first Black head coach to compete in a college football championship<\/a> in January, said it can be easy to “take it for granted sometimes” that they get to compete on the national stage, “and we can’t take it for granted,” he said, explaining that he thought learning about the fan and his father “was a way to remind” his players about what motivates them on the field.\n<\/p>\n “Yes, team glory matters for each other, and if that ain’t enough motivation to get you to practice, let me remind you about the seniors,” he said, using the team’s seniors who are experiencing “their last guaranteed opportunity” in college football.\n<\/p>\n
Freeman said he reminded his players that if playing for those seniors “ain’t important to you, let me tell you about this young man that lost his father at the Pitt game.”\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
“We have an obligation to make sure we put on a performance the right way, because it’s the lifelong dream of some person that’s going to see our team play, and we have an obligation to make sure we give it our all,” he said. “A performance worthy of what that kid or adult paying their money to come watch\u00a0you play.”\n<\/p>\n
Concluding his remarks, Freeman said he advised his players, “You better value what Saturday brings to you, because then you\u2019ll do the work in the moment.”\n<\/p>\n
Next, the Fighting Irish will travel to California to take on the Stanford Cardinals on Saturday, Nov. 29.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEED TO KNOW Notre Dame football head coach Marcus Freeman spoke to reporters about a fan whose father…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":317390,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[67],"tags":[399,398,396,397,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-317389","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-football","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-football","11":"tag-ncaafootball","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/317389\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/317390"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=317389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=317389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}