Freeman's Focus: "Sometimes you have to visit dark places, to get what you need"

 

SOUTH BEND, Ind. -- As the Irish welcome Louisville to the House that Rockne Built, there's a lot on the line.

In life there are things that you would just rather forget about.

"I'm not revisiting last year to motivate you. I'm revisiting last year to learn from those things that that we have to learn from that that game presented," Freeman said.

Last year’s game versus Louisville is one of those "things". The 33-20 loss brought instant frustration.

Now it’s time to revisit the past.

"It's a lot like therapy. Sometimes you got to revisit those dark places, you know, to kind of get out of it what you need," Freeman added.

Freeman is focused on what his team needs to do differently. On both sides of the ball.

"As you watch film, they're good in all three phases. Offensively they I think they took a lot of pride in running the ball," Freeman mentioned. 

Louisville ran for two touchdowns on 185 yards against the Irish. Those numbers opened another can of worms.

"What you do when you're able to run the ball is create some opportunities to throw explosive plays down the field and that's something you've seen from their offense," Freeman said.

Freeman added "They're defensively, an aggressive attacking, you know, are going to challenge you to, you know, stop the run".

Running the ball with your backs is one thing. Putting the rock in the hands of your quarterback creates a bigger issue if you're the cards.

"I mean, he's 6-3, 215 plus, and runs probably a 4.5. You know, you might look at Riley and say, how well does he run? He can roll and we saw that in practice, and a couple our guys on defense were lucky he was in a red jersey," Freeman said.

Leonard wasn’t wearing blue and gold last year, but he’s 0-2 against Louisville so, he knows the pain of losing to the cardinals.

To get his team ready coach Freeman definitely has no problems picking at those wounds.

"I think it's an opportunity for guys that weren't in this program last year to be able to reflect and understand that, hey, we lost to this team last year, but there's a lot of great learning opportunities from that game. And that's what I'm going to preach to our team," Freeman said.