Notre Dame Head Coach Marcus Freeman Named Finalist For Eddie Robinson Coach Of The Year Award
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Notre Dame head football coach Marcus Freeman was named a finalist for the FWAA Eddie Robinson Coach of the Year Award. The Eddie Robinson Coach of the Year Award is given annually to a college football coach by the Football Writers Association of America (FWAA). The award is given in honor of former Grambling State University head coach Eddie Robinson. This honor was first given out in 1957 to Ohio State head coach Woody Hayes.
This is the second year in a row that Freeman has been named a finalist for this award. There have been four previous Fighting Irish head coaches that have won the Eddie Robinson Coach of the Year Award with Brian Kelly being the most recent winner in 2012. Head coach Charlie Weiss won in 2005, Lou Holtz won in 1988 and Ara Parseghian won in 1964. Holtz is the only coach on this list to win this award and a National Championship in the same season.
In 1964, Parseghian went 9-1 and finished 3rd in the AP Poll. In 2005, Weiss won the award after turning around, what had been a luke-warm program, back to a Top 10 program in college football. In 2012, Kelly won the award after going 12-0 in his third season at the helm and earning a spot in the BCS College Football National Championship game.
Freeman ended the regular season riding a 10-game win streak after beginning the year 0-2. This year was the first time since 1966 that the Irish won all of their regular season games by 10 or more points. The Fighting Irish ended the season averaging 42.0 points per game, led the nation in interceptions with 21 total, 10th in passing yards per completion, 11th in rushing defense, 13th in scoring defense and 4th in turnover margin.
The Ohio native is now 43-12 as Notre Dame's head coach and has only lost four games in the last two seasons. He is one year removed from winning three playoff games including a win in the Sugar Bowl over Georgia and the Orange Bowl over Penn State. In his third season in 2024, Freeman coached in a national title game and had similar aspirations this season before they were squashed by a corrupt process. This season, however, Notre Dame ended on a 10-game win streak averaging nearly a 30-point margin of victory which ranks in the top 10 most dominant win streaks in college football over the last five years.
Freeman has led Notre Dame to a 21-3 record in the regular season over the last two years with every win except one being by double digits. This is a drastic improvement to his humble beginnings in 2022 when he first took the coaching job dropping the season opener to Ohio State in Columbus and following that up with a loss to Marshall in the home opener. The job is far from finished yet for Freeman and the Irish, but he's undoubtedly one of the best coaches in all of college football and has elevated Notre Dame to it's highest status in college football since the late 1980's and early 1990's.
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