Marcus Freeman leaving Notre Dame for the Giants? No longer an option New York fans for on Monday, Freeman made it clear what his next move is.
That’s right, Irish fans. Your head coach, the one who led your team to the CFP Championship in January, is staying in South Bend.
Freeman was hired as the team’s defensive coordinator in 2021 before being promoted to the top spot in 2022. Since then, he’s led the team to three straight bowl games, both wins, and then last year’s run to the CFP title game, where the Irish fell to Ohio State, 23-34.
In his three seasons as Notre Dame’s full-time head coach (he was the interim head coach for one game in 2021 after Brian Kelly left for LSU), Freeman has compiled a 43-11 record, and has only lost two games in each of his last two seasons, including this season where the Irish were excluded from the CFP Playoffs.
While their exclusion was a hotly debated topic, re-signing Freeman to a new deal wasn’t.
Freeman, already one of the highest-paid coaches in college football with estimated annual earnings in 2025 of $7.4 million, has agreed to a new restructured contract that extends his deal an additional year through 2031. It’s now reported that he could earn almost $71 million in total compensation (salary plus incentive bonuses) over the life of his new contract.
But the deal was necessary to keep him at the university.
“He’s the absolute best coach in the country for Notre Dame, full stop,” said Notre Dame athletic director Pete Bevacqua earlier this month. ‘One of the greatest college coaches in the country. People forget how young he is. So I get it, I get it and that’s a compliment to him and his success and the way he represents himself and the way he prepares and who he is and how he talks.”
Freeman is only 39 and has a long career in the sport ahead of him, so to lose him after such success would have been a major loss for Notre Dame.
