Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman Hits on Fiesta Bowl Matchup With Oklahoma State
STILLWATER – We’re back in game week mode as Oklahoma State is set to take on the Fighting Irish of Notre Dame this coming Saturday, Jan. 1 in the PlayStation Fiesta Bowl.
The Cowboys landed in Phoenix on Sunday afternoon and have already gotten a practice in the books, with the Fighting Irish landing at some point Monday afternoon. There will be a Zoom call Monday afternoon with both head coaches, Mike Gundy and Marcus Freeman, but we’re going to take a look at what Freeman had to say about the Pokes last week ahead of the trip out to Arizona.
The Cowboys struggled to move the ball early in the season, but really started to click once they got into the meat of conference play. Spencer Sanders started to settle down, the offensive line starting to get the feel of things and the combination of Jaylen Warren and Tay Martin was electric.
“Explosive plays — their quarterback can be explosive with his feet and his arm,” said Freeman. “No. 1 [Tay Martin], I don’t know the names, but No. 1 is really good — the wideout. They’ve got freshman wideout [could be talking about either of the Green twins, Jaden Bray or John Paul Richardson] that is really good that’s really showing up. And their running backs, they’ve got multiple running backs but No. 7 [Jaylen Warren], he can take it the distance at any moment.
“They want to run the ball. That has been the big challenge for our defense. They want to ball. We want to stop the run. We have to do whatever it takes to make sure they can’t run the ball up and down the field on us and limit the explosive plays.”
On the defensive side of the ball, the Cowboys were one of the best units in all of college football. They held opponents to just 16 points and 278 yards of total offense a game. Their run defense was easily one of the best as they held opponents to just 2.7 yards per carry and just 91 yards a game.
“They do a lot of different things,” said Freeman. “What you can see is that you can’t do all of those different things as a defensive coordinator in the first year. But when you talk about a team that’s senior-led and has as many returning starters as they do, you can do all these different things because, for them, they’ve been doing the same thing for four years.
“It’s going to be complicated. It’s a very sophisticated system and a system that has been built over years. The players know the ins and outs of it. It’s not just running around and creating havoc. You can tell these kids know what they’re doing.”
They’ve also limited teams to less than 200 first downs on the entire season, more than a 100 less than what the Cowboys did on the offensive side of the ball, while holding teams to just a 26% conversion rate on third downs.
“It’s going to be a battle,” said Freeman. “As a team, we’re taking a journey through their season. Right now, they’re 6-1 or 7-1. We finished with Kansas today. You see explosive plays on offense. There’s takeaways on defense. There are moments where the defense is four-and-out. They stop fourth-down conversions. They don’t give up big plays. There’s a lot of three-and-outs for their defense.”
Pokes Report will be on site most of the week as Robert Allen is arriving in Phoenix on Monday. So, we’ll have plenty of content from both Arizona and Stillwater leading up to kickoff of the Fiesta Bowl on Saturday.