Marcus Freeman told Josh Pate’s College Football Show that he seriously considered NFL head-coaching interest after the end of the 2025 regular season but decided to remain at Notre Dame.
"This year got really loud after the end of the regular season, and, you know, usually, I’ve never been in this position where we’re not playing in a bowl game or playing in the playoffs, and so I did — I took a minute to really say, ‘What is this opportunity of being an NFL head coach?’" Freeman said on the show. The 40-year-old coach said he had never coached in the NFL and wanted to learn what professional teams look for and what they think it takes to be successful. "I’ve never coached in the NFL," he added.
The scale of the opening was real: ten of 32 NFL head-coaching jobs opened this year, and Freeman said that attention swelled after Notre Dame’s late-season run. He tied the chatter directly to the program’s on-field success. "With team success comes individual opportunities," Freeman said, noting that the Irish won their last ten games — a stretch he believes produced the outside interest. "If we didn’t win those last ten games, then my name or nobody else’s name would be floating around here," he said.
Freeman placed that personal decision inside a wider account of responsibility and transparency. He said he was always honest with his players about the outside attention. "I was always honest with our players," Freeman said. He also said he kept the Athletic Director and his family in the loop while he evaluated whether an NFL vacancy was a fit for him.
That evaluation, Freeman said, yielded useful insight even though he will stay put. He described gaining "valuable knowledge from evaluating the NFL opportunity," saying the process taught him what NFL decision-makers value. Still, he framed the choice in the clearest terms: "But for me, it was the opportunity to be the head coach of this university was one that I wasn’t ready to let go." Freeman reiterated his personal ties to the program in plain language. "I love this place," he said, and reminded listeners, "I’m the head coach at Notre Dame."
The Notre Dame run also had knock-on effects for players. Freeman pointed to Jeremiyah Love’s candidacy for the Heisman as evidence that team performance creates individual recognition. "There’s a strong feeling if we didn’t win those last ten, then he wouldn’t have been up for the Heisman, right?" he asked, tying the quarterback’s national relevance to the team’s winning streak.
Freeman described the season’s earlier chatter as quieter: during the 2024 season there had been "a little bit of chatter" about NFL interest while Notre Dame was in the playoffs, he said, but the attention grew louder after the 2025 regular season. That increase in attention arrived in a year when a large number of NFL head-coaching jobs opened, creating an unusual market for candidates without NFL experience.
The tension in Freeman’s account is direct and personal: he is a coach with rising national profile who has never worked in the NFL, who took a moment to evaluate what a leap to the professional ranks would mean, and who concluded the right choice for him now is to remain where he has built relationships and recruited players over multiple seasons. He refused to treat the NFL interest as a secret and emphasized the importance of being candid with players and family while weighing the option.
Freeman’s decision matters now because it ends a run of public speculation tied to Notre Dame’s late surge and a crowded NFL hiring cycle. The pragmatic result is simple: Notre Dame keeps its head coach, and Freeman keeps the program he says he loves — a choice he described as neither inevitable nor accidental but earned by the team’s own success.
