SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Marcus Freeman sat on the auditorium stairs, watching Notre Dame’s season end. The Irish had been dumped out of the College Football Playoff in a made-for-television ceremony. Now, as the projector showing ESPN’s selection show was cut off, the head coach had to address his team about the gut-punch, with more cameras rolling.“I feel awful for you all because I’m the person that’s supposed to stand in front of you and say I got the answer,” Freeman said on the “Here Come The Irish” docu-series. “And I don’t have the answer right now.”He could barely maintain eye contact, his mind racing. Freeman loathes losing, a fact that is as well-known around Notre Dame as it is at Wayne High School in Huber Heights, Ohio, where Freeman grew into an All-American linebacker bound for Ohio State, and everywhere he’s been since. For a coach notoriously obsessed with competition, that December afternoon humiliation was bound to be the spark that started a year-long fire.On Labor Day weekend, Notre Dame will put the results on display when a season with national championship aspirations opens against Wisconsin at Lambeau Field. And however this season ends, these next five months will help answer a question Notre Dame’s head coach has asked himself over and over, his answer evolving with his career from five-star recruit to a face of college football.When Marcus Freeman loses, what happens next?Those who have interacted with him in high school weight rooms, on pickup basketball courts and at Hawaiian beach resorts know what’s coming. The Athletic spoke with a dozen players, coaches, teammates and friends who have seen him deal with failure firsthand to understand how he will turn last season’s anticlimactic finish into fuel.Why Oregon is Ralph Russo's No. 1 team in the AP pollRalph D. RussoFreeman’s high school career was ended by a game-winning touchdown thrown over his defense in the final minute. His playing career at Ohio State included back-to-back losses in the national title game (but none to Michigan). He was the linebackers coach for Purdue teams that lost 39 games in just four seasons. And at Notre Dame, he has endured stunning upsets to Marshall and Northern Illinois, plus three losses to his alma mater that have pushed the limits of his pain threshold.“I think I’ve matured, I really do,” Freeman said this summer. “I think I used to be so obsessed with winning, let’s go again, let’s compete. Now it’s about figuring out why we lost.”After every home game for the past four years, Freeman locks himself in his office, rewatching the tape alone, understanding the questions before hunting for the answers. It’s a different kind of competition, deeper than man vs. man. But it’s still Freeman versus something. He can’t function without that push and pull, so much so that he’s made competition a default setting around Notre Dame, beyond Saturday afternoons in the fall.“There’s not ever a time you don’t keep score,” said former offensive coordinator Gerad Parker. “That’s who he is.”Freeman doesn’t limit the grind of training camp to players.Before preseason practices kick off, he challenges his staff, too. He turned a step-tracking contest into a March Madness-style bracket last spring (Freeman didn’t make the Final Four). Usually, there’s an August weight-loss competition. The staff will divide up into teams — defense, offense, operations, etc. — make goals for the month and weigh in. Then the competition begins, with money on the line for those who hit their goals and penalties for those who miss.“We’re not just doing it to feel good about ourselves,” said former recruiting director Caleb Davis, now the general manager at San Diego State. “There’s gonna be a winner and a loser about it.”Davis kept up the routine after camp, pairing up with recruiting staffer Dre Brown, who is now at USC. They’d do 100 push-ups daily in the recruiting office. Freeman noticed as he walked by one day and politely asked what the heck Davis and Brown were doing.“He’s like, ‘Or you could just f—ing wake up in the morning and lift before anyone else gets in like I do,’” Davis said. “So Monday through Thursday, Dre and me would meet in the GA locker room at 5:58, walk into the weight room together, and Free’s already on the treadmill, 30 minutes in.”Few places let Freeman flex his competitive edge like the weight room. He started doing the varsity football team’s workouts in middle school, following the lead of his older brother Mike. Before Freeman’s freshman year, he pulled classmate Tyler Orndorf into his orbit. The offensive lineman thought he was the strongest player in his grade. Freeman made him rethink that over the next four years.“He’s running from his house to the weight room when the rest of us are getting rides from someone’s dad,” Orndorf said. “No skipping sets, no skipping reps. There were seniors not doing that. He took my performance to another level.”Before their senior years, Orndorf wanted to test himself against Freeman to see if he’d caught up. Rock, paper, scissors to see who’d max out first. Orndorf basically conceded the bench before starting, but he knew Freeman’s max squat, so he added 10 pounds and knocked out a rep with the team crowded around.Victory. Almost.“This guy finds those 2.5-pound plates and has this s—-eating grin that I’m gonna get you,” Orndorf said. “And sure as s—, he did. That’s who he was. He’s not gonna lose.”The Ohio State linebackers had other ideas. Freeman arrived in college to a group that included upperclassmen A.J. Hawk, Bobby Carpenter and Anthony Schlegel. Hawk and Carpenter became first-round picks; Schlegel went in the third round and is now an assistant strength coach with the Buckeyes. They all loved the weight room, where Ohio State tracked everything and everyone knew it. For every winner in the squat rack, there was a loser. Often, that loser was Freeman.“Age is a hell of a thing, so it was tough for him early on,” Carpenter said. “But every day, regardless of what happened the day before, he thought he could get you. Even if it wasn’t even all that close, in his mind, he was making it close.”Ultimately, that delusion served Freeman well. He’d become a three-year starter and two-time all-conference linebacker. He figured out how to turn those losses into wins, remembering what it felt like to get beat, keeping that pain for later.“When you’re a highly recruited guy like that and you’re as good an athlete as he is, I think losing almost comes as a little bit of a shock to you,” Carpenter said. “And I think that probably translates well for coaching at these big-time programs, because you have to learn to be able to lose a little bit. Then it’s next rep, what happened, move forward. He was one of those guys.“Maybe because I used to whip his butt all the time in those drills.”In theory, the Mauna Lani Hotel should not be a competitive space. The five-star resort and spa in Hawaii is more like a slice of paradise, which is why Notre Dame’s head coach was there for a family vacation three years ago, with the Parkers, Davis and Davis’ girlfriend rounding out the traveling party.And yet, once the brood of kids was adequately sunscreened by the pool, Freeman couldn’t help but notice the cornhole boards next to the tiki bar. Parker saw them, too. They pulled in Davis and Freeman’s oldest son, Vinny. It was Marcus and Caleb vs. Vinny and Gerad for most of the next two days.“We took an early lead, and you know it’s kind of like, ‘Hey, what are we playing? Best of five? Best of seven?’” Parker said. “However many, everybody ended up pissed off a little bit. On the second day, it was every bit of three or four hours we stood over there on the boards and just kept playing.”“Free just kept saying one more, one more, one more,” Davis said. “And then eventually we just won so many in a row that we ended up wiping the floor with them.”For Freeman, there is no hill too small to compete on. He plays Wiffle ball with the quarterbacks on Fridays during the season. He put a mini basketball hoop in the linebackers room while he was defensive coordinator. He plays spades or tonk on the private plane the staff uses for recruiting trips.“He ain’t gonna stop. That’s the beautiful thing about it,” said former defensive backs coach Mike Mickens. “Like the flight ends, all right, I didn’t lose, we’ll pick it back up in the air.”“He was constantly wanting to play guys in P-I-G,” said former linebacker Jack Kiser. “And you beat him, he could not sit with being beat. Sometimes it’s like, ‘Coach, I beat you. We’re done.’ He’s like, ‘No, I didn’t lose, I just lost that one.’“He’s going to find a way to win, and I think that’s the most impactful type of coach, someone who’s never going to throw in the towel, who’s always going to find that edge, that extra piece they can use to win.”All this even shows up in his fashion. The seemingly one-of-one hoodies and shirts Freeman wears to news conferences. The custom suits and designer sunglasses captured by ESPN and NBC cameras when Freeman enters the stadium on game day. It’s always juxtaposed with what’s being worn on the other sideline. There’s a reason why Freeman has already been featured in Esquire and GQ.“People don’t understand this, that dude puts thought into what he’s wearing to those press conferences,” said longtime friend BJ Payne. “When he gets off the bus, what he’s wearing, that’s a competition to him. Everything in his life is a competition.”Back at Ohio State, his teammates made fun of Freeman for being the guy with the unnaturally crisp dress shirt on gameday team walks. Just because the suit came from Men’s Wearhouse didn’t mean Freeman couldn’t dress it up.“He literally bought a can of starch and would iron his shirt on Friday nights in the hotel,” Carpenter said. “All for a 30-minute walk and then take it off.”The only part of losing Freeman seems to enjoy is the chance to weaponize it.During the run to the national championship game two years ago, he invoked Northern Illinois so much that it probably felt like Huskies head coach Thomas Hammock was on staff. In the locker room before the Sugar Bowl against Georgia, Freeman told his players he didn’t want to talk to the team that had just won 11 games in a row. He wanted to talk to the team that had just lost to Northern Illinois … almost four months earlier.Then Notre Dame beat the SEC champions in their spiritual backyard.Freeman insists he doesn’t overprepare this brand of messaging, although it’s been utilized too much during Notre Dame’s 24-4 run the past two seasons for the talking points to be random.“There’s times I put deep thought into what they need to hear that day or as we get ready for an upcoming opponent,” Freeman said. “I think it’s just a feel you have to have as a leader.”It’s already clear that Freeman plans to keep the wounds of last season from fully healing. In the aftermath of the CFP snub, he pivoted to “Leave no doubt” as a rallying cry for 2026, from winter workouts to spring practice and now into fall camp. Blaming the selection committee for how last season ended would numb Notre Dame to the pain of it all. And Freeman loves the hurt, even if he hates to lose.“You’d be losing the loss,” Freeman said. “You’re losing an opportunity to get better. You have to figure out why you have failure. That’s my obsession.”Soon, everybody else will see just how deep that obsession goes. Notre Dame is expected to be a double-digit favorite in every game this regular season, other than Nov. 7 against Miami — and the Irish project to be touchdown favorites in that one. If Freeman’s message gets through, it will be Wisconsin, Rice, Michigan State and more that end up on the business end.“There’s gonna be some situations this year that are probably gonna get pretty ugly. And that’s just because they have to,” Payne said. “I don’t think there’s any win on this schedule, even Miami, that would clear that feeling of last December for him.”Well, there is one win that could.But that game won’t be played until Jan. 25.For all the psychoanalysis those in his circle offer, the point of all this is rather simple: Freeman competes because he can’t help himself. That hardwiring took Freeman from dominating high school weight rooms to grinding his way through Ohio State and up the coaching ladder, all the way to the head job at Notre Dame at just 35 years old. Freeman, now 40, hasn’t won everything at every stop. But he has never backed down from a challenge, no matter the size.Leading Notre Dame to its first national championship in 38 years is just the next competition.“You win or you learn,” Freeman said. “How many games we’re gonna play, I’ll let you know. That’s wisdom. That’s age. But I’m gonna find a way to win at the end.”