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By any estimation, Notre Dame is one of the standard bearers for the purely American enterprise that is college football. Perhaps it is only fitting that of any program, the first Black or Asian American coach to lead a team in a Division I national championship game will belong to this storied program led by Marcus Freeman. Freeman’s father is Black and his mother is of South Korean descent.
Notre Dame and Ohio State play in the CFP National Championship on Jan. 20 in Atlanta — which means Freeman will make history on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and in King’s hometown.
There is a duality about Freeman being the head coach at any program, much less the bluest of blue bloods. While Black men make up about half of FBS players in any given year, there are only 15 Black head coaches out of 134 schools. He’s only the third Asian American to ever lead an FBS program besides Norm Chow, who coached at Hawaii from 2012–15, and Tim Chang, who is currently Hawaii’s head coach and was hired a month after Freeman was promoted at Notre Dame to head coach after serving one year as defensive coordinator.
“There’s a lot of people in this coaching profession that have come before me that have given me this opportunity,” Freeman said before the Orange Bowl semifinal. “But the other person that I think deserves a lot of credit is our former AD Jack Swarbrick, because he’s the one — and our president John Jenkins at the time — that made the decision to hire a guy that was 35 years old and had never been a head coach. He made that decision. So Jack Swarbrick and Father John Jenkins deserve a lot of the credit for having courage and for making a decision to hire me at that time.”
Marcus…
Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/marcus-freeman-is-a-reserved-beacon-of-representation-on-college-footballs-grandest-stage/
Author : Richard Johnson
Publish date : 2025-01-17 16:07:00
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