The interesting question will be how he reacts

by omahadomer, Wednesday, July 22, 2026, 18:16 (1 day, 6 hours, 36 min. ago) @ hobbs

if ND wins a NC in the next couple of years, which is quite possible. Will he be like Saban and stick around and continue to drive the truck or will he hear the siren call of the NFL? Saban, of course, had gotten a taste of the NFL and found it not to his liking. Freeman has only been there as a player.

The other question is what will college football in particular, and college athletics in general, look like five or six years from now? The current NIL structure was beyond imagination a decade ago. For all of the SEC's huffing and puffing about leaving, they no longer have cornered the market on high-level, quasi-professional football.

NIL and the general de-amateurization (if that's a word) took away the SEC's advantage of paying players and requiring only a nominal affiliation between the athletes and academics. ND has competed like gangbusters on the money side of things, which isn't a surprise given the wealth of the alumni base. ND has maintained reasonable academic standards but it is considerably easier for athletes to get their degrees than it was in earlier years given the proliferation of summer courses and alternative modes of educational delivery.

I hope that the kinds of things that make Freeman special will continue to make him special. I don't mean that I think he'll change in any fundamental way; he's too authentic for that. It's more a question of whether the world around him will change.

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"Somewhere in Middle America"