Final Pregame Press Conference
By Chad Ryan
NEW ORLEANS – Marcus Freeman and Kirby Smart addressed the media in the final pregame press conference on Tuesday at the Sheraton New Orleans before Notre Dame and Georgia meet in the Allstate Sugar Bowl for their College Football Playoff quarterfinal game on New Year’s Day.
Both coaches thanked the Allstate Sugar Bowl host committee as well as the city of New Orleans for the hospitality shown to their teams and staff, but both confidently stated they were ready to meet one another on the field at the Caesar’s Superdome.
“Everyday you wake up, you’ve got to choose hard,” Freeman said. “I mean, “choosing hard” is a motto that we have in our program about the guys that choose to come to Notre Dame and play football there, and we don’t try to hide it.”
After winning the SEC championship, Georgia earned a bye in the first round of the playoff while Notre Dame played last week against Indiana. Smart said there are both positives and negatives to having the extra time off.
“There is a level of concern when you haven’t tackled and gone live,” Smart said. “With the way college football is now with the portal, and you lose players, you just can’t afford to not have depth in practice like you really want to practice.
“When you look at the calendar either way, you can make positives and negatives (to earning a bye). There’s risk of injury. I think when you ask Marcus that question, he lost a very dominant player, and there’s a risk of injury in that game.”
On the same topic, Freeman asserted his stance that you play the hand your dealt.
“I think you have to embrace your current circumstance,” Freeman said. “If I’m going to sit up here and say I wish I had somebody else’s, you’re making an excuses for the circumstance you have.
“And so we embrace it. Again, we embraced Week 13, which was the conference championship week, as our bye week. We had to have the mindset that we’re going to use this as our bye week. The conference champions are going to use the first round as their bye week.”
