Marcus Freeman and Ryan Day say fiery pregame speeches are unnecessary when playing for a championship

ATLANTA — For Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman and Ohio State coach Ryan Day, those dramatic pregame speeches that inspire a football team to victory are the stuff of Hollywood.

Both said they had nothing special planned for their final words in the locker room before the start of the college football championship game.

The message to their players will be to keep doing what they’ve been doing, because that’s what got them here.

“You have to do what we did, and you have to do it better,” Freeman said. “We are facing an excellent opponent. You are a match in the national championship. One could say with a little passion. The natural emotions will come out at that point.”

Day said there will be no shortage of emotion on the field and there is no need to try to fire up his players beforehand.

“Being in the locker room is a special moment. It is,” Day said. “But all of a sudden you can’t just force a guy at the last second to make him play really, really hard. It’s a build-up that usually starts 48 hours to get your body, your soul, your mind ready to play in a game like this.”

Crack care

Notre Dame kicker Mitch Jeter overcame lingering hip and groin injuries in no time. He was just 6-for-12 on field goals in the regular season. He is 7 of 8 in three playoff games, and his 41-yarder with seven seconds left gave the Fighting Irish a 27-24 win over Penn State in the Orange Bowl semifinals.

Jeter went through daily treatment in Notre Dame’s training room. He also got help from his chiropractor father, Andrew Jeter, who traveled from the family home in Salisbury, North Carolina, a few days before each game to care for his son.

“I’m very grateful to him for speeding up that healing process,” Mitch said. “Chiropractic is about realigning the body and he helped me realign, which allowed the muscles around my body to heal faster. He’s been a big part of my life and everything I’ve done so far this season.”

Buckeyes background

For a week, Notre Dame’s Marcus Freeman has sidelined questions about his ties to Ohio State.

He grew up in Dayton, Ohio, and played for the Buckeyes from 2004-08. He was the starting quarterback on Jim Tressel-coached teams that lost to Florida (2006) and LSU (2007) in the Bowl Championship Series title games. The BCS was the predecessor of the CFP. He considers teammate and current OSU linebackers coach James Laurinaitis one of his best friends.

Freeman has already coached against the Buckeyes twice, losing 21-10 in 2022 and 17-14 in 2023.

“Everybody knows where I went to college,” Freeman said. “But as I’ve always said to our program and to everyone around our program, this opportunity is just this opportunity. It’s not about where I went to school. It’s not about the last two times we played Ohio State.”

Local connections

Nine players from the state of Georgia are on the Buckeyes’ roster, including four starters. Ohio is the only state with multiple representatives. Notre Dame has four players from the Peach State, but none will start.

“Most of our guys that are on the Georgia roster are from the Atlanta area, and when they saw from the jump that the national championship game was in Atlanta, they were excited for the opportunity if it presented itself and we got to this game,” the state coach said Ohio Ryan Day. “They are excited. There’s a lot of chatter in the locker room about going back to Atlanta, and he’s going to have a lot of friends and family here.”

Extra points

Notre Dame is the No. 7 seed in the first year of the 12-team playoff, and Ohio State is No. 8. In 10 years of the four-team playoff, only once have the bottom two seeds reached the championship game. It was in 2018, when No. 4 Alabama beat No. 3 Georgia 26-23, also in Atlanta. … Ohio State has won six straight against the Irish and leads the series 6-2. … Ohio State is the first two-loss team to play in the championship game. … This is the third CFP Championship game between teams from neighboring states. Alabama and Georgia met in 2017 and 2021. The campuses of Notre Dame (Indiana) and Ohio State are 251 miles away.