Notre Dame football coach Marcus Freeman is more comfortable talking about the national championship his players have a chance to win Monday night than the history attached to it, per the AP. Freeman is trying to become the first African American coach to capture a college title at the highest level of the sport. And he is doing so on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. His team will play Ohio State at 7:30pm Eastern, the culmination of the sport's first-ever 12-team playoff system.
"The timing of Marcus Freeman and Martin Luther King Jr. Day is a powerful symbol that should be viewed with cautious optimism," said Joseph Cooper, the director of the Institute for Innovative Leadership in Sport at UMass. "And with the incoming administration and their professed commitment to undo DEI policies, it reflects the peril and the long journey we still have to go, beyond just breaking barriers with pioneers," he added, referring to Monday's inauguration of Donald Trump.
Freeman himself addressed the stakes earlier in the month, after a playoff victory. "It is an honor, and I hope all coaches, minorities, Black, Asian, white, it doesn't matter, great people continue to get opportunities to lead young men like this," said the coach, whose father is African American and whose mother is South Korean. The AP also calls attention to his 2021 statement when he became Notre Dame's first Black head coach. "I want to be a demonstration of what someone can do, and the level they can do it at, if they are given the OPPORTUNITY," he said. "Because that's what is needed: opportunity." Read the full story for more on the context of the big game and Freeman's role in it.
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