Shane Gillis revealed on Bussin’ With The Boys that he nearly got Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman on Saturday Night Live earlier this season, but the appearance was canceled in the wake of Sherrone Moore’s firing and arrest at Michigan.
“I tried to get him on SNL this year,” Gillis said. “And it was close. We were close to getting it done. I was talking to Lorne [Michaels] about it, and we were close. We were going to have him on Weekend Update, and then something happened at the Michigan program that became the biggest story in college football, and not Notre Dame, so we couldn’t do it. For real. It was that week.”
Freeman was slated to appear on the Dec. 13 episode’s Weekend Update segment, three days after Michigan fired Moore for cause after obtaining credible evidence of an inappropriate relationship with a staff member. Moore was detained the same day after allegedly breaking into the staffer’s home and threatening to harm her and himself. The story consumed sports media for two weeks and only grew more disturbing as The Athletic revealed Moore had been sending unsolicited Instagram messages to women in sports media dating back to 2020.
All of which is to say: the moment Moore was fired, any lighthearted college football content was dead on arrival.
Gillis has spent the last two college football seasons becoming something of an unofficial ambassador for Notre Dame football. He’s also the guy who was fired from SNL in 2019 before his debut episode aired — a decision Lorne Michaels later said was forced on him by NBC executives — and then returned to host in February 2024 and March 2025.
Given how deeply Gillis has embedded himself at Notre Dame — and the university’s relationship with NBC — it probably won’t be the last time he tries to get the head coach of his favorite football team on SNL.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.