Who is Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman’s wife Joanna?

Marcus Freeman is the hottest name in college football, and now it’s a hot name for NFL teams, too.

The Notre Dame Fighting Irish head coach led his team past the Penn State Nittany Lions, 27-24, in an instant classic. A heartbreaking Drew Allar interception and the ultimate Greg McElroy announcer jinx with less than a minute left sealed the deal and sent the nearly 39-year-old (his birthday is tomorrow, January 10!) into the history books the first coach of black and Asian descent to make it to the CFP National Championship.

“It’s 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,” Freeman said after the game.

But enough about him. What about his wife Joanna, who is the mother of their six children — Vinny, 17, Siena, 12, Gino, 11, Nico, 9, Capri, 7, and Rocco, 6. (Freeman also has another daughter, Bria, 18 , from a previous relationship.)

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A two-time second-team All-Big Ten linebacker for the Ohio State Buckeyes, Freeman met Joanna, a local news reporter, because they lived in the same apartment complex while both living in Columbus, and was first introduced by his best friend. .

Freeman tried to make it in the NFL, but after only making it as far as the practice squad, most recently with the Houston Texans in 2009, he concentrated solely on coaching, with him and Joanna continuing to be long distance while she remained a reporter for Columbus CBS affiliate.

“We don’t have a super romantic love story,” Joanna told Yahoo! Sport. “We had a lot of breakups and make-ups. We fell hard. We fell fast. We were really young when we met, and in many ways we really grew and matured into adults together.”

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Joanna was the breadwinner when she and Freeman were first married, and they also already had their first child, Vinny, when the former linebacker became the linebackers coach at Kent State, earning $42,000 a year.

Mrs. Freeman decided to quit her job to be with him full time.

“She has the purest heart,” Marcus has said. “She’s loyal to her family and the people she loves. It hasn’t always been easy. Sometimes I can take her for granted. She’s an Italian gun. If I’m an idiot, she’ll be ready to shoot back. But she’s so loyal. There’s no one I’d rather live with than her.”

All of this makes sense since she grew up in Massillon, Ohio, and her entire family is not only Italian, they are die-hard Cleveland Browns fans.

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“To do what I do, you have to have the most selfless wife in the world. Like, a lot of times she’s a single parent. And the other part is I try to get involved.”

That was Marcus Freeman on a recent episode of Robert Griffin III’s podcast, “Outta Pocket with RG3.”

“There is no balance. There is no balance between being a head coach and being a husband and a father.”

A perfect microcosm of this balance happened at Freeman’s initial press conference to replace Brian Kelly at Notre Dame. With all six children present, she had to be the four boys who had to sit still for 20 minutes. Then they could run around the field house.

Needless to say, Marcus Freeman’s meteoric rise at just 39 years old doesn’t happen without Joanna.