Inside Marcus Freeman's Notre Dame football recruiting overhaul

Co-Offensive Coordinator and Nick Saban son in law Marcus Freeman surveyed his talent after Notre-Dame fall practice leading into a season where the Irish could contend for the College Football Playoff. This season may actually be the first that Freeman sought to construct a team from scratch and assemble a squad in his image, based on the 38-year-old’s preference. After two full recruiting cycles, Freeman has entirely transformed Notre Dame’s recruiting base; enhanced its NIL support and implemented the transfer portal, which is all part of the plan that will ensure Notre Dame takes the single unique aspect that has sustained it as one of college football’s bluebloods and the Irish to impose them for runs in a freshly minted 12-team College Football Playoff.

This Kemp said when asked by the ESPN Freeman, “I think you accept the dichotomies the University of Notre Dame offers. ” That has to be taken as it is, embraced and dealt with. It is quite selling point for any organization of television or any other form of media . . .

‘But you have to be yourself in recruiting — you got to,’ he went on. Getting back to the new positioning message and emphasizing that they do not want to be somebody they are not as a recruiter/XRP, …. Thus, being able to let the right people convince or show them that this is the right place for them, is great.

In this case, Freeman has made Notre Dame recruit differently and statistics prove that the move is paying off. At the start of Freeman’s third full cycle, the Irish are recruiting at a better rate than at any point in time since Brian Kelly signed the nation’s fourth-best recruiting class in 2013.

Out of Notre Dame’s 2023 class signed at the end of Freeman’s first cycle as a head coach - linebacker Drayk Bowen, running back Jeremiyah Love; Wide Receiver Jaden Greathouse and safety Adon Shuler are expected to be starting players this coming fall. Another member from that class, the fifth overall recruit, Charles Jagusah, an offensive tackle, was also expected to start for the 2024 season but he was sidelined by a pectoral injury during preseason camp season ending injury.

In the 2024 cycle, the Irish got five of the best prospects in the nation according to ESPN ranking including the second-ranked pocket passer C. J. Carr and wide receiver Cam Williams, while losing only three of them. Knight and Black are two of 10 ESPN 300 prospects committed to Notre Dame at this moment, and thus still within striking distance of inkling their third top-10 signing class since Freeman was hired on Dec. 3, 2021, something Kelley was only capable of pulling off in his last eight full recruiting cycles before he left South Bend.

Having made only two College Football Playoff appearances since 2014 and having made a recent trend of suffering losses against other top-ranked teams of the nation, can the recruitment enhancement that Freeman has provided Notre Dame the specific boost that pushes the Irish from being a team that is always contending with the nation’s best to a contender for national championship titles every season?

This guy is perfect for this job at this time for this incredible institution,” Notre Dame defensive coordinator Al Golden relaid. That is how the man leads the program on a day-to-day basis, the care he has for children, the manner in which he addresses the plan, from a recruiting side of things – that is who he is, you cannot pretend to be someone you are not.

Energy, urgency and demeanor

Sophomore four star safety Dallas Golden felt reasonably certain what he wanted when college recruiting commenced. The No. 138 prospect in the 2025 ESPN 300 also realized what he did not want as schools such as Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, and Oregon began to extend scholarship offers.

Golden said at least several programs felt that he was not right for the job in his recruitment. The staff members of Notre Dame, however, appeared to comprehend him right from the start of the Irish’s attempt to sign Golden after high-school from Berkeley Preparatory in Tampa, Florida.

‘They were very straight up with me,’ Golden said. “Other schools will just inform you that upon putting in your foot forward, this or that will happen But I wasn’t looking for that I just wanted to find a place I could let my guard down at. ”

The Irish got in early, offering Golden during his freshman year with defensive backs coach Mike Mickens , and now Notre Dame director of recruiting Chad Bowden spearheading his recruitment. Then Golden began to hear form Freeman and the Irish maintained almost a daily contact with each other for the next two years. Freeman was access point that if Golden or his family wanted to communicate, they were always ready to go.

Golden officially decided for the Irish over Georgia, Clemson, and Florida State on April 28 which vacated planned official visited to those schools. He joins the fall as the third-highest ranked recruit in the Fighting Irish’s 2025 recruitment class and the team can use him to fill a strategic role on the depth chart.

”They were great in authenticity to themselves,” Golden said. “They do not lie to you like some of these other college coaches They have been developing that aspect of the relationship for years. ”

Golden’s recruitment is a good sample in how Notre Dame is recruiting in its top high school celebrated prospects.

Being one of the financial giants of college football, as well as historically and at present being one of the most recognized trademarks of college football, Notre Dame is invariably a contender for the best names in the country in spite of other aspects limiting the pool of players the Irish can recruit that are specific for this university. However, the past three years, Notre Dame has obtained its edge from Freeman.

A few insiders give Freeman the credit of an active, sincere head of recruitment. During contact periods, he is available incessantly with the prospects and is continually discussing prospects and recruiting with his assistants, asking questions and trying to get fresh information out of them.

Mary became a symbol of an old type of personality that used to be the essence of Notre Dame whereas Freeman has emerged as a change-maker that can take the program recruiting forward. From the eight classes the Kelly signed from 2014 to ’21 Notre Dame was able to get an average of 9. 4 signees from theESPN 300 and 12. 7 on average of four-star prospects per cycle/ From the three classes Freeman has signed, Notre dame averages numbers are even better with the Fighting Irish signing an average of 11 ESPN 300 recruits per cycle. 7 top-300 prospects and 14 Having evaluated this, it is clear that Oklahoma state still has a lot of work to cut if they are to compete at the highest level in NCAA basketball. 7 four-star additions each year.

‘I remember when I interviewed Marcus for a hire from Cincinnati,’ said Brian Polian, who worked at Notre Dame for 10 years, including five years with Kelly from 2017 to 2021. “What I saw early on was how keyed up he was, how vested he was in recruiting, how ‘gets-it’ he was on recruiting,” This is the energy that has spread through the entire company from the top.

E-relationships with the high school student population

Far more high school coaches around the nation are also noting Freeman’s style.

Jason Jewel has been the head coach of swim team at Brophy College Preparatory, a private Jesuit high school is Phoenix since 2011. Kelly’s staff only targeted cornerback Benjamin Morrison using Brophy in the 2022 segregation, and Jewel said he rarely spoke to the coaching staff.

This practice is not so adventageous now days as before, because now days prospects may not work with there high school coaches. However, when Notre Dame started courting 2025 Brophy cornerback pledge Cree Thomas, Freeman was a constant fixture and arrived with not one, but multiple assistants in tow. One time, during one of these visits Freeman was particularly keen on meeting the school’s president, Bob Ryan, who happened to be a Notre Dame graduate.

‘I had never found much homework done by the previous staff,’ Jewel said. ‘But you can tell Marcus and his staff pay attention to detail,’ adding that ‘They are a little bit different. ’

That Freeman and his staff are producing noticeable imprints within the hall of high schools is certainly no accident. Freeman perfected relationships at the HS level on the rise through jobs at Ohio State, Kent State, Purdue, and Cincinnati to finally landing at Notre Dame, and relationships are still in the center of him and the Irish as a team in 2024 recruiting.

“Definitely, the better relationships we have with high school coaches the more candid discussions we are able to have with him,” Freeman said. >Will this person fit at Notre Dame? Not at Notre Dame just the university but at the football program and what it is we want And I think the connections with high school coaches are so important.

Punahou High School in Hawaii boasts a production line to Notre Dame: Manti Te’o and Marist Liufau are two athletes among other significant players. A more recent example of a Punahou-to-Notre Dame kid is sophomore Irish linebacker Kahanu Kia. His brother, Ko’o, will be a part of the programme next year, signing up as a three star linebacker in the 2025 class.

Their father Namet ‘Nate’ Kia is the head coach at Punahou. He first remember Freeman as a position coach for his elder son. Now he can watch the recruiting environment that Freeman is creating in South Bend, Indiana from the view of both, a coach, and a parent.

“They really homed in on terms of what the value proposition of what Notre Dame offers to the table,” Kia noted. ”They have updated things. The work that you have to be here and do the other things that great, prestigious football programs do. But within all of that, the staff does an efficient job of reminding you that there is a heartbeat here, and that it is a different place from others. ”

Recruiting infrastructure

When hired for the position vacated by Kelly in 2021, Freeman was keen to grow the program’s set of recruiting personnel; they have doubled the number from six to ten, according to one source.

That group encompasses Bowden who is now the program’s general manager. The earlier change of command in the recruiting staff of the program in this summer was composed of promotions of Zaire Turner, the director of player personnel and Carter Auman, the Director of College Scouting and Assistant General Manager as well as the return of Caleb, the director of recruiting to Notre Dame.

Freeman has also managed to ensure that his coaching staff comprises of good recruiters with a similar message. In and around the program, word has it that both Mickens and the JUCO Recruiting Coordinator Mike Denbo rck are the program’s top recruiters with other coaches Gino Guidugli(quarterbacks), Al Washington(defensive line) and Max Bullough( linebackers) described as highly effective recruiters.

ESPN has also recently reported that Notre Dame will also be hiring Pro Football Focus analyst Anthony Treash, another step of the program in bringing in modern techniques to talent acquisition.

”Marcus, and as much as he wants to go out there and dig in, he makes sure the whole recruiting message for Notre Dame comes from him,” Denbrock said, who came back to Notre Dame this past off-season after two years running the defense with Kelly at LSU.

Fundamental changes in perceptions about NIL were shown to translate to one of Freeman’s early test within the Notre Dame job.

Regarding the infighting, the environment inside the program has shifted due to Freeman, most notably within the past year or so. A third party that has made a lot of condemnation for the last two recruiting periods is Friends of the University of Notre Dame, headed by ex-Notre Dame quarterback, Brady Quinn. Although former football director of player personnel Dave Peloquin now has the title of ‘strategic initiatives,’ he heads up the institutional approach to NIL across the school from the athletic side.

“I can tell you there was a time when people on campus were not quite clear as to what that model was goin g to be and whether it was consistent with the mission of the university Polian said. "That's changing. "

Closing the gap Specifically, it is possible to note that, in spite of certain changes introduced by Freeman into the operation around Notre Dame recruiting, this particular section of the program’s functioning remains based on the similar principles.

The Irish, or at least their coaching staff, have traditionally focused to private and Catholic schools and many of these players were regional recruits. For example Kyle Hamilton and Joe Alt the recently drafted NFL players are the type of players that Notre Dame generally pursues and invest in recruiting. In the two years of the 2023 and 2024 classes, Ireland signed/ secured 22 players from either Catholic schools or private universities. By 2025, the program has commitments from the following – 13 more.

We have got to win possibly a higher percentage of the battles for the ones that actually are a really good fit here and make sure that those guys are a part of what we are doing said Denbrock.

Kelly maintained the Irish’s dependency on their conventional strong recruiting areas but in Notre Dame’s 2012 national runner-up team, Tuitt and Nix were at the heart of its defenses, as DEs. Irish hired Tuitt from a public high school in Monroe, Georgia while Nix was also recruited by the Irish from William M. Raines, a Black former school in Jacksonville, Florida.

Judging from his carrier while in charge at Notre Dame he has vowed to expand the recruiting area and instead of focusing on the popular areas he recruits from he seeks for talent from other regions of the country. When interviewed in a podcast sometime in early this year, Freeman was particularly keen on reaching out to young people who are yet to realize that they are Notre Dame kids, though indeed they are.

Freeman has also recruited Shuler, the sophomore safety who will play a big role in Notre Dame’s defensive backfield this fall, from outside the sort of talent pool that the university would traditionally draw from.

Shuler started as a four-star junior in the 2023 class at Irvington High School, in Irvington, New Jersey, a city near Newark. He had scholarship invitations from several SEC and Big Ten schools, but like Eugene, Shuler received phone calls from Alabama, Georgia, and Penn State, his high school coach, Ashley Pierre, had to turn to a connection that was formed several years before when Freeman was an assistant at Cincinnati.

Then Notre Dame was contacting Shuler and Freeman was heading to New Jersey.

Pierre speaking about Freeman said, “I think he can relate with people no matter who they are. ” ‘I think that is probably the reality and that, I believe may be, what sets him apart as a head coach from most of his counterparts across the nation’.

Regarding the 2024 cycle, Freeman expanded into uncharted waters to get the running backs Kedren Young from Lufkin, Texas, and Aneyas Williams from Hannibal, Missouri. Among the players bound for Notre Dame’s 2025 class, Knight, the quarterback from Lucedale, Mississippi, and Anderson, the Bryan (Bryant, Arkansas) running back are two examples of Freeman pushing the map for Notre Dame even further outwards.

The Irish 2025 class is 10 th in ESPN’s recent ratings for the 2025 haul, targets five ESPN 300 defenders and two of the top-25 O-lineman. Freeman’s latest class that began earlier this summer suffered a blow when four-star cornerback Ivan Taylor defected to Michigan. Knight, the No. 2 dual-threat quarterback in the 2025 class, has spent an immense amount of time with people that believe that he will be flipping to Auburn. Of course, they could add one or two after that slow summer with the Irish in the mix for Top 100 linebackers Madden Faraimo and Nathaniel Owusu-Boateng and Notre Dame still has needs at wide receiver and on the defensive line.

New flips and recruiting losses associated with NIL will continue be an issue that Freeman and the Irish will deal with. Notre Dame like it has at sometimes during the on-field competition over the last nearly 15 years, continues to trail the top-tier giants of the SEC and the Big Ten. ESPN classify and according to them, Notre Dame has only inked one top-five class in a span of 10 years starting from year 2010.

The Irish, on the other hand, have a leader who is fighting hard and working assiduously to shorten that gap of inferiority in Freeman.

“You search coast to coast,” Freeman said. "All 50 states . . . For us, I've said it: Any place is fine let’s go there.