It’s going to be very hard to get back to that stage.
There’s no shame in Notre Dame’s performance Monday night. Against the best team in the country, the Irish gave themselves a believable chance to win right up until one play before the two-minute warning. They fell behind big, looked as overmatched as they were, and in a development we all should have expected, rallied to get back in it. This was the 2024 Notre Dame football story. Too small. Too slow. Too banged up. Right there at the end, the second-best team in the country without much serious debate.
This “second-best team” part is big. Our national championship drought is long—37 years now—but we hadn’t finished second in the AP Poll since 1993. After the 2012 season’s championship, we fell all the way to fourth. Second-best isn’t the goal. But it’s not something we’ve done in a long, long time. In a sport which demands you earn your success more than any other does in American sports, Notre Dame earned more success than anyone but Ohio State. We were better than Georgia, Alabama, and Texas, three of the four uber-talented programs. Only Ohio State beat us.
If there’s a what–if this year, I don’t think it’s Xavier Watts somehow wrestling that interception away from TreVeyon Henderson, as perfect a moment as that would have been. I don’t think it’s Christian Gray somehow keeping up with Jeremiah Smith alone, one-on-one in the open field, and then somehow successfully swatting that pass away. I don’t think it’s Rylie Mills’s knee holding together healthily through the Indiana game. I think it’s the twelve-team playoff coming one year later. In the four-team era, Penn State would not have remained ranked ahead of us. That’s not really how the committee did things in the four-team era. We probably would have made the field, and Ohio State would not have, and we might have won it all. There’s no sense dwelling on this—we lost to NIU; we can’t say we deserved a title—but it’s on the mind today, wondering what it will take to close the rest of the gap.
In this twelve-team format, those uber-talented programs will almost always make the playoff. It will take disaster—as Alabama can attest—for those programs to miss a twelve-team field. That gives them a big margin for error. It gives them time to experiment, time to figure things out. It gives them time for injuries to pile up, creating a war of attrition which favors those with five-stars on the bench. Our best path to a national championship used to involve the uber-talented beating themselves. What if we’d drawn Kansas State instead of Alabama at the end of 2012? Now, it involves either one long-odds upset (probably more, to be honest) or Notre Dame closing the talent gap.
We aren’t not closing the gap. We might not have the top-end athletes, guys like Smith and Mykel Williams, but we do have depth. This was what allowed us to hang in there when Mills and Benjamin Morrison and Jordan Botelho and Boubacar Traore and Ashton Craig and Anthonie Knapp went down. We didn’t have five-star athletes to replace five-star athletes, but we had four-star athletes to replace four-star athletes. This Notre Dame roster featured fewer composite five-stars than Kentucky, North Carolina, and Mizzou. But we had the most four-stars in the country, and that combined with elite talent development to make a huge difference.
I’m not extremely worried about the talent development piece if Al Golden leaves for the Bengals. Golden certainly played a role in that, but his greater strength seemed to be scheme. We will miss him, to be sure, but it’s impossible to know what Morrison and Leonard Moore and even Xavier Watts—not technically Mike Mickens’s player until this year, when Mickens went from cornerbacks coach to defensive backs coach—would be without Mickens in the program. Golden leaving might lead to us promoting Mickens to defensive coordinator. Golden leaving might allow us to retain Mickens, who un-promoted would be a top target for coordinator positions elsewhere. Mickens staying might preserve our ability to develop weapons in the secondary. Great position coaches are always difficult to retain. If they’re young, they should and do try coordinator jobs to see if they can succeed with greater responsibility. But even in a world where Golden leaves, it’s fair to guess that our development apparatus will remain elite, at least until the rest of the sport catches up. Marcus Freeman gets almost as much credit as he deserves, but I’m still not sure people realize how smart the guy is. He knows what he and his position coaches are doing in the offseason. Lane Kiffin tries to buy talent. Marcus Freeman builds it.
The development machine should keep churning. If we get better bodies into it, look out.
There’s reason to believe we will get those better bodies. They won’t be here next year—our recruiting class is underwhelming again, laced with hidden gems but lacking obvious first-round talent—but they should be on their way. Switching from FUND (an attempt at non-profit NIL in a pay-for-play world) to RALLY will help, as will Notre Dame’s rejuvenated identity under Freeman, as will the SEC champion’s scalp still hanging from our belt. In the long term, there is hope for closing the gap. It’s going to take a lot of money, and we’ll need to stay at the front of the on-field pack, but it’s possible. We recruited at a top level in the days of Willingham and Weis. Freeman is a better recruiter than both those men. Give him the resources, and he and his staff will cook.
In the short term, though, we’re going to need to continue to win with culture. Next year looks promising—we’re losing guys (Watts, Morrison, Mills, Riley Leonard, Howard Cross III, Jack Kiser, Mitchell Evans, Jordan Clark, a few other starters), but we should return seven offensive linemen capable of starting, a Heisman candidate running back with multiple high-quality sidekicks, two shifty receivers, one or two good options at quarterback, promising athletes at edge rusher, lots of linebacker experience, our two starting cornerbacks from this year’s playoff, and a fierce safety who’s spent two years learning with one of the best we’ve ever had. Georgia has taken a step back. Alabama is in disarray. Oregon’s talent hasn’t caught the big boys yet. Penn State’s losing the two guys who made this team better than the usual Penn State. There’s hardly one position group where Texas should be better than they were this year. All those teams (except Penn State) can out-talent us, and that means they could put together something we can’t beat. But only Ohio State should be assumed to be better than us off the bat, and the Buckeyes are 1) dealing with plenty of turnover and 2) not exactly the model of a high-focused program well-equipped to handle a championship hangover. Ohio State was the best team in the country, but they also blew games they should’ve won, at Oregon and against Michigan.
In 2026, Texas should be a dynamo, Ohio State should be even better, we should assume Georgia will be back, Alabama might have figured things out, etc. etc. etc. But in 2025, things don’t shape up too badly for the Fighting Irish. The schedule might be harder, but that’s fun, and it’s full of those games that look harder on paper than they end up being, specifically the ones against Miami and Boise State. The scary thing is that we could be facing a hangover of our own, and we could take even Miami and Boise State lightly, and Texas A&M comes to town Week 3 looking for revenge. Our culture cannot let up. We will miss these graduating seniors in that particular arena.
Positionally, though, the only glaring concerns for next year are replacing Mills & Cross and replacing Xavier Watts. If we can do that effectively, the team we bring to the field should be better than this year’s team. We’ll need to replicate the offseason focus and in-season composure. That’s going to be the hard part.
It’s a luxury to talk about culture like this, especially given where we sat after the loss to NIU. To be clear, that loss to NIU is still concerning: We will play at least one very bad team next year, and likely two or three. Those should not be things we worry about, but until we start winning more games 66–7, we should and will worry about them. But it’s a luxury to talk about culture. It’s a luxury to have culture this good. It’s a magical thing in sports, and especially in college sports, where belief and heart can go such a long way. This was a special team, and we should not take for granted how the next man always stepped up, or how Leonard’s teammates picked him up after that horrible day in September.
A lot of the story of the 2024 Fighting Irish can be told in that quarterback room. We’ve had hints that Steve Angeli helped teach Leonard a lot, specifically about reading coverages. Between that and his field goal drive in the Orange Bowl, we’re lucky Angeli stuck around. But Leonard was the starter. Leonard was our quarterback. And while I will love Xavier Watts forever, and while Mills and Cross were Nix-esque anchors, and while Kiser and Pat Coogan were the kind of Notre Dame kids this program needs, just like Indiana and Kentucky’s basketball teams need players from Greenwood and Elizabethtown, Leonard shaped this team’s identity more than any man but Marcus Freeman himself. I will go to my grave with the memory of Riley Leonard running into the teeth of the best defense in the country four times in a row at the end of that first drive, lowering his body and driving back 300-pound athletes who’d give prime Stephon Tuitt a run for his money, hobbling and gasping and going right back into that line again, pushing with every ounce of his tremendous courage and his unfathomable faith.
Riley Leonard knew he was a poorer passer than his backup. Riley Leonard knew he didn’t see the things his backup saw. Riley Leonard knew who he was, and he used who he was to become a greater football force than we could have reasonably asked him to be. That was this whole team. Not Leonard, specifically. He didn’t carry these guys. But that’s who this team was: Humble enough to recognize its weak points. Confident enough to render those weak points nearly entirely irrelevant. With 2 minutes and 38 seconds left in the season, Notre Dame had a chance to win a national championship. Notre Dame earned itself that chance, and it sounds so corny to say it this way, but Notre Dame earned that chance through humility and courage and work.
Next year is promising, but it will be hard. The future is bright, but plenty of programs enjoy bright futures. Everything is easier said than done in college football, a sport where you must earn your success free of salary caps and drafts. If we can bottle this 2024 team’s identity and make it Notre Dame’s identity for a long, long time, we will be great for a long, long time. We will even, most likely, win a national championship. That, again, is far easier said than done.
God bless Rylie Mills and Howard Cross.
God bless Jack Kiser and Pat Coogan.
God bless Benjamin Morrison and Xavier Watts.
God bless Mitch Jeter, Al Golden, and so many more.
God bless Riley Leonard.
Thank God for Marcus Freeman.
