I’m not going to pretend I know enough about football to evaluate Tommy Rees as an offensive coordinator. I’ll leave that to people plenty smarter than I, like Nick Saban, for example. But a few thoughts on Rees leaving Notre Dame last week after spending ten of the last thirteen years in South Bend:
Is This Betrayal?
I assume many Notre Dame fans are taking this as betrayal. When a coach makes a lateral move, it generally feels that way. A question, then, is whether this really is a lateral move. I don’t personally think it is, but that’s the crux of it.
Initially, there was some talk that this was accompanied by a pay increase, and it’s possible it was. I’m struggling to find confirmation on that point. But Notre Dame was paying Rees upwards of two million dollars a year while Alabama’s old offensive coordinator, Bill O’Brien, was making only a little more than half that. It doesn’t sound like Rees is taking a pay cut, but I haven’t seen a final number, and I’m not sure we ever had a definitive number Rees was making at Notre Dame. This wasn’t about money. It was about the opportunity itself.
Rees will now coach inside one of the two best-operating programs in all of college football, and he’ll take over a seat whose last five inhabitants are now the head coach of the New York Giants, the offensive coordinator of the New England Patriots, and the head coaches at Texas, Mississippi, and Maryland. Does that mean the job develops coaches? Not necessarily. Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian and Bill O’Brien weren’t exactly nobodies going into Tuscaloosa. But then again, neither is Rees, and all five of these last five coaches have come out better on the other side of their time under Saban.
Beyond the opportunities the job creates, it’s an opportunity in itself. Whether we like it or not, Rees will coach more talent at Alabama than he’s ever coached at Notre Dame, and more than he would have coached for at least the next two seasons even if things took a dramatic turn on the recruiting trail. Whether we like it or not, Rees will not have to adjust to as many of the puzzling in-game decisions that plagued Marcus Freeman early in the year and challenge most first-time in-game managers. Nick Saban makes mistakes—the Kick Six, that bizarre fake field goal in the 2018-19 national championship—but they’re more rare. Possibly most importantly, whether we like it or not, Rees is many times likelier to win a national championship at Alabama than he is at Notre Dame. I don’t know Rees personally, I haven’t heard Rees speak on his career ambitions, I’m not in Rees’s head. But if the guy who’s spent ten of the last thirteen years chasing a national championship wants to die having won a national championship, this is his most immediate best chance to do that.
Is the opportunity better enough to justify taking it? I think so, but I don’t personally mind if others don’t. This is sports. You don’t have to be reasonable. And besides, what consequences are there if Notre Dame fans are unhappy with Rees? What are they going to do, boo him at the Sugar Bowl? It’s not like Notre Dame fans haven’t booed Rees before. Even for those of us who view this as, in a tiny scenario, a possible route towards having a well-trained head coach with Notre Dame ties should Freeman not work out, there’s no real consequence if part of the fanbase hates Rees now.
What Does This Say About Notre Dame?
I don’t think anybody doesn’t know that Notre Dame is not as poised to win a national championship as Alabama is. I don’t think anybody could reasonably say Notre Dame is as far away as, say, Michigan State, but Notre Dame isn’t on the plane of Georgia and Alabama and it isn’t on the plane of Ohio State, below those two. After that, it gets messier, but we don’t need to parse it here. The point is that this doesn’t take Notre Dame from title contention to life as an afterthought. It’s in between both those poles.
Still, there’s more work to do now, because Notre Dame had someone at least Nick Saban thought was among the best offensive coordinators in the country, and now Notre Dame does not. What’s more, it’s a pretty jarring reminder that Notre Dame is not top dog. This is like back when Urban Meyer’s name would be suggested for the job and never fulfilled. It’s like when Brad Stevens’s name came up for Indiana’s basketball job and that never happened. If Indiana was what it wants to be, it’d have the power to get Stevens. If Notre Dame was what it wants to be, Rees would never leave for anything beyond a head coaching role or maybe an NFL coordinator job. It’s one thing to not be the best team on the field. It’s another to not be the top destination for coaches. Schools (and their broader communities—boosters and fans and the rest) don’t have all the power over that second part, but it’s more under their control than the first. Rees memorably and pointedly (and movingly) said last winter that he believed it was possible to win a national championship at Notre Dame. His departure doesn’t mean his belief has changed, but it does show that there are places he’d rather coach than Notre Dame, he who can genuinely be counted among Notre Dame’s biggest believers.
There have been reports that Rees was interested in being considered more seriously for the head coach role when Brian Kelly left. There has been speculation that Rees—Tommy “Do Your Fucking Job(, Drew Pyne)!” Rees—didn’t mesh perfectly with cool, calm Marcus Freeman. There are close, intense personal relationships behind the scenes into which we don’t have much visibility. But this doesn’t seem like a messy divorce. It seems like a promotion. That says worse about Notre Dame.
Where Does This Leave Notre Dame This Fall?
As others have pointed out, Notre Dame can seek a coordinator well-tailored to Sam Hartman’s strengths, one excited about coaching Sam Hartman. They don’t have to do this, but they can. It’s an option. As others have pointed out, Notre Dame is operating from a position of strength. They were just paying their offensive coordinator roughly twice what Alabama’s was making. They might not be Alabama, but it’s not a bad job. As others have pointed out, this is an opportunity for Freeman to shape the program more towards his design. It’s an opportunity, yes. But it’s also a challenge.
Marcus Freeman, late in the offseason, has been tasked alongside Jack Swarbrick with finding and onboarding a coordinator who will, in his first year, coach a very young wide receiver corps, a Michael Mayer-less offense, and an offensive line I believe is replacing both starting guards. And he won’t do it within the comfort of a soft landing. There are ACC teams on the schedule, but this isn’t the ACC. Notre Dame hosts Ohio State and USC and goes to Clemson all within a seven-week span in the middle of the season. Those are three of the six likeliest national champions, according to current sportsbook odds. Rees’s replacement has his work cut out for him. The ceiling is high: It’s not unreasonable to think Notre Dame could take two of those three and make the final four-team playoff. But the task is difficult.
Where the Program Stands
Notre Dame has come a long way over the last two decades. It’s come a long way over the last decade, even with that decade beginning with a national championship game appearance. The program had its worst season this year since 2016 and it still won nine games. It was still among the twenty best teams in the country. That is all very, very good, and much better than where things stood when Tyrone Willingham or Charlie Weis or Brian Kelly took over.
But.
But there are humps to get over, and there are causes for concern.
The program hasn’t won a New Years’ Six bowl or the equivalent since the days of Lou Holtz. I haven’t been alive for a Notre Dame win in a bowl of that stature, and I’ll turn 29 this fall (to borrow from LeBron, maybe it’s me).
The program might be struggling to adapt to the world of NIL. As a friend put it recently, “No group has been able to cut through the noise and articulate a clear NIL strategy for ND.” As we asked recently, “Does something exist or not?” Hopefully, things are going on behind the scenes to adjust for this, and God bless Jack Swarbrick for being a good enough athletic director that we can believe in that hope. But there’s a feeling around NIL that’s reminiscent of the late 2000s, when a sizable chunk of the Notre Dame community thought it ridiculous that national championship contention wasn’t coming as easily as it did under Holtz, rejecting how the game had (and now has again) changed.
The program’s head coach remains a relative unknown, and not in the way that someone else knows and we’re the ones who don’t. Nobody knows how good a head coach Marcus Freeman is. Not even Marcus Freeman. He’s been a head coach for only one full season. He’s only six years older than Rees. Given Luke Fickell was preparing for the College Football Playoff and Signing Day was imminent when Kelly left town, he was the best hire possible, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be an awesome coach. I hope he is. I think he can be. But nobody really knows.
We’re left, then, with a lot of weight on the shoulders of a 68-year-old athletic director amidst a rapidly changing college football landscape. It’s a tenuous spot. And with Rees leaving, the uncertainty just rose.
I wish Rees the best. I hope it works out for both him and for Notre Dame. I’m more confident in the former than the latter.
