6 Thoughts on a Thursday

The health of Benjamin Morrison and Mitchell Evans was supposed to be one of the biggest storylines of camp for Notre Dame. I don’t believe anyone thought that it would be answered so positively on day one.

Marcus Freeman put it plainly when asked about them.

"Yeah, everybody will be cleared by the time we get to game week. I just don't know exactly when it will be over these next upcoming weeks, but they'll be good to go."

We probably didn’t even need that quote to determine that’s what would happen. Morrison participated fully in the first practice. Evans was limited with his reps, but he wasn’t moving at half speed in the drills he did take part in.

So, with that mystery solved, the focus moves to other position battles.

I don’t include quarterback as one of them. Things can change, but Riley Leonard getting all of the reps with the ones and Steve Angeli getting all of the reps with the twos would seem to indicate the way things will likely go.

The main camp competitions when it comes to starting positions are at guard, linebacker, wide receiver, and safety. What they all have in common is that the options are good at all of those spots.

It’s two 2023 starters on the offensive line who are battling it out at left guard with both Pat Coogan and Rocco Spindler working with the first team on Wednesday. It’s a sixth-year senior in Jack Kiser and four linebackers who were blue-chip recruits for a reason as the group pushing for time at linebacker. It’s Rod Heard, a multi-year starter at Northwestern, and rising talent Adon Shuler splitting reps with the ones at safety.

After they shifted some personnel, the most competitive position on the entire team this season might be wide receiver. It’s a long way from where it was last season.

There’s still things to prove for the two guards and the majority of the linebackers lack experience, but this is one of the rare situations where all of these starting positions that are undecided at the moment are more about finding the best out of good options rather than settling for whoever is left.

Starting out camp that way says a lot about how good the team can be this fall and while the vibes around recruiting aren’t as good as fans want them to be at the moment, the vibes around the team are pretty stellar before the season.

2. Is it possible to actually play five linebackers when Notre Dame only plays two linebackers the majority of the time?

They had four linebackers play over 200 snaps last season and two of them combined for 1,242.

Yes, it’s entirely possible and I think it can happen without as much management as one might think because of how Notre Dame can switch things up with their third down package. That’s how Jaylen Sneed got to 231 snaps last season and he didn’t start playing as much on third down until halfway through the season.

Max Bullough was moving linebackers in and out today with the ones with all five of Kiser, Sneed, Drayk Bowen, Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa, and Jaiden Ausbery playing in some combination together with the starting defense, even with them probably having three linebackers on the field for less than 10 snaps on Wednesday.

What will be interesting is if we see more combinations of three linebackers playing together in a sub-package outside of what they did last season when they used Sneed and Marist Liufau primarily as pass rushers when JD Bertrand was also on the field.

3. Marcus Freeman talked about playing the best six or seven wideouts this year when asked about moving Jordan Faison outside to the field from the slot. They know he can play the slot and that they have multiple players who can play there.

They’re trying to get the best guys on the field at the same time and blocking either Faison or Greathouse from playing is not an optimal move for the offense.

Faison moving to the field puts him in competition with Kris Mitchell. They have Beaux Collins, Jayden Thomas, and Micah Gilbert at the boundary. That leaves Jaden Greathouse and Jayden Harrison in the slot as seven guys and we’ll see if others like KK Smith, Logan Saldate, or Cam Williams can break into that.

Whether they end up playing six or seven, at some point it will be three or four out of this group who will end up rising above the others. It may be determined by health, but obviously that’s far less of a concern looking at the depth chart today than it has been in a long time for Notre Dame.

Regardless of how it plays out, I really like the idea of trying Faison at the field even if it only pushes Mitchell. He previously only had freshman behind him and now if Mitchell is the day one starter there, it means he earned it while competing with someone as talented as Faison.

4. Hopefully ISD subscribers noticed that our guy Matt Freeman was the only one who reported before camp that Faison was moving to the field, Sullivan Absher was going to be at left guard, and Aamil Wagner would slot in with the starters at right tackle to start camp.

Maybe it’s premature to just hand the job to Wagner, but it was notable to me that while Coogan and Spindler both took reps with the ones at left guard, Tosh Baker did not take reps with the ones at right tackle. At the very least, it’s Wagner’s spot to lose.

If this presumably sticks as it is with Wagner on the right side, Charles Jagusah on the left, Ashton Craig at center, Billy Schrauth at right guard, that means there’s only one spot that needs to be settled. That’s very different than it was last year when Notre Dame was working through multiple combinations at both guard spots.

That took a minute to get it figured out and it surely didn’t help Zeke Correll, Joe Alt, and Blake Fisher that things took time to get settled. Having four of five spots set would be a great thing for the line as a unit in order to build something over this next month rather than having to go through a long process of struggling to find answers.

5. Freeman was asked about the adjustment freshmen have to make who come in the summer compared to those who weren’t in the spring. He said that some of the best freshmen he’s coached have arrived in June. He didn’t mention Morrison, but I’m sure he’d be included in that group.

Freeman wasn’t at Notre Dame when Kyle Hamilton or Michael Mayer were freshmen, but they both enrolled in June. So did Joe Alt in Freeman’s first year as a defensive coordinator. Those are three examples that if you’re good enough, you’re going to play no matter when you arrive.

I wanted to highlight part of Freeman’s answer to that original question because it’s relevant in a couple of ways.

"To me, it's the ability for those guys to play fast, right? When we evaluate you in high school, we evaluate you playing as fast as you possibly can, right? And so all of them are good, right? But the guys that are able to play fast. Faster here, right? Like sooner, are the ones that are probably gonna have a chance to play early. And so that's the challenge, you know, it. Can I process all this information and with emotions and everything that's going on and still play fast? If you can do that, you got a great chance to play early."

That was the thing that was evident with Morrison in his first camp. He processed things fast. He broke on the ball quickly, he played confident, and it was obvious why he had jumped into the two-deep halfway through preseason practices.

Processing things quickly is why KVA has put himself into the mix at linebacker too. He plays fast and it’s why he doesn’t look like a freshman.

I brought this up on Hit & Hustle yesterday as well, but how it went for Morrison is a good reminder of why there’s still some time for things to click for freshmen with the team not even in pads yet. No one was raving about Morrison on the first day of camp back in 2022, but they were buzzing about him two weeks later.

We’ll see if any of the June enrollees can pull a BMo and start generating hype in a couple of weeks. With the depth after Notre Dame’s top-three corners, it would be a big deal if either Leonard Moore or Karson Hobbs can put themselves in a position to travel in week one to Texas A&M.

6. One reason why that could be more likely now is what Notre Dame did at practice today and I assume they’ll continue throughout camp. They were running drills in two spots with threes and fours working drills like O-line vs D-line one on ones, 7 on 7, or 11 on 11 at the same time the first and second team were working.

We didn’t get to see most of those reps because of where we were situated watching practice, but those simultaneous reps maximized practice time in a way that isn’t often done for younger players.

So much of camp for underclassmen who aren’t in the two-deep has to do with watching the top group work. It’s also known as taking “mental reps”, which isn’t the worst thing for these guys to watch and learn. Not having them watching also means they aren’t there getting hyped when their teammates are making plays, which changes the dynamic of practice a bit.

I think that might explain why the South Bend Tribune’s Tom Noie didn’t think there was much energy during day one of camp. I don’t necessarily agree with him, but it’s a lot less vocal with half the team working on a separate field.

Those are the negatives, but the positives greatly outweigh those. Where in the past we might have seen a young defensive end be lucky to get one rep of one on one pass rush in a camp practice, now that same player is getting four or five.

Most freshmen are doing everything they can to try and learn the offense or defense during camp as well and that’s awfully difficult to do when most of the learning is taking place in the meeting rooms or by watching rather than doing on the field.

Having things going on in two spots provides a much greater opportunity for younger players to get significantly more reps than they would normally get. That also could lead to some players who might not have had a shot to be ready to play early in the previous environment to now be able to put more things on film to persuade the coaching staff to bump them up to the top group.

It might not be ideal for the media who can’t watch two things at once. It’s a lot better for the players and for the program so they can better evaluate and develop those players.

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