Ethan Long | QB Blake Hebert "Perfect Fit For Notre Dame"

For Ethan Long‍, the next move was an obvious one. 

With Notre Dame suddenly in need for a quarterback in the Class of 2025, Long - an Irish safety commit - knew exactly who he wanted, his Brunswick School teammate, Blake Hebert‍. 

“When we lost Deuce (Knight) unfortunately, we had no one else in mind, but Blake,” Long says of himself and his fellow Brunswick teammate and Notre Dame commit Matty Augustine‍. “He's a great kid, great student, and he really does love the game and that's what we want. He's going to take care of us and I believe he's going to take us to greatness.

“He's a great player. He's a leader. He's the perfect fit for Notre Dame.“

Hebert transferred to Brunswick back in January and though he was committed to Clemson at the time and Knight was pledged to the Irish, but a sense of, ‘Hmmm…’ soon developed.

“We always joked about it a lot,” Long recalls. “At first it was a joke, but then we were like, 'Hey, he really is a Notre Dame kid. He loves football and we really could make this happen.' We got on him a little bit more and I think it just snapped.”

It wasn’t difficult for Long and Augustine to craft their pitches.

“The Four for 40, obviously,” says Long. “There's no better school to go to than Notre Dame if you want that future. Obviously football's going to end at some point and Notre Dame's going to set you up for life. But also, we're playing the top football in the nation. We're going to compete at the highest level.  

“That's just what we were really trying to sell him on, 'We can do anything together and just think of it, three of us from the same school going to the same school. That's history right there and we're just going to continue to be great.'”

For Long, hearing from the other members of the 2025 Irish recruiting class was additional affirmation that his region is underrated.

“They all texted me,” he laughs. “They were like, ' Yo, your school must be nasty or something.' I was like, 'Hey, don't sleep on us up in Connecticut. The East Coast can ball.' As you can see, Elijah Burress is having a great year, and that's just one person. We've got kids from everywhere and just know that we're going to come for it all.”

More than anything, though, Long is excited for his future teammates to get to know his current teammate and his confident they’ll come away feeling the same way he did when he got to know Hebert.

“Right off the jump, he proved that he has respect for us and respect's a big word,” Long says. “He has the same mindset, same goals, same end game, and we really understood that. We were like, 'Alright, if we're going to do this, we're going to do it together.' We really adored that and really took it as a team. There's no me, there are no I's. It's straight team. Blake was a perfect fit and he just really jumped on that and is leading us to greatness.”

On the field, Long points to Hebert’s “presence.”

“The way he carries himself is different. You can tell that Blake's a special kid, a special quarterback, he knows how to lead. You just feed off him and all that energy that he has and just having him, you're comfortable, your offense is going to score and move the ball in tight situations under pressure, he's going to get it done.”

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