Maturity Paving the Way for Notre Dame LB Jaylen Sneed
Jaylen Sneed recorded six tackles in last week’s Orange Bowl victory over Penn State, but the biggest play of the night by the South Carolina native didn’t include him making a tackle.
Sneed used a slight hesitation move to get by the Penn State left guard to pressure quarterback Drew Allar into throwing an enormous interception to Christian Gray with 33 seconds left in the game, which paved the way for Mitch Jeter’s game-winning field goal moments later.
“After the play, I told Christian you better thank me,” laughed Sneed. “It was a great play by him. Just to know I did it for my brothers and my team, and we stopped them, we were able to win the game.”
Now, Sneed has made several big plays throughout his career, but this type of play has been a long time coming. It was a mature play. It required Sneed not to attack the quarterback immediately and use his elite athletic traits at the right moment to close ground on Allar.
Would the 6-foot-1, 222-pounder have been able to make that play earlier in the year? It’s debatable as Sneed admits he was thinking and trying to do too much at the beginning of the fall but a conversation with linebackers coach Max Bullough in the middle of the season might have changed the trajectory of his career.
“I don’t even know what week it was,” explained Sneed. “Toward the middle of the season, Week 6 and Week 7, he told me, you just have to play free. You have all the athleticism. You just have to turn yourself into a football player. You have all the tools, everything. You have to turn yourself into a football player.
‘We started meeting every Tuesday. We met a couple times a week. He just taught me some of the little things he used when he played the game that would help him so he wouldn’t have to think so much on the field. After that, I just stopped thinking so much and just started playing.”
Sneed will get to showcase his new mentality and playmaking ability against his former linebacker coach in Monday’s National Championship game. James Laurinaitis coached the Notre Dame linebackers in 2022 and Sneed has felt the benefits of having two former players coach his position during his time at Notre Dame.
“It’s been great having two guys of their caliber,” Sneed stated. “Both of them played in the league. You just know their knowledge of the game is so much higher than yours. You just want to learn from them every day. I felt like my freshman year it was hard to learn because I really didn’t know what was going on. I’ve definitely learned a lot more with Max because he’s been here for my two most (involved) years. But (Laurinaitis) definitely started the foundation.”
The road to get to this point hasn’t always been easy. As with most players, Sneed has experienced the ups and downs of college football despite arriving in South Bend with that five-star tag. It’s taken some humbling moments, but Sneed has embrace it all and learned from some tough lessons, wich has led to him playing the best football of his career.
“It’s been harder than I thought it was going to be, for sure,” said Sneed. “Being a college linebacker isn’t as easy as it looks. Starting off, I had to gain weight first. I was skinny, so I had to gain weight, had to learn the playbook, which was hard. And then just having mentors like Jack (Kiser), JD (Bertrand) and Marist (Liufau), just having them, just watching them, and then having them tell me, saying it how they would say it, not how a coach would say it. It just really helped me a lot.”
Sneed’s ability to mature and realize what he needed to do probably kept him in the blue and gold, but perhaps more importantly, allowed him to see the light at the end of the tunnel.
“Last year, one game I didn’t play and I didn’t talk to family for a couple days because I was just all in my head,” recalled Sneed. “Knowing I had that support system and then going back to them and them supporting me through the struggle, and then like me now and still being here after, it’s just like, I don’t know, it pays off in a different kind of way.”
Notre Dame’s defense will have a tough task on Monday as they’ll face one of the most talented offensive rosters in the country. The Buckeyes have the ability to create explosive games behind the best receiver unit in the sport, while they also have two running backs who could be All-Americans.
Sneed’s role will be simple.
“We’re just going to get after the quarterback as much as we can, try to put some pressure on Will Howard,” stated Sneed. “That’s really it. Hopefully, our DBs play well behind us.”
The opportunity to play for a National Title isn’t lost on Sneed or his teammates. They’ve experienced the lows of walking around campus after the NIU game and now the positive vibes of reaching the pinnacle of the sport.
“The vibes are good on campus now, as they should be,” said Sneed. “It’s not crazy. It’s too cold to be crazy. It’s been a great experience coming back to school. We’re Notre Dame, so we chose hard, and we have to go to school and play in the national championship.”
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