Leadership.
It’s the key to long playoff runs and what Notre Dame needs to find this summer.
The spring offered a glimpse of who might step into the void left by veterans like Howard Cross III, Riley Leonard, Jack Kiser, Rylie Mills, Xavier Watts, and Benjamin Morrison. The challenge now is to turn potential into presence.
Drayk Bowen, Jaden Greathouse, Will Pauling, Aamil Wagner and both quarterbacks, CJ Carr and Kenny Minchey, come to mind regarding who raised their voice in the locker room, but it won’t stop with them.
Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman plans to hit the ground running to cultivate his next group of leaders.
It’s worth noting that Freeman has held leadership positions as a player and coach, so he knows what he’s looking for and how to get a group of young men where they need to go.
”The first thing is, you have to educate them on what you believe leadership is,” explained Freeman. “I think that's the biggest mistake. We talk leadership, but what is leadership to them? There are certain ways I want our leaders to view leadership and that's the most important thing, to define what I view leadership as for them and then you put them in leadership situations.”
Freeman’s push to develop the next set of leaders started on Monday as the team returned to campus for offseason workouts and summer classes.
The structure mirrors past offseasons. Players will be split into competitive teams and will select leaders to guide their group, but the goal goes beyond competition.
“We're going to have different teams this summer and the teams will vote on two leaders, or captains, whatever you want to call them,” Freeman said. “If you're a leader of a team, and somebody on your team makes a poor decision, well, I'm not going to the person who made a poor decision.
"I want to talk to the leader because as a leader, the assumption is you're going to fix the problem, no matter if you can or you can't, no matter if it's your fault or not, like that's what leaders are in a position to do, to problem solve. Well, this person missed or did something wrong. We're looking to the leaders to fix that problem. That's what leadership is. It's you're a problem solver.”
Freeman will also be keeping close tabs on which players can help elevate their groups.
“You elevate the people you lead, and if the people you're leading aren't elevating, your performance isn't better, then I'm gonna look at you as the leader,” said Freeman. “That's the way we're going to continuously grow and promote leadership."
Offseason workouts also lead to creating depth, which is something Notre Dame boasted a year ago on the way to Atlanta. It’d be hard pressed to find a more injured team than the Irish last fall, but no one batted an eye. They went to work.
Work has been one of the pillars of the Notre Dame program under Freeman, which includes those Bloody Tuesday practices in the fall that can also be risky, given how physical the head coach wants them.
That said, developing depth and leadership is built into Freeman’s program naturally through how he and his staff run the building on a daily basis.
“I think number one is the depth,” Freeman said when asked why Notre Dame can become an elite force in college football. “Two is the culture in terms of understanding the culture we have, the expectations we have and probably the most important is that if you don't put Notre Dame in front of yourself, you're not going to be a part of this thing and that's what you do.”
Freeman's ability to have his program buy into team glory is rare, especially in the Transfer Portal era.
What’s the key to getting his team to follow his lead? Freeman isn’t focused on keeping people happy.
“How do we continuously make sure that every person in this program chooses Notre Dame before themselves?” said Freeman. “We define your role for a game and then no matter what that role is, as long as we achieve the desired result, which is a win, you're happy because we win not because of what your role was defined for that game.”
The key for long-term success, as say Georgia or Ohio State, will be continuing to recruit elite talents who buy into the culture at Notre Dame, but also develop those players into NFL talents.
“I think the culture is important and probably development,” said Freeman. “How do we develop the talent that we have? How do we get them better in a year, in four years? How do we continuously develop the talent that we have as a football program?"
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