Notre Dame linebacker Drayk Bowen has raised his level of play through four games of his final college season.
The 6-foot-2, 235-pounder leads the Irish with 22 tackles and has missed just 3.8 percent of his tackles, a massive improvement from 2025.
Per PFF, Bowen missed 16.4 percent of his tackles a year ago, but that number wasn't due to a lack of effort or talent.
The Indiana native played through multiple injuries, including a hip labrum injury that required surgery and a four-month recovery.
“I think being healthy was always a big one for me,” Bowen stated. “Just everything that happened with the surgery was a lot of different things. Hip labrum was fixed, but then there was a piece of bone that they had to take out that was growing around my hip labrum.
“My hip didn't fit into my hip socket right. It was a lot of things that were going on last season that kind of did that.”
College football is a grind and some players might not have been able or even chosen to play through those injuries. Bowen never considered coming off the field.
Now, he's taking advantage of the additional recovery opportunities available inside Shields Family Hall.
“Taking that from last year, what I learned in this year, durability is just making sure that you're taking care of your body the right way,” Bowen said. “I try to do stuff before and after practice to really take care of my body so that doesn't happen again, and I feel as good as I can going into Saturday.
“You're never going to feel 100% once the season starts, but as long as you can maintain 90% at least around there, you're going to feel pretty good going into game day.”
Despite missing spring ball and having his rehab slow his progress, Bowen hit the ground running once he was cleared.
He made two trips to Los Angeles during the offseason to train with Lee Lowe Jr., who runs Prototype Players Training and is Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa's longtime trainer.
“I went out to California and worked with a coach through Kyngstonn, Coach Lowe,” explained Bowen. “He really taught me a lot of things, how to play off movement, different ways to use my hands to defeat blocks that I hadn't really ever learned or hadn't really thought of.”
It might get overlooked, but Viliamu-Asa and Bowen (and Madden Faraimo) training together during the offseason speaks volumes about Notre Dame's linebacker room.
The Irish boast an incredibly deep linebacker corps and every advantage is needed to earn playing time.
Yet Bowen had the relationship with Viliamu-Asa to reach out and ask to be connected with his personal trainer. Viliamu-Asa didn't hesitate to help his teammate.
That relationship and trust have carried over to the field.
“That's just how we are as a group,” said Bowen. “It doesn't matter who's in there. Everybody's going to go make a play, go play with a high motor. I think it's how we all work in the film room. We all see things a little bit differently that all really helps each other.
“The way we all communicate in the game. ‘Hey, we're seeing this. Kyng's in there. Hey, I saw this.’ We go look at it on the iPad and we're all communicating.”
Notre Dame's linebackers have also benefited from a deeper defensive interior this fall.
The Irish invested heavily in improving the defensive line and that investment is making life easier for Bowen and the rest of the linebackers.
“To have all those guys and then have as many as we do that can rotate and stay fresh, it just makes us play so much cleaner,” Bowen explained. “They take on double teams and then as soon as a guy comes off, they're making a play. The O-line really has to honor them, which just makes our job so much easier. Having those guys has been phenomenal this year.”
As the calendar flips to October, Notre Dame enters the month with the nation's top defense, having yet to allow 300 total yards in a game.
The results have been impressive, but Bowen believes the foundation is built Monday through Friday.
“I think just how well we practice is the first thing,” stated Bowen. “The intensity that we practice at. Every day you go in with the mindset of there's things you've got to see, whether it's a walkthrough, whether it's a full speed padded practice like today, whether it's a fast Friday. Just making sure that you're seeing things you're supposed to see, communicating it, and then just going out and performing with intensity.
“Never taking a rep for granted, whether it's a coverage rep, tackling rep, or a pass rush rep, a run rep, just a regular run. That's one thing that's allowed us to play so fast on Saturday. We go into a practice week with such a good intensity that you see it come out on Saturday. We recognize things. We play fast. We play physical.”
Notre Dame will travel to Chapel Hill this weekend and while North Carolina presents a formidable challenge, the Irish will also face a rare situation: a noon kickoff.
For Bowen, though, the kickoff time doesn't change the mindset.
“We call it Notre Dame time because it doesn't really matter what time you go play,” said Bowen. “At the end of the day, when we show up, it's time to go. That could be noon, 3:30, 7:30, whatever it is. When you go play a noon game, you're waking up and you're going. There's no little break in the day. There's no longer break in a later game. It's wake up, get to the stadium, you're rolling.”
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