Notre Dame’s five remaining team captains followed new head coach Marcus Freeman out of a Purcell Pavilion tunnel and onto the court Saturday night as he greeted the crowd at halftime of the Irish men’s basketball game against Kentucky. They looked on and waved as the home crowd serenaded him with a “Mar-cus Free-man” chant.
It was a quite the metaphor.
The captains hitched their trailer — and the program’s future — to Freeman when they vouched for him as Brian Kelly’s replacement in an early December meeting with athletic director Jack Swarbrick. They trusted him to sustain the culture they helped build over the last few years. They believed he could push the program through the challenging last few steps to winning a national title.
It seems they will follow him anywhere.
Regarding prep for the Jan. 1 Fiesta Bowl and Freeman’s first few weeks of practice, though, he’s following the captains for guidance as much as anyone else.
They’ve been here for a while, after all. Some of them five years. They’ve seen success. Considering their voices are one reason Freeman is in this position, they’ve earned some input. And, of course, Freeman is still new to the logistics of this whole head-coach thing.
“I’ve leaned on them heavily with a lot of what we’re going to do in this bowl preparation,” Freeman said. “I asked them how much media do you want at practice? Do you want the media there? What are your thoughts on practice times? What are the curfew times? I’ll lean on those guys to have ownership of how this bowl preparation is going to be.
“That’s a great group of guys. They all have different ideas, but they’re all team guys. They’ve been my core. They’re the people I lean on most in terms of how we move forward.”
With running back Kyren Williams and Kyle Hamilton sitting out the bowl game and turning pro, Freeman’s captain confidants are four graduate students (defensive end Myron Tagovailoa-Amosa, linebacker Drew White, nose tackle Kurt Hinish and injured receiver Avery Davis) and one senior (center Jarrett Patterson).
All but Davis are three-year starters. All but Patterson have been around for the entirety of Notre Dame’s 54-9 record since 2017. They’re architects of Notre Dame’s cultural reboot following a strife-filled 2016. Hamilton and Williams came in two years later and made enough of a locker room impact to be named captains as juniors.
Of the seven captains, two have already played their last game in a Notre Dame uniform. Hinish and Tagovailoa-Amosa will do so Jan. 1. White, Davis and Patterson have eligibility left, but have not made final decisions on staying or going. It’s possible none are back. Even so, they want the culture they helped create to stay in place long after they’re gone. Freeman was their choice to uphold it.
“One thing the captains emphasized is we wanted someone in-house to take over,” Tagovailoa-Amosa said. “We had built something special here. The one thing we didn’t want was somebody to come in and change that culture, bring in their own principles and lay it on us before the bowl game.”
Freeman does have to fill a couple staff vacancies. He needs a defensive coordinator and a linebackers coach to replace himself. He’s in the market for a special teams coach to take over for the departed Brian Polian. There may be more jobs to fill after the bowl. It’s possible he brings in an outside hire for at least one of them.
In the meantime, he has elevated a trusted understudy: senior defensive analyst Nick Lezynski.
A former Notre Dame walk-on, Lezynski has worked with the Irish’s linebackers for the last four seasons. He was involved in recruiting Notre Dame’s 2022 linebacker class, namely Traverse City (Mich.) Central four-star Joshua Burnham. Now, he’s adding special-teams coordinator (with Freeman’s help) to his duties and is the de facto linebackers coach. It may as well be a job interview.
“He has taken a big leadership role in the linebacker room,” Freeman said. “He has been with me all year. He has been in every linebacker meeting. He knows exactly the progression we have in the linebacker room. He has been doing a great job in individual meetings.”
If he keeps it up, the captains might vouch for him too.
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