Getting a handle on the transfer portal complexities awaiting Freeman, ND

What the quarterback position becomes under Marcus Freeman at Notre Dame will set the trajectory for his legacy as the school's head football coach, with a fan base comprising exceptionally unforgiving graders.

What is happening in the transfer portal with that position group early in the second full cycle of no-sitting-out player movement and NIL money coexisting and increasingly mingling will add to the steepness of Freeman’s challenge.

Junior Drew Pyne’s surprise exodus Friday won’t necessarily do that — for the long term anyway.

In the narrow view of 21st-ranked Notre Dame’s upcoming bowl game — to be announced Sunday afternoon — Pyne’s portal plunge does leave Freeman at the mercy of Game 1 and 2 starter Tyler Buchner’s surgically repaired left shoulder holding up and/or freshman Steve Angeli’s learning curve being way more accelerated than the seven in-game snaps he was afforded this season would suggest.

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But with ascending prospect Kenny Minchey set to sign a National Letter of Intent later this month and to enroll in January, elite 2024 prospect CJ Carr in the next class, Buchner perceived as having the higher ceiling between him and Pyne, and a likely portal addition coming, there’s a chance this year’s 10-game fill-in starter and 20th-ranked QB nationally in pass efficiency would have been no higher than No. 3 on the depth chart next August.

Or the year after. Or the year after (should Pyne use all of his college eligibility, including a redshirt year and a COVID exemption year).

Given how Pyne got the top of the depth chart by ignoring math as well as outsiders’ projections of what his limits were, the expectation was that he’d at least stick around to compete in the spring, THEN perhaps use the second transfer window (May 1-15) to look for his happily ever after.

Once the 6-foot, 198-pound New Canaan, Conn., product stepped into his lifelong dream Sept. 10 — when his best friend on the team, Buchner, suffered a fourth-quarter should separation in a 26-21 loss to Marshall — Pyne so embraced it that Freeman and offensive coordinator/QBs coach Tommy Rees actually had to chase him out of the film room and tell him to go home on more than one occasion.

Despite the surprise timing Friday, Pyne said all the right things in his Twitter epistle. And there were plenty of warm-and-fuzzy cyber reactions from teammates. Yet, given a detail or two difference, we’ve all seen this movie before.

Beginning with Zak Kustok in the 1997 recruiting cycle, Notre Dame has signed 32 quarterbacks coming out of high school in the post-Lou Holtz Era. Minchey will make it 33. Of the 29 no longer on the active roster — a group that now includes Pyne — only six avoided transferring, changing positions or both.

Those six are Brady Quinn, Evan Sharpley, Jimmy Clausen. Tommy Rees, DeShone Kizer and Ian Book. Only Quinn, Sharpley, Rees and Book among those six who exhausted their college eligibility at ND.

The flip side of the portal is the new frontier, and one Notre Dame is not on equal footing to deal with, despite its one positive QB transfer experience with 2021 starter Jack Coan.

The Irish can easily get grad transfers through admissions. Undergrads, especially those closing in on their degree, have to thread the needle when it comes to transfer credits — something Northwestern safety transfer Brandon Joseph almost miraculously was able to do last winter.

And yet he told Inside ND Sports earlier this year that if he leaves after fall semester to enter the NFL Draft as an early entry, it’d likely would be easier for him to go back to Northwestern to earn his degree than finish up at Notre Dame.

Freeman and athletic director Jack Swarbrick have been trying for the past year to find some middle ground with the school's deans and other academic leaders, and have been reportedly met with some open minds. But that doesn't mean actual movement is imminent or even faster than glacial.

And then there’s this dynamic regarding both potential QB portal additions as well as gifted QBs on ND’s roster in future seasons.

"One of the real issues we've got in college football is people that are tampering with guys on your team and paying them money to leave," North Carolina head coach Mack Brown said Friday during a press conference previewing Saturday night’s ACC Championship Game between Brown’s Tar Heels and Clemson.

The Irish (8-4) defeated both teams by double digits this season. Clemson starting quarterback DJ Uiagalelei, Rivals No. 1 overall prospect in the 2020 class, is rumored to be headed to the portal soon. North Carolina redshirt freshman QB Drake Maye is being coaxed to, per Brown.

"It's an issue that needs to get stopped,” Brown said. "I sat down and did lunch with one of our starters (Maye) the other day, and I said, 'Are you getting calls?' He said, 'Coach, I've got 15 places I can go.' He said, 'I'm not going anywhere.' I said, 'Are they offering you money?' He said, 'Yes, 100 percent.'"

To extrapolate Pyne’s quest for more defined path to certain playing time as the norm is as naive as it is overly cynical to suggest the Drake Maye anecdote is business as usual. But Rivals national director Adam Gorney on the Inside ND Sports Podcast this week, suggested that scenarios like Maye’s are picking up momentum both at the portal level AND the high school recruiting level.

He also said while some programs, like Notre Dame, can thrive in a model in which recruiting and developing high school talent is the dominant way of dealing with roster churn, at least supplementing with the portal is become more of a necessity.

But there’s a price, as Pyne’s snap decision suggests. You bring in a portal piece at a particular position group — or even discuss the possibility publicly — and you run the risk of losing a developmental piece to the portal.

So instrumental is the transfer portal becoming to roster transformations, like USC's, that moving forward Rivals will rank incoming classes three ways: 1) High school recruits only. 2) Transfer portal additions only. 3) High school recruits and portal additions combined.

Which brings us back to Freeman, his mission to transform the quarterback position and his program trajectory.

High school recruiting still matters, and Freeman to this point has been elite. Portal recruiting matters too, and the same diligence, involvement and authenticity that moves the needle with high school prospects should do the same with potential transfers, even with some built-in impediments.

Freeman's most interesting strategy in all of that is leaning into what Notre Dame is — difficult — and selling that, instead of whitewashing that part of the ND experience during the recruiting dance and hoping recruits will push through it without transferring after arriving to a different reality in South Bend.

“I don't want to see young people make a mistake," Freeman said of the portal recently, "instead of embracing a challenge, embracing the discomfort that it takes to grow to maximize who you are as an individual by running to the portal and going to find an easier way.

“That's always my message to our guys. ‘Listen, stay and continue to fight, continue to work, because if you do the right things and you work tirelessly, at some point you're going to get what you want.’

“Then when you get what you think you want, there's going to be another challenge ahead of you. Those challenges never stop. You get better as an individual, but you come upon a new challenge.

“That's what I want for these individuals. I want them, more than anything, to get a degree from Notre Dame, because that will last forever. But I want them to learn life lessons here and get through some difficult times. Because if you can learn to fight and really persevere through those difficult times, this will help you throughout the rest of your life."

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