How ND QB Tyler Buchner's twisted journey is now powering his ascent

Editor's Note: This story has been updated after Notre Dame named Tyler Buchner as its starting quarterback for the 2022 season on Saturday, Aug. 13. The story was originally published on Aug. 4, 2022.

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Tyler Buchner was a seventh-grader when his brash aspirations last brought him to the campus of The Ohio State University for what he considered an unofficial recruiting visit.

For lacrosse.

The now-Notre Dame sophomore quarterback is pretty certain that at some point he took a peek inside fabled Ohio Stadium, a facility so pungently reeking of football tradition that it overwhelms whatever the nearby Olentangy River smells like.

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That visual somehow completely escapes Buchner’s memory now, along with every other facet of the 100-year-old facility on the Columbus, Ohio campus.

He can imagine, though, how he’d like it to be resembling and reverberating on the night of Sept. 3. That’s when Buchner will take his first steps toward either re-establishing a once-prodigious career path or starting the countdown by the Irish fan base until elite 2024 QB commitment CJ Carr arrives.

“When I’m running on the field on the road, you hear the boos,” said Buchner, now the curator of an eight-game win streak of Notre Dame QBs making their starting debuts, all crafted during the 12-year Brian Kelly Era. “I’m expecting that at Ohio State and hoping for it, because I kind of like it.”

Ohio State alum Marcus Freeman — presiding over his first regular-season game as Notre Dame’s head coach, in the stadium where he starred as a linebacker — named Buchner the starter over junior challenger Drew Pyne on Saturday, eight days into preseason camp.

"Extremely difficult decision," Freeman said Saturday after making the choice with offensive coordinator Tommy Rees. "One that me and coach Rees spent an enormous amount of time talking about.

"It's not really a seven-practice decision. This is something that we kind of looked at last year, we looked at spring, we looked at the summer and the start of fall camp — an entire body of work.

"We just felt like it was time. It was time to give the offense clarity on who's going to be the starting quarterback."

Many believe Buchner not only has the higher ceiling — and perhaps the highest since Jimmy Clausen during the Charlie Weis regime — he now decidedly has the higher floor between him and Pyne.

And seemingly the best poker face.

Those who know Buchner best would argue his constant even-tempered, matter-of-factness is the same inside as it is in what he shares with the world. And that it’s not a product of being overly guarded but rather of being obsessively pragmatic.

Case in point. Buchner has an NIL agent, but has done little to max out the value of being a quarterback at Notre Dame. And that’s because he didn’t view it as an immediate priority in a summer he felt needed to be transformational for him.

“Pocket change,” he said of his financial return, “which is cool.”

How about conference realignment, the hot, big-picture topic of the summer?

“Heard of it,” he deadpans.

Notre Dame possibly joining the Big Ten?

“I have no idea how to feel about it. Doesn’t matter.”

How intense does the spotlight of being an ND QB get for him?

“Honestly, I really haven’t dealt with a full season of being the guy,” Buchner said. “I don’t really know how it would feel. But I’ve had tastes and little things. Heard a lot about me missing a step talking to a professor and injuring my ankle before the Blue-Gold Game, and having to miss it. Wasn’t the first step I’ve missed.

“I kind of minimize it by staying off social media for the most part, but I appreciate the fact that fans are so bought-in and emotional and passionate about Notre Dame football, which is awesome.

“When you’re doing well — best fans in America. If they’re upset, it’s probably for a decent reason. Look, I watch NFL games. When I have a team that I am rooting for, I’m impassioned about it. I’ll say things while watching games that I would never want those players to hear.

“So I don’t really get affected by what fans say about me, because I do the same thing as a fan. Every guy sitting on a couch somewhere is thinking the same thing. I’m no different.”

What has defined the perception of the 6-foot-1, 215-pound San Diego product to this point is a statistically freaky junior season in high school playing largely against overmatched competition, along with his niche role in ND’s two-QB system last season as a college freshman.

What has defined his reality, though, is what he has done when no one’s watching.

During a long rehab for an ACL tear sustained four plays into his high school sophomore season. During a senior prep football season erased from the fall of 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

During the just-completed summer term at Notre Dame.

“I was asked to get better in a lot of ways, and I think I have,” Buchner told Inside ND Sports in a one-on-one interview in July. “Building relationships. Getting bigger, stronger, faster. Asserting myself as a leader.

“But I’d say the area I improved the most was throwing the ball. Throwing-wise this is the best I’ve thrown in my life.”

Buchner wasn’t asked to throw much as a tag-teammate to starter Jack Coan. He attempted 35 passes and fashioned a 142.7 pass-efficiency rating in that small sample size, second-best in the past 50 years among ND freshman starting QBs.

His specialty was running — at a 7.3-yard-per-carry clip — and ending up as ND’s second-leading rusher (358 yards and 3 TDs on 46 carries) behind L.A. Rams rookie Kyren Williams.

Keep in mind, though, Buchner throwing the ball in camps and offseason events prior to his first high school start as a high school sophomore was enough to coax scholarship offers from the likes of UCLA, Alabama, Georgia, Michigan, USC and Oregon.

If that improved passing persists, it will not only change the prevailing perception Notre Dame nation has about Buchner, it will likely alter the Irish postseason trajectory in both 2022 and ‘23.

Without it, it’s difficult to envision a path to extend the nation’s longest active road win streak to 11 games on Sept. 3 while trying to overcome two-touchdown favorite Ohio State’s more-polished, more-proven, more-dynamic offense that piled up more yards and points in 2021 than any other FBS team.

“I think Buchner has everything you need,” Freeman told Inside ND Sports. “Both of them (Buchner and Pyne) do. That was one of the biggest questions I asked Rees.

“I said, ‘Do we have quarterbacks in our system, in our program right now that can help us win a national championship?’ He said, ‘Absolutely.’ So that kind of affected the way that we looked at the (transfer) portal.

“We said we don’t need to do anything with the portal, because we have those guys in our program. They're just unproven. Until they show it in a game, there’s always that little bit of doubt. Until you can do it on a consistent basis in a game, that’s what everybody’s waiting for.”

Derek Samuel’s and Buchner’s worlds first collided shortly after Buchner’s first start as a sophomore at The Bishop’s School in San Diego truncated after a pass for minus-six yards and a run for a net of one yard in a 28-10 loss to El Cajon (Calif.) Grossmont back in 2018.

To this day the physical therapist/performance specialist with a long list of NFL clientele remains an offseason workout partner and one of his most trusted mentors for Buchner outside the Notre Dame coaching staff.

It’s a group that also includes former Notre Dame All-America cornerback Shane Walton, throwing specialist Taylor Kelly and former Irish QB Rick Mirer. The Mirers lived in the same neighborhood as the Buchners when Tyler was growing up and their sons played sports with and against him.

“I had heard much about Tyler prior to him ever coming in,” Samuel said. “La Jolla is kind of a small community, and everybody talked about this super freak football player. To be totally honest, I was already kind of bent out of shape that I wasn’t already working with him.

“I had already worked with so many NFL athletes, so I’m like, ‘God, who’s working with this kid?’ Sure enough he tears his ACL. And his family asked around the community: Who works with football players? Because of my presence in the NFL space, they came up with me.

“I had already heard about him a fair amount, and then once he came in, I thought it was a pretty good match.”

One of the first things Samuel told Buchner was that this detour, and any others that might follow, would make him a better football player in the long run if he processed it correctly.

“I like to say, ‘The first thing an elite athlete has to learn how to do is suffer,’” Samuel said. “The path to success for an athlete, it’s not paved in gold. It’s paved in suffering. And that’s how we find out who we are.

“The public looks at the professional athlete as having this charmed, glamorous, beautiful, easy, effortless life. God graced them with this amazing ability, and they always get the hot girl and always get all the money and the big house and fancy car. But for those of us who have spent time around proper athletes, that simply isn’t the case.

“These athletes live a very, very hard life, even the ones we see on TV with all the fame and all the riches. When you know how to suffer, you’re going to have the best opportunity at success. Not realizing that is what gets a lot of elite-level athletes in trouble.

“They think they’re just going to show up – whether it’s a college campus or at the next level in the NFL — they think, oh my God they made it. Little do they know that’s the hardest part.

“The easiest part is getting there. The hardest part is staying there. The public thinks it’s a very easy life. It's far more complex than anybody on the outside looking in could ever really begin to imagine.”

What Samuel learned about Buchner from his rehab was how little direction and inspiration the then 16-year-old needed to maximize every session.

“He would just get into the movement strategy and figure out a way to make it work for what he needed to do as a quarterback,” Samuel said. “It was really cool to see. That and how intelligent he is. Chances are he’s the smartest person in the room in any room in which he chooses to stand.”

Including smart enough to absorb the lesson about suffering and how to best process it, and put it to work — again. Two and a half weeks before his junior season, Buchner suffered a hamstring strain.

“Once again we have to dig deep. We have to grab from our toolkit of coping strategies and figure out the world isn’t going to come to an end,” Samuel said. “The sky didn’t come crashing down. Once again, we need to put on our hard hats, and that’s what we did.”

Buchner went on to have one of the most prolific high school seasons statistically in U.S. high school history in 2019. He threw for 4,474 yards with a 53-5 TD-interception ratio. And he ran for 1,610 yards, averaging 12.6 yards a carry, and 28 more TDs.

It confirmed the ND coaching staff’s faith in Buchner, having offered him a scholarship in February of 2019 with one high school pass completion under his belt and still in the throes of ACL rehab. He verbally committed to the Irish less than a month later, on March 8, after randomly running into former Irish All-America linebacker Manti Te’o in Samuel’s office earlier in the day.

Buchner’s Rivals player ranking shot up to No. 42 overall after that prolific junior season, with a trajectory to eventually end up as a five-star prospect.

Buchner wanted to push himself harder, so he transferred to Helix High in La Mesa, the same school that produced former Heisman Trophy winner Reggie Bush, to play against the top-caliber competition in the San Diego area.

The COVID-19 pandemic squashed those aspirations and his player ranking — he sank to No. 113 at the end of the recruiting cycle — but not Buchner’s progress. Despite California having some of the most restrictive COVID protocols, Samuel was deemed essential personnel. And instead of meeting at his facility, he’d commute to Buchner’s house to train him in an impromptu weight room that the family set up.

With Buchner sticking with his plans to enroll early in February of 2021, Buchner’s mom, Audrey, studied the Notre Dame playbook as meticulously as he did and quizzed him regularly to prep him for the college transition.

“She thinks she knows a lot about football,” Buchner said with a laugh of the Yale grad and former equestrian college athlete. “Seriously, she is really smart and she really helped.”

Said Samuel: “Missing his senior year of football was a shame, because he was so thirsty, he was so ready and he had a very good ecosystem around him. So seeing him miss his senior year, again we have to deal with adversity. Again this is how the world works. You can only prepare with what’s in front of you.”

One of Buchner’s delights over the summer was helping along June-arriving freshman skill players Holden Staes, Eli Raridon, Gi’Bran Payne and Tobias Merriweather, the same way former ND QB Ian Book helped Buchner during Buchner’s first few months on campus while Book was prepping for the NFL Draft.

“I think they’re going to surprise some people,” Buchner said of the freshmen. “You can see the spark they bring when they’re on the field. And you watch them work, and they’re as impressive. Tobias, wow, he was always going over the playbook in his dorm room every time you looked.

“Coach Freeman, I think, sets the tone for that. Guys see how hard he works and it becomes part of the culture for everyone.”

Freeman’s approach to X’s and O’s when it comes to the QB room, though, created some mild culture shock at first.

“Seeing things from a defensive perspective is quite different,” Buchner said of the former defensive coordinator. “If you’re drawing up plays from a defensive standpoint, it’s backwards for us. It's like, ‘What are you doing?’ But once you get used to it, the terminology is pretty helpful.

“His big emphasis is talking about leadership and ways to lead, because there’s always different ways to lead. (Brian Kelly) had a different way of leading than coach Freeman does. I think hearing those things and picking up on new nuggets is always beneficial to my development and the rest of the guys’ development.”

So too, he figures, is having family close at hand. With Buchner’s sister Paige, a star rising senior soccer player, having verbally committed to Notre Dame, the family is shopping for a residence near the ND campus.

“My family’s awesome,” said Buchner, who has another sister (Brooke) who plays beach volleyball at Cal and another volleyball-playing sister, Bryce, in middle school.

“My dad (Todd) was a fullback at Colgate in college, but he likes to tell me and everyone else he taught me how to throw. But if you watch him throw, you realize that’s not likely to be the case. What is true is that he’s been there for me, for us, at every turn. And he’s going to be there in Columbus to take in what I think will be a really cool experience.”

Samuel will too, but from a distance.

“There’s no doubt in my mind that Tyler Buchner is ready to impose his will on anything that he fully commits to,” Samuel said. “Whether that’s his academics. Whether it’s his time in the weight room. I don’t get too many high school kids who can put 405 pounds on their back and do a back squat with ease, but Tyler was that kid.

“He's got this unbelievable ability to develop strength. He’s got so much fast-twitch fiber in his body. If he were a stock on the market, he’s a buy. I’ll tell you what, I’m going to be glued to my TV set on Sept. 3.

“And whatever happens in that game with regard to Tyler, just know that he’ll handle it, go back to work and make sure the best is yet to come.”

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