SOUTH BEND, Ind. — The dream that still flickered for Mike Denbrock when he walked away from a reduced role at Notre Dame following a lost 4-8 season in 2016 was to evolve enough as an offensive play-caller somewhere else to put him on the fast track to being a college head football coach.
Someday.
Now at age 58 and back at Notre Dame for a third tour of duty, Denbrock revealed on Friday that that ambition has since mutated. But the work that went into him getting the opportunity to lead his own program uncovered a different calling.
And two months into it, the newest Irish offensive coordinator/tight ends coach is finding in reality so far everything he envisioned when in December he left behind an unsigned three-year contract extension to continue on at LSU as offensive coordinator and Tigers’ head coach Brian Kelly’s most valuable sidekick.
The same Brian Kelly who became Notre Dame’s all-time leader in wins in 2021, and then publicly chalked up his decision to abruptly relocate to LSU that December to both a lesser commitment by ND to winning a national title and a more contorted road to arrive there.
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What Denbock’s offense will look like in 2024 as his sequel to presiding over the nation’s No. 1 scoring offense, total offense and the Heisman Trophy winner, QB Jayden Daniels, last season at LSU is compelling in its own right.
Especially given how inexperience at the offensive coordinator position was the single-most significant factor that separated the 2023 Irish from playing in a College Football Playoff game versus doing so in an admittedly welcoming and well-run second-tier bowl game sponsored by a breakfast cereal mascot.
But why Denbrock is doing it all in 2024 and contractually through 2027 at Notre Dame and not LSU or the couple of other SEC schools that flirted with him in December isn’t just a seismic soundbite.
It’s pushback — unintentional, but pushback nonetheless — on the reality Kelly continues to hawk about the school at which he spent 12 years and successfully reinvented himself at as well.
“It’s Notre Dame,” Denbrock said in a three-word sentence to explain his reasons for coming back — rather, coming home — again.
The context that came along with those words is even more powerful, even though at this point it’s more about program perception than actual program ascendance.
It’s the unflinching belief in who Kelly’s successor at ND, third-year Irish head coach Marcus Freeman, will become and who he already is. It’s the belief that Notre Dame can win a national title — not someday, but while Denbrock is moving around the offensive X’s and O’s and recently extended Al Golden is doing the same on defense,
“I think I'm very content leading an offense and helping Marcus and this program win a national championship here,” Denbrock said Friday in meeting with the Notre Dame beat media for the first time in this incarnation. “And I want to be part of that and I want to do that here with these student-athletes and with this coaching staff.”
Denbrock was Kelly’s associate head coach, wide receivers coach and offensive-play caller at Notre Dame when the two parted ways last time. And he gets incorrectly lumped into a 2016 staff purge that included changes at defensive coordinator and strength and conditioning coordinator among them.
The reality is Denbrock could have stayed for year 8 of the Kelly regime in 2017, with the same titles and same paycheck but without the play-calling gig. That eventually went to import Chip Long, whom Kelly would end up firing three years later.
He bet on himself and left for Cincinnati, where head coach Luke Fickell had opted to try to rebuild a long successful UC program that predecessor Tommy Tuberville managed to bankrupt.
There he crossed paths with Freeman for the first time and continued to cross them via weekly calls and texts after Freeman outgrew Cincinnati and became Kelly’s defensive coordinator at ND in January of 2021.
“I think just experience is the best teacher,” Denbrock said of how he is better than the version that coached at ND from 2002-04 and pointedly the one who coached under Kelly from 2010-16. “I mean, even though I had been in that role before, since leaving here the last time it's kind of been a lot more where it was my show to run.
“You're always going to have influences from the head coach, and he's always going to have a voice in what you do and how you do it. And that's Ok, I'm unbelievably fine with that. But I was able to break away and kind of develop my own way of doing things, my own system, my own style of offense, if you will. In how that fits, what I think —based on the personnel that we have available to us — what the best way to do that is.
“And [I’ve] been able to adjust it the way I want. Been able to add to it the way I wanted. Been able to subtract from it the way I wanted. That's, I think, the biggest difference now. Experience is a great teacher, No. 1. And No. 2, the system that we're going to run and its development is something that I'm in complete control of.”
Kelly got a blast of it firsthand when Cincinnati, then still a Group of 5 school, came into Notre Dame Stadium and with Denbrock handed the Irish their only regular-season loss that season, 24-13.
A loss that kept the Irish out of the College Football Playoff that season. Instead the Bearcats made the four-team field.
Denbrock’s offenses have continued to evolve. Here are a few key clues to how that will translate this offseason in South Bend:
► He values the run game and Notre Dame’s history of leaning into it, but he has come to look at its place in the overall vision of the offense in a different light.
“I think any great offense revolves around the ability to be able to run the ball,” he said. “Having said that, I will say that I think I'm more open than I was years ago to not just pounding my head against a brick wall, and just understanding that the game has changed.
“And the more athletes you can get out in space and create mismatches is also a good way to play offense. So, there'll be a good balance of that. There'll be afternoons where we run it 50 times and there'll be afternoons where we may throw it 50 times.”
► And speaking of running, a quarterback who can be involved in the running game, as Daniels was heavily at LSU and Duke transfer Riley Leonard figures to be at ND, is essential to success.
“I think in today's college football, it's important when you get against elite defenses to be able to have some element of that in what you do,” he said. “It doesn't have to be the major factor. It doesn't have to necessarily be the deciding factor.
“But there are going to be instances in almost every football game. And I think that even happened here last year with Sam [Hartman]. There were times where he had to get out of the pocket and make a play with his feet, and it led to some pretty positive results. And so, those things will be an element of what we do for sure.”
► He is open to new ideas, whether they come from Freeman or outside of the meeting rooms of the Guglielmino Athletics Center.
“[Freeman] was very familiar with a good piece of it from some of the things that we did at Cincinnati,” Denbrock said. “And there'll be some elements of it that are alive and well in what we do here. And we added a lot of things to that the last couple years that I think benefited and make it better.
“Hopefully, we'll add a few things this year. Whether that was some of the things that they did a year ago that the kids are really familiar with and do a good job of executing or whether that's a new idea from the Miami Dolphins or the Philadelphia Eagles or wherever it comes from — or another college team. [I’m] always open to trying to be better at what we're doing and how we're doing it.”
When spring practice starts on March 7, Denbrock will split his time between the position groups on offense, handing the reins to the tight end group to a capable grad assistant when he needs to deal with quarterbacks, wide receivers, running backs or offensive lineman.
“Not being the quarterback coach and being the coordinator always takes a little bit of coordination,” he said. “And I think as long as you've got people that you know and trust in those position rooms with those players, that takes the burden off of me and lightens it up where I know what type of teachers are on this staff.
“I know how they teach the game. I'm comfortable with how their rooms are and the camaraderie within the rooms and the team-building that goes on and those things. So, I don't necessarily have to concern myself with that.
“I love to be involved in all of it. And I will be involved in all of it. … I think, as much as anything, it's incumbent on me to get around to the different position groups and establish relationships with those guys, so it's not just some old guy yelling at them on the practice field, but we all actually have a relationship beyond football.
“That'll be very important to continue to build that over time. But I think more than anything, I try to do a really good job of making everybody on the offensive unit understand that we're all in this together, and that this is our offense. This is Notre Dame's offense.
“This isn't my offense. This isn't any one coach's deal. This is all of us together. And that's the only way we're going to be as strong as we need to be.”
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