Notre Dame officially hires Mike Denbrock as offensive coordinator
Editor's Note: A version of this story was originally published Friday. It was updated Wednesday with the official announcement of Mike Denbrock's hiring.
Mike Denbrock is coming home. Again.
With a second wind — make that a third wind — at his back that makes him an even better fit than his first two tours of duty as a Notre Dame football assistant coach.
In a move that will likely redefine Marcus Freeman’s head-coaching trajectory heading into his third year on the job, the 59-year-old Denbrock, who presided over the nation’s No. 1 team in total offense (547.8 ypg) and scoring offense (46.4 ppg), and produced a Heisman Trophy winner this past season at LSU, was officially named Notre Dame's offensive coordinator on Wednesday.
Inside ND Sports broke the news on Friday morning.
He walks away from Tigers head coach and longtime friend Brian Kelly and a lucrative-but-unsigned contract extension offered to him when he turned down Mississippi State to become the nation's highest-paid college football offensive coordinator, then passed on joining new Texas A&M head coach Mike Elko recently to become the offensive coordinator there.
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Instead, Denbrock will face Elko and the Aggies as his first assignment in Notre Dame’s 2024 season opener, Aug. 31 at College Station, Texas. After finally accepting an offer Friday from ND that was too good to turn down.
And with a résumé significantly upgraded from when he left Notre Dame as associate head coach/wide receivers coach following the 2016 season, in which Kelly recalibrated and reinvented himself.
“First and foremost, Mike is an elite coach across the board,” Freeman said in a statement on Wednesday. “He is a great leader, recruiter and developer, but what I love the most is his competitive spirit.
"Mike not only has a lot of experience, but he has achieved a high level of success at multiple places. He has the ability to mold his offense to utilize his playmakers, while putting defenses in conflict. I want to thank Jack Swarbrick and our leadership for consistently providing us the resources to ensure we can attract the best coaches and staff to join our program.”
Denbrock was expected to fly into El Paso, Texas Wednesday to take in a Notre Dame football bowl practice, have dinner with the coaching staff and then address the team Thursday morning, before flying back to Baton Rouge, La.
Per a source, Denbrock informed Kelly in his office of his decision Friday morning after being asked last Thursday to think about it overnight. The same source confirmed a guaranteed four-year contract.
The Homer, Mich., native replaces one-and-done Gerad Parker, hired Dec. 18 as the head coach at Troy University and formally introduced on Dec. 19. Like Parker, Denbrock is expected to coach the tight ends as his primary position group.
His two-year run at LSU includes being named one of five Broyles Award finalists, an honor given annually to the nation’s top assistant coach. Pro Football Focus named him as the No. 5 offensive coordinator in all of college football before he helped LSU move up 27 spots in the national total offense rankings to No. 1 this past season.
Before Kelly and Denbrock arrived, the Tigers were 91st in total offense, in 2021. That's also the year Denbrock was a Broyles Award semifinalist in his final season of five at Cincinnati.
Quarterback and Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels also dramatically transformed after transferring in from Arizona State, following the 2021 season, with Denbrock at the joystick of the Tigers offense.
This past season the grad senior set an NCAA record for single-season passing efficiency at 208.0, and is sitting out the Tigers’ Jan. 1 ReliaQuest Bowl date with Wisconsin to prepare for the NFL Draft.
In 2022, Daniels’ pass-efficiency rating was 144.5, good for 39th nationally and 20 spots below where Notre Dame’s Drew Pyne finished, and 25 rungs below where outgoing ND QB Sam Hartman ended up that year in his final season at Wake Forest. In 2021 Daniels’ mark was 136.2 with Arizona State, No. 65 among qualifying QBs nationally.
In 2023, Daniels was also the nation's leading rusher among quarterbacks, at 94.5 yards per game (1,134 total), and he led all FBS players regardless of position in yards per carry, at 8.4.
Part of what made Denbrock the perfect fit in Freeman’s mind was what he did between his last run at Notre Dame (2010-16) and his reuniting with Kelly at LSU in 2022 — his five-year run as the offensive coordinator at the University of Cincinnati.
And Freeman was around for the first four of those seasons (2017-20) as the Bearcats’ defensive coordinator. In 2021, after Kelly had hired Freeman away from Cincinnati to be his DC, Denbrock and Freeman faced off against each other at Notre Dame Stadium with Cincinnati prevailing, 24-13, in Kelly’s last season as head coach of the Irish.
The Bearcats went on to become the first — and still only — Group of 5 team to make the College Football Playoff field. UC has since moved up to the Power 5 level, with their inaugural season of Big 12 football this season.
Current Notre Dame QBs coach Gino Guidugli and new wide receivers coach Mike Brown had overlapping seasons with Denbrock and Freeman at Cincinnati, as did current ND cornerbacks coach Mike Mickens.
Also attractive to Freeman is Denbrock’s experience at handling the Notre Dame scrutiny and spotlight. He and John McDonell, currently a senior offensive analyst at LSU, shared offensive line and tight end coaching duties at ND under head coach Tyrone Willingham during his three-year regime (2002-04).
Denbrock returned to Notre Dame as part of Kelly’s first staff in 2010, first as the tight ends coach. He eventually coached wide receivers, held the title of offensive coordinator but didn't call plays, then called offensive plays when he wasn’t the offensive coordinator (2015-16) but associate head coach.
When he left after the 2016 season, Denbrock was Notre Dame’s best offensive play-caller dating back to at least the start of the Willingham Era (2002), when measured by both the frequency of his offenses exceeding the opposing defenses’ averages in scoring (89 percent) and yards allowed (77 percent).
Successor Chip Long, by comparison, was at 74/71 percent. Kelly was 61/67. Charlie Weis was 72/70. And Denbrock did it against the toughest defenses comparatively. He faced top 43 (top third of the FBS) defenses in 65 percent of the 26 games in which he called offensive plays for the Irish, and top 10 defenses 19 percent of the time.
And yet he took a perceptual hit on the way out. Denbrock got unfairly and incorrectly lumped into part of the staff that was purged after ND’s 2016 season that ended with a 4-8 record. He would have kept his title as associate head coach had he stayed on, but he would not have been calling the plays in 2017.
Maybe he should have. But when that wasn’t a reality, he bet on himself by joining a rebuild at Cincinnati under Luke Fickell that saw the Bearcats go 4-8 in the first year of that (2017).
The next four years, before Denbrock reunited with Kelly at LSU, UC lost seven games COMBINED. And won 44.
To this day, it's often misreported that Denbrock was fired in 2016. But the decision was his to leave the coach with whom he shared an apartment and Ramen Noodle dinners during the dawn of their coaching careers as grad assistants at Grand Valley State in the late ‘80s.
Denbrock is known as an elite recruiter, and had a long track record during the Kelly Era for pulling top prospects out of California when the recruiting template leaned into geography and recruiting territories more than the positional recruiting that’s more commonplace now.
He has coached every position on offense except running backs and has been a college defensive coordinator, in addition to his heavy offensive coaching experience.
And just ahead of the 2014 season, he beat prostate cancer, just months after being named offensive coordinator. It was discovered during a routine exam required for a life insurance policy,
“The people who love Notre Dame football and follow Notre Dame football, the messages that they’ve sent me, the things that they’ve sent me, the encouragement they’ve sent me, have absolutely done nothing but help get me back on my feet and moving again," he said after surgery that summer.
And now he’s back with those Notre Dame people and embracing them. Again. Betting on himself. Again.
And betting on Marcus Freeman's coaching ceiling and his ability to climb there.
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