SOUTH BEND, Ind. — There’s a fairly exhaustive rundown in Notre Dame football’s game notes for Saturday’s Senior Day matchup with Wake Forest regarding the trail of milestones and impressive numbers quarterback Sam Hartman will soon leave behind.
In his final home game, and the 500th game in the history of Notre Dame Stadium, the 24-year-old, sixth-year collegian comes full circle, facing the program he spent five years playing for and evolving in before his transfer to Notre Dame last January.
It will also mark the first time the two programs will clash in football since the Irish pummeled the freshman version of Hartman, and Wake Forest, 56-27 in game four of his college career, back in 2018 in Winston-Salem, N.C.
Kickoff Saturday is 3:30 p.m. EST (NBC/Peacock) after Hartman and 30 other seniors and pseudo-seniors — only seven of whom are exhausting their college eligibility at season’s end — are honored in pregame.
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“That's a game I try and forget,” Hartman told Inside ND Sports of the 2018 ND-Wake game in a one-on-one interview this past summer. “It was 100 degrees. Drue Tranquill probably tackled me like 15 times. Julian Love was on that team. And they were like, ‘Just don't throw at him. He's really good.’
“First play of the game, I threw right at him. Knocked it down. Yeah, it was surreal. And then we played Clemson in 2018, like two weeks later. And that was Trevor Lawrence’s first start. We kind of got bombarded (63-3). That was not fun. Those are not fun Sunday morning meetings, either, for sure.”
Neither likely was the Sunday position-group meeting after Notre Dame’s 31-23 loss at Clemson on Nov. 7 that was followed by a bye week for the CFP 19th-ranked Irish (7-3). A year after throwing for six TDs against the Tigers while playing for Wake Forest, Hartman recorded the lowest pass-efficiency rating of his career (70.9) since the aforementioned Clemson loss to in 2018 (56.1).
In the bigger picture, Hartman enters this game against his former teammates (4-6) fifth on the NCAA’s all-time passing yards list with 15,239 and 555 away from passing Texas Tech product Graham Harrell to move into the No. 3 spot.
He’s seventh in career TD passes (128) with a chance to move up to as high as No. 3 realistically if he can add seven more to that total over his next three games. So far 2,27s of those yards and 18 of those passing TDs have come in an Irish uniform.
“He's been so consistent in terms of his approach to the game,” Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman said during his weekly Thursday Zoom meeting with the media. “He has done some really great things for our football program in terms of not just on the field, but off the field in terms of how he's really elevated the preparation and the play of the quarterback room.
“His ability to meet with the wideouts to make sure everybody's on the same page. He's just brought a lot of things to our program that sometimes you just don't always see on Saturday.”
Indeed, much of Hartman’s impact in his one year of ups and downs in South Bend shows up in the growth of the people around him.
Zora Stephenson spent most of this season as NBC’s sideline reporter for Notre Dame home-game broadcasts. Lewis Johnson will fill in for her this Saturday, as she’s drawn NBC’s play-by-play assignment for the Notre Dame’s women’s basketball matchup with Illinois in Saturday’s Citi Shamrock Classic in Washington, D.C. (1 p.m. EST).
She shared her thoughts and observations of Hartman’s impact on the Notre Dame program.
“He has so much respect among those young men across multiple position groups,” Stephenson told Inside ND Sports. “Even coach Marcus Freeman talks about how he’s just a different kind of guy. In super early, out super late when it comes to his routine and being at the facility.
“Sophomore defensive back Benjamin Morrison, a guy that Sam probably doesn’t interact with on a daily basis, happened to run into Sam at the facility early one day, and Benjamin Morrison was like, ‘What are you doing here so early? This is not your lift time.’
“And Sam’s like, ‘This is part of my routine. Like, I watch extra film. I get in extra lifts.’ And Benjamin Morrison changed his entire schedule for this season so that he had extra time to get into the facility earlier before classes, because he saw Sam doing it.
“He said, ‘If Sam’s doing it, that’s greatness, and I want to do it.’ And I think that’s the perfect way to describe his impact. If Sam’s doing it, that means it’s probably the right thing to do. And if you want to get to the next level, you do what Sam’s doing.
“So, I’m sure verbally he’s done things, but his actions have spoken even louder than his words.”
His actions Saturday will reflect how he deals with adversity, something he had plenty of practice with on and off the field during his five years at Wake Forest.
“You want to know why I’m forever grateful for Wake Forest and everything that they gave me?” he told Inside ND Sports. “Coach [Dave] Clawson believed in me throughout bad games, good games, OK games. I grew so much. And the only reason I'm here at Notre Dame is because of them.
"I was only about 6-foot, 170 then (212 now). I wasn't ready for the big show or whatever you want to call it. Thankfully, I got to develop and try to put on some weight and figure out how to play football.”
Injury/personnel updates
After starting the week with several question marks in terms of player availability due to injuries, Freeman said Thursday that the only player listed as questionable on Monday that won’t likely be available is starting center Zeke Correll.
Correll suffered a concussion in Notre Dame’s Nov. 7 loss at Clemson.
“He has done some non-contact [work], but he has not been able to do contact yet,” Freeman said. “He hasn’t cleared concussion protocol. Everyone else should be available.”
• Junior right offensive guard Rocco Spindler was lost for the remainder of the season in that same game and has undergone surgery. Freeman on Thursday described the injury as an MCL injury and that Spindler is expected back for spring practice.
“It's not an ACL, where you're out for six to eight, six to nine months,” Freeman said. “I don't know if he'll be 100%, full go for spring ball just because you're going to miss some of the winter-conditioning phase, but we expect to see him back as we get ready for spring.”
• Redshirt junior Michael Kern is expected to start at quarterback for Wake Forest on Saturday, replacing recently demoted starter, redshirt sophomore Mitch Griffis, Hartman’s original successor.
The process for replacing Balis
Freeman said Thursday the search for a permanent replacement for former Irish football director of football performance Matt Balis will pick up steam right after the Irish complete their regular season Nov. 25 at Stanford.
Fred Hale has been holding down the role in an interim capacity since late July, when Balis suddenly resigned for personal reasons just days before training camp started. Freeman said Hale would be considered in the national search.
“Fred's done a really great job of continuing to lead our strength/conditioning, our team and has really done a great job with our current players in terms of getting through the in-season process,” Freeman said.
Freeman said the traits he’s looking for in Balis’ permanent successor is someone who’s “forward thinking” and is on the “cutting edge” of strength training and sports science.
Reimagining wide receiver roles
Three of Notre Dame’s most productive wide receivers and most consistently healthy ones all happen to play the same position — slot receiver. That’s freshmen Jordan Faison and Jaden Greathouse, and senior converted running back Chris Tyree.
None of them profile as an outside receiver, though Greathouse has been giving it his best shot over the past few games.
“The conversations I've had with the offensive staff is that because an individual is maybe suited for a certain position that we have depth at, like we have to be creative and find ways to get that person or those people want on the field to have success,” Freeman said. “Like what are their skill sets and how can we utilize them in different positions?
“Maybe I’m not a tall, long receiver that you usually look for on the outside, but they have a skill set that if we feel like they're one of our best, then we’ve got to find a way to get them on the field at the same time, but then ask them to do things that they're suited for.
“And that's to me always the challenge, is that you don't have a system that you fit this certain individual into that position. It's OK. Get your best 11. How can I find ways to put them in different positions? Offensively and defensively? But to get them on the field and create a system or a structure that has your best players on the field.”
And it’s something Freeman did himself during his days as a defensive coordinator at ND and Cincinnati.
“I didn't like the idea of recruiting just to a position,” he said. “I liked it to recruit to talent level, and to really adapt whatever I was doing as a defensive coordinator around that talent level, because you can't have your best players on the sideline because they're three deep at one position.
“To me, you’ve got to be creative and put those guys on the field and realize what their strong suits are and put them in a position to be successful. And to me, the best coaches find a way to do that.”
Kicking around the transfer-portal trend
With South Florida transfer Spencer Shrader exhausting his final season of eligibility at ND in 2023 and no high school kicker committed in the 2024 recruiting class, it’s fairly apparent the Irish will go back to the transfer portal to get a place-kicker for the third cycle in a row.
“I think you'll see more and more of it,” Notre Dame special teams coach Marti Biagi said earlier this week of Power 5 teams largely recruiting proven grad transfers over high school prospects at the kicker position.
“We only get one. If we had two to three kicking scholarships, two to three punters, you're like, ‘OK, we can work on this one, but we know we have this guy.’ But when you're trying to get [just[ one, then there can't be a big margin of error.
“ I don't think it's ever an option that we're not going to look at high school kids. So in general, that's the great part about having camps in the summer. If anybody does catch your eye, then you're able to see it. But I would say the hardest part for us is trying to go see kickers play in their element in high school. It's just really hard to grasp that.
“Anybody can come and in a one day camp really perform, but you're trying to say 'OK, is this who I'm really putting my eggs in a basket for?' … You get film, and it's hard. You hate it. I was a kicker and you hate it, because 7-for-10 [on field goals] in high school, you don't know.
“Was it because of the hold? There's so many little things and you're like, ‘OK, the film is good in college.’ You can see it, so [taking a transfer] definitely makes sense.”
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