SOUTH BEND, Ind. — “You have not arrived.”
Those are the words Benjamin Morrison put on his mirror to remind himself to never get complacent. Even following a Freshman All-America season, the Notre Dame cornerback has that message from his father floating around in his head.
“I understand there's so much more to achieve and so much more to do that I want to do,” Morrison said in a one-on-one interview with Inside ND Sports this summer. “Without the right support system, I could see how dudes get caught up in the name and social media and stuff. But with the right support, there's no way you can really fail.”
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The support system for Morrison’s football career starts with his father, Darryl Morrison. His four-year NFL career with the Washington Redskins (1993-96) turned professional football into a dream that always felt within reach for Benjamin.
“I would look at his helmet every single day,” Benjamin said. “His jerseys are hung up around the house. Seeing that it never seemed too far or too big of a dream for me. I always said if my dad could do it, I could do it.”
As attainable an NFL career seemed when Pro Football Hall of Famer Darrell Green was a family friend, Benjamin also learned what it took for his father to get there in the first place. And he saw how his father made Benjamin’s older brother, Samuel, train to play football.
Benjamin tagged along as his father and brother did workouts at a nearby park. Even as a second-grader, Benjamin was mimicking what they were doing and learning how to backpedal and plant as a future defensive back.
“It was almost a knock on me if I didn't take advantage of that opportunity to look up to my brother and want to be better than him,” Benjamin Morrison said. “That's the goal when it comes to families. Someone does it before you and your goal is to do better than them, because they've already paved the way for you.”
It’s safe to say Benjamin has already outperformed Samuel. Rivals rated the older brother as a two-star recruit out of Washington (D.C.) Gonzaga College High in the 2015 recruiting class. He went on to play four seasons at Arizona and one season at San Diego State.
Samuel, also a cornerback, finished his college career without an interception. Benjamin tallied six in his freshman season alone.
Benjamin still has work to do to catch up with his father’s NFL accomplishments. With Darryl’s help, he’ll get there too.
“I used to get jealous of my friends and their parents, because their dads were so nice and so cool,” Benjamin said. “My dad was always saying, ‘I'm not your friend. I'm here to push you.’”
A rough welcome to college football
While Benjamin Morrison started to build a recruiting reputation for himself at Phoenix Brophy Prep, he continued to find examples of repeatable success around him. He watched cornerback Denzel Burke excel in his transition from Scottsdale Saguaro to Ohio State, which included Freshman All-America honors in 2021.
By the time Morrison enrolled at Notre Dame in June of 2022, he convinced himself he could reach the same heights as Burke, who he trained with in the Phoenix area.
“Being able to see him do what he did and knowing I'm putting in the same work as he's putting in, that kind of gave me the confidence coming into this,” Morrison said. “I knew what it took, because I've been surrounded by dudes like that. Seeing what he's accomplished — I kind of feel lucky, I feel blessed for people to go before me. I've been in the position that I was always the youngest to see people do it before me.”
Then came preseason camp at Notre Dame. The first day he took reps against Notre Dame’s first-team wide receivers, Morrison struggled. “Torched,” was the word he used.
The double moves and back-shoulder fades fooled him for the better part of a week.
“I literally thought, ‘I'm going to redshirt this year.’ I was fine with it,” Morrison said. “I was like, I have a lot room to grow. But it came down to keep going after it every single day.”
Morrison’s father offered encouragement from back home. Keep going, he was told.
“I never lost confidence in myself when I was getting beat,” Morrison said. “It still happens to this day. When you get beat now, understand why you did and let's not let it happen again, basically. That's the biggest growth of my game that's helped me put me in the position I am in, because I never allowed the moment of failure to succumb my overall goal.”
A turning point in Morrison’s freshman season
A week before Benjamin Morrison’s breakout performance against Clemson, he temporarily deleted Twitter from his phone.
He was so distraught about his performance in Notre Dame’s 41-24 win at Syracuse that he couldn’t bear to see what people were saying about him on social media. Morrison allowed his first touchdown catch of the season and was flagged for a holding penalty in the first quarter.
“I'm on their sideline. Usually I'm locked in, I'm dialed. But I'm hearing what they're saying about me,” Morrison said. “I'm just like, ‘Dang. I'm a freshman. I suck.’ In my head I'm just talking down on myself.”
In a conversation after the game, Morrison’s father asked him if he thought he could still be a Freshman All-American after that performance. They didn’t talk for the rest of the weekend.
“I thought he lost all hope in me,” Morrison said. “I felt like crap. I was like, ‘Dang. I lost it.’ So I thought had my worst game. I was mad at my dad.”
Then a Sunday conversation with head coach Marcus Freeman changed Morrison’s perspective entirely. Maybe Freeman sensed that Morrison needed some extra support. But for whatever reason, Freeman stopped Morrison on his way to practice and asked him how he thought he played against Syracuse.
When Morrison responded by insulting himself, Freeman insisted he didn’t play that poorly outside of the penalty.
“And then I was like, ‘Wait.’ Because the night before I'm in my dorm crying. I was at the lowest I've been,” Morrison said. “Then I was like, ‘OK, if that's the lowest I can be and then your head coach tells you that you didn't play that bad, I have all the confidence.’
“I’ve been the lowest. And I knew I wasn’t even in the right state of mind. If I just go out there and play and that's the worst that can happen — my head coach told me I didn’t play that bad — I can do whatever I want.”
Morrison probably put too much pressure on himself heading into the Syracuse game. As someone who likes to map out goals and vision boards, Morrison broke up the regular season into three distinct parts in a notebook. The first four games — Ohio State, Marshall, California and North Carolina — were a time for Morrison to get acclimated to playing college football. The second four games — BYU, Stanford, UNLV and Syracuse — were meant for Morrison to start making plays. The final four games — Clemson, Navy, Boston College and USC — were when Morrison wanted to take over with his performance.
By the time Syracuse came around, Morrison wasn’t making many plays. He had already become a regular starter and an important piece in Notre Dame’s secondary, but he didn’t intercept a pass and broke up only two in the first seven games. Morrison wanted to use the Syracuse game as a springboard into the final third of the season. Instead, the Clemson game became that in a major way.
Cornerbacks coach Mike Mickens kept Morrison in the starting lineup against then-No. 4 Clemson.
“I've already been at the lowest. I know what it feels like. So, why not just play?” Morrison told himself. “So, I just played football. I got to what I knew I could do. That's when my whole season took off because I just started playing.”
Morrison intercepted two passes in the second half of a 35-14 Notre Dame victory. The first, which came near the end of the third quarter, gave Notre Dame’s offense the ball in the red zone. The second Morrison returned for a touchdown to give the Irish an insurmountable 28-0 lead with less than 13 minutes left in regulation.
Two weeks later, Morrison pulled off an interception hat trick against Boston College. Despite intercepting three passes, he still remembers the one reception he allowed that game for 32 yards.
“I was playing football. I was having fun,” Morrison said. “So, although I gave up that one, I still made plays because I was just playing football. I didn't let that one play affect the whole game.”
The impact of Mike Mickens
Marcus Freeman and Mike Mickens played a major role in Benjamin Morrison’s decision to come to Notre Dame as a four-star recruit in the 2022 class. But Morrison admits he didn’t realize what Mickens could do for him at that point.
“There's so much stuff he's helped me with,” Morrison said. “There's so much stuff. He's helped me with confidence. People don’t understand: I played 80% of cover two in high school. So, I came here not knowing how to press. He's helped me press, understand leverage, understand splits, understand what hand to put up, understand how to look back for the ball.”
Mickens recognized the difficulties Morrison and the other cornerbacks were having defending back-shoulder fades, so he emphasized drills that would allow them to counter the common passing attack. That helped Morrison turned previous missed opportunities into future interceptions.
“I could have had three more in the beginning of the season,” Morrison said. “I just didn’t look back. He knew that, so he figured out how to fix that, how to get me comfortable and the patience he has for me. The mistakes I was making in some of these games, I told my Dad, there’s no way I should still be playing.”
Former NFL defensive back Jamar Taylor, who Morrison calls a mentor, has watched Morrison’s development from afar after getting to know him in high school when they were both training at the Fischer Institute in Phoenix. He can tell the amount of coaching Morrison has been receiving since leaving for South Bend last year.
“It’s been great watching Ben’s growth,” Taylor said. “He’s a kid who’s hungry. Everything that he’s put into play is something that he’s written down and he’s been manifesting probably since even before high school.
“He’s a driven kid. He asks a lot of questions. He works extremely hard. He has really good physical athletic attributes. Just to watch him excel last year, it was great. Because the kid’s worked hard ever since I met him and even before that with his dad and his brother and his trainers.”
Morrison can run through a list of deficiencies he’s worked to correct under Mickens’ tutelage. He was a poor tackler. He bailed at the wrong angle in press coverage. He understood his own assignment, but he didn’t have a great understanding of the other two-thirds of the field. He wasn’t strong enough to shed blocks.
The thought of how much Mickens has impacted him gives Morrison goosebumps.
“People don't understand how close we are,” Morrison said. “The time and effort he's put into my game. There's no way I should have been out there in the first game of the year playing Ohio State. But that just showed how much he believed in me.
“Every single day I put cleats on at this stadium, my goal is to prove coach Mickens right. I want to make him the best DB coach in the nation off of my play. That's my biggest thing.
“If I have a bad game, I don't care — I'm not thinking about what people are talking about me. I feel for him, because I let him down. Because he's in here at 10 o'clock trying to put us in the best positions. If I knew I didn't do that for him, that’s messing me up.”
Better in year two
A couple lines in “Still Don’t Know My Name” by Labrinth resonated with Morrison, so he used it to accompany a photo he shared to his Instagram story earlier this summer.
The title alone was fitting for Morrison, who believes he’s not quite a household name outside of Notre Dame circles. And the idea of “dreaming of all the possibilities” captures Morrison’s goal-setting mindset.
He’s not planning to share his wildest goals for the 2023 season, but a quest to be better in so many ways may be the best summation. He even has a motto: “Do it twice, so they know it's not luck.” It’s awfully fitting considering his two biggest games as a freshman included multiple interceptions. Now he wants multiple seasons of success to bolster his résumé.
“I’ve already proven myself, so now I have to prove it even more to myself that I can do this again,” Morrison said. “I get frustrated when I hear someone say, ‘Yeah, next year you probably not going to get as many interceptions just because they won't go at you.’ But I think that's kind of a slap across the face, because it's possible.”
Jamar Taylor has urged Morrison to block out the noise. He’s known as a phenom now, but that status can fade quickly in college football.
“Ben has to take that same approach, because where a lot of guys fail is they end up doing really well their true freshman year and then that next year is a slump,” Taylor said. “Because they feel like they’re on top of the world. Just as fast as people are screaming your name, they’ll also boo at your name.
“That’s kind of the nature of the beast of playing corner especially or if you’re a quarterback. Those are two positions where you’re kind of on that island. As long as Ben stays hungry and stays motivated, the sky’s the limit. He knows he has to build off last year this year.
“Can he do it again? Then after that can he do it again? If he just adds on and builds those blocks up, eventually he’ll have that wall of success where his name will be called in the draft.”
In the broadest of terms, Morrison wants to be a better leader, a better teammate and better friend. Those goals can’t be measured. But progress doesn’t have to require lap markers.
“For him it’s what’s the next challenge for you,” Marcus Freeman said. “How much are you going to continue to improve at your craft? The greatest example for him is his father who played in the NFL for many years. You don’t stop getting better.
“One of the things I talk to the group about is challenge everything. You guys have heard me say that plenty of times. What does that really mean to you, Benjamin Morrison? It’s a growth mindset.
“Are you going to come in every day and choose hard and do the things it takes to become a better football player? Because there is no finish line.”
And when there’s no finish line, you can never arrive.
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