Maybe Marcus Freeman had to agree to follow through on Chad Bowden’s idea of having Notre Dame’s head football coach jump out of a helicopter over ND’s campus to impress recruits.
Bowden, Notre Dame football’s director of recruiting since 2022, has agreed to stay at Notre Dame despite a heavy pursuit from new Michigan head coach Sherrone Moore, a source told Inside ND Sports late Thursday morning.
Maize & Blue Review, the Michigan site on the Rivals network, had reported that Michigan was offering Bowden a significant pay raise, increased staff and an increased role. Details on how Bowden's role may expand at Notre Dame were not immediately available.
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Bowden, 29, followed Freeman to Notre Dame in 2021 and took on the role of defensive recruiting coordinator in an analyst role. Freeman then promoted Bowden to director of recruiting for the entire program once he became head coach.
Bowden has proven to be one of Freeman’s best hires and not just for getting recruiting staffers to dress up like secret service agents or leprechauns when greeting recruits on visits. Almost any recruit who Notre Dame spends significant time recruiting has a close relationship with Bowden.
“He’s elite at what he does, and he’s one of the hardest workers I know,” Freeman said of Bowden in December on Wake Up the Echoes, a video podcast produced by Notre Dame’s in-house Fighting Irish Media. “There’s times where I’m actually like envious of the relationships he has with our recruits — maybe even with my kids. My kids, when they come to the office, most of the time they say, ‘Hi, Dad.’ They go right into the recruiting office and spend time with Chad and his staff, because they have a unique ability to bring those kids in and communicate and spend time with them.
“That’s trust. Trust is built over time. That’s why I’ve always wanted to work with him. He’s a hard worker. He’s a really good person. Most of the time he has outside the box ideas. He pushes me. Like one of our things is ‘The Golden Standard’. Challenge everything. You talk about a guy that challenges me to think outside of the box to get outside my comfort zone, sometimes I gotta say no. He is a guy that makes me better.”
Bowden tries to build energy around recruiting visits in different ways. Which is why he pitched Freeman on the idea of jumping out of a helicopter in the first place. His process doesn’t just catch headlines. It produces results.
Notre Dame has signed three full classes since Bowden joined the Irish recruiting staff. Notre Dame hasn’t finished with a class ranking below No. 11 in the country in any year: No. 6 in 2022, No. 11 in 2023 and No. 9 in 2024. It’s the best three-class stretch in Rivals team rankings since 2006-08 with finishes at No. 8 twice and No. 2.
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Notre Dame signed 68 recruits in the 2022-24 classes. They’ve consisted of one five-star recruit, 53 four-star recruits, 13 three-star recruits and one two-star recruit. Thirty-four of those signees have been ranked within the Rivals250. Twelve of those have been top 100 recruits.
And Notre Dame’s 2025 class, which already has 14 commits, is currently ranked No. 1 in the country by Rivals.
Bowden and Freeman first worked together at Cincinnati when Freeman was the defensive coordinator/linebackers coach and Bowden was an intern in the recruiting office. Bowden sat in on Freeman’s meetings with players and took notes as someone wanting to learn more about coaching. Then Freeman invited him to coaching staff meetings to expose him to more knowledge.
“For me at Cincinnati, watching Coach Freeman and how he treated people, how he treated the players, how he treated the staff, the support staff on a day-to-day basis, that made me want to work for him, with him wherever he went,” Bowden said on Wake Up the Echoes. “I know there were various things that happened even before he came to Notre Dame, opportunities he could have taken. I always told him, ‘It doesn’t matter if it was Hocking College, I was going to come with him.’”
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