Sam Mustipher Develops Into Notre Dame Centerpiece
In the throes of a 4-8 campaign in 2016, then junior center Sam Mustipher — playing his new position for the first time in his football career — became a poster child of how the entire operation was unraveling.
Several errant snaps in a monsoon at North Carolina State helped result in a 10-3 loss and an infamous sound bite from head coach Brian Kelly on how “atrocious” the snapping was. A week later in a 17-10 loss to Stanford, a Mustipher snap that went out of the end zone for a safety helped propel the Cardinal comeback.
About 17 months later, after helping Notre Dame to 10 victories in 2017 and the Joe Moore Award as the nation’s top offensive line, Mustipher is one of three captains — joining fellow seniors Drue Tranquill and Tyler Newsome — on the 2018 Notre Dame team (with a fourth to be added at the end spring).
From the abyss, Mustipher has risen to the summit as the model Notre Dame student-athlete to emulate on and off the field, and the epitome of Kelly’s favorite buzzword in 2017: Grit.
“Great student, great role model,” Kelly summarized. “Represents Notre Dame football in the manner that you’d want your student-athletes. He just has an immense amount of respect from his peers, coaches, and players.”
“It speaks to the resilience you build at Notre Dame,” Mustipher reflected this week on his ascent. “This place is hard. It’s hard academically and athletically. It’s not for the faint of heart. It’s not left to the weak, timid or non-committed … I was down, and it hurt. I just kept my nose to the grindstone and kept chipping away at the goals I had set for myself.”
Like Tranquill, Mustipher is enrolled in the College of Engineering and will receive his undergraduate degree in computer science. He has contemplated a career in cyber security, and he’s so far ahead in his academic load that his lone class this semester is Intro To Droid Building, which involves constructing a robot.
Currently, he is one of eight team leaders of Notre Dame SWAT teams — the acronym for Summer Winter Accountability Teams — that was the brain child of Kelly and second-year strength and conditioning coach Matt Balis in the winter of 2017 to forge accountability and team building that aided the turnaround campaign and No. 11 final ranking in the Associated Press poll.
The leaders have a “draft” in which approximately a dozen players in the winter and then a few more in the summer (with the arrival of freshmen) are given daily and weekly “points” for their work in strength and conditioning, in the classroom, in community service, etc.
With his team in the lead at the start of spring drills, Mustipher now jokingly refers to himself as “GM Of The Year.” His hand-picked team is comprised of quarterback/receiver Avery Davis, fellow offensive linemen Robert Hainsey, Aaron Banks and Logan Plantz (his first overall selection), running backs Jafar Armstrong, Tony Jones and Jahmir Smith, and walk-ons Temitope Agoro, Brandon Garcia and Patrick Pelini.
Last year Mustipher was “second in charge” for team captains Nyles Morgan in the spring and Austin Webster in the summer. That taste of leadership augmented his own development as one of the nation’s top centers.
This spring there are huge voids in the offensive line meeting room. Unanimous All-American Quenton Nelson and consensus All-American Mike McGlinchey are off to the NFL, as is coach Harry Hiestand (Chicago Bears) after coaching the Irish offensive line the past six seasons.
Both Mustipher and fellow senior and third-year starting guard Alex Bars sat in on the interviews for the potential successor to Hiestand, and the promotion of 2015-17 offensive analyst Jeff Quinn — who coached the offensive line for Kelly for two decades from 1989-2009 — is a natural bridge from the past to the present to Mustipher.
“We wanted a guy that wanted to be here, and it meant a lot to be here,” said Mustipher of Quinn. “He’s going to coach us to the best of his ability and coach us 110 percent every day… He brings a motivational energy, he understands the way the standard needs to be set.”
Mustipher will see to it as well.
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