Marcus Freeman doesn’t care where a recruit comes from.
Private school, public school. Big city, small town. Picture-perfect family background, struggling household just trying to get by. The Notre Dame defensive coordinator is out to shed the stigma that prospective Irish players have to be “Notre Dame guys” in order to put on the golden helmet and run through the tunnel on fall Saturdays in South Bend.
He shared his thoughts on the subject in an interview with former Notre Dame defensive lineman Chris Zorich (1987-90) on The Zorich Podcast.
“There’s two different ways you can look at it,” Freeman told Zorich. “You can look and say let’s find all the kids that are ‘Notre Dame guys.’ They check off every box; maybe private school kids, two-parent homes — a kid that you know that if you offer this kid, he’s coming to Notre Dame. That’s, to me, the Notre Dame kid.
“And you know what? Let’s find the best players in the country. Some of those players might be ‘Notre Dame kids.’ They might be. But I don’t want to just take this group of guys and say these are the only ones we’re evaluating. I want to look at all of them and then kind of filter out through the best players and say, ‘Hey, can this guy make it at Notre Dame?’”
Freeman said Notre Dame Head Coach Brian Kelly was recently enamored by a particular recruit. He couldn’t stop talking about him. Freeman, mere months into his stint working under Kelly, was blunt with his new boss.
“Coach Kelly said, ‘Oh my gosh. I love this kid. He’s exactly what we need here,’” Freeman said. “I said, ‘Coach, you guys wouldn’t even have talked to this guy a couple years ago. You wouldn’t have even gotten him on the phone.’”
Freeman said the recruit comes from an inner-city, single-parent home. Quite simply, Freeman said the player is “not a Notre Dame guy on paper.” But that clearly doesn’t matter to the man calling many of the shots on the blue and gold recruiting trail.
“He’s intelligent,” Freeman said. “And he works at it. You don’t have to be a 32 ACT, but you’ve got to be willing to go to study hall every day. You’ve got to be willing to work at it and not cut corners. If you have that makeup, you can make it here.”
Zorich dove into an anecdote from his time serving on a committee to seek out potential Notre Dame students. Zorich said the person in charge of the committee’s master plan was to talk to all the Catholic schools in Chicago.
That was it.
Zorich didn’t like that approach then, and he’s not in favor of it now. He said he got chills listening to Freeman’s fresh perspective on how he’ll recruit players to Notre Dame. Naturally, Freeman gave the member of Notre Dame's 1988 national championship team more forearm hair-raising ammunition.
“You can’t sit on your high horse and say, ‘We’re Notre Dame. You’re coming to us,’” Freeman said. “No. You have to get on the phone and convince these young people that — yes, it is Notre Dame and there is no comparison. I believe that. But we have to show these young people the history, we have to show them how big this brand is, we have to show them we’ve got the most Hall of Famers in NFL history.
“We have to show them all these things so they can go, ‘OK, Now I know why Notre Dame is Notre Dame.’ It’s not just because we’re on NBC. It’s because there is some history, tradition and a network that is second to none. And if we’re willing to work at it and do that, watch out.”
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