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What New GA Chris Watt Brings To Notre Dame’s Offensive Line Room

New Notre Dame offensive line graduate assistant Chris Watt and offensive coordinator Tommy Rees have made a habit of converging paths.

Both hail from suburban Chicago towns and lined up on the offensive side of the ball while playing for the Fighting Irish from 2010-2013, with Rees as the on-again-off-again starting quarterback and Watt a stalwart at left guard. During that time, the two became great friends and off-campus roommates.

After college, Watt entered the NFL as a third-round draft pick by the San Diego Chargers, while Rees went undrafted and contributed to the Washington Redskins practice squad for a season before hanging up his cleats for a coach's whistle.

It didn’t take long for them to team up again, but with a new dynamic. Rees was named a Chargers offensive assistant in 2016, which also happened to be Watt’s last year with the franchise.

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Former Notre Dame offensive lineman Chris Watt returns to the Fighting Irish as a graduate assistant
Former Notre Dame offensive lineman Chris Watt returns to the Fighting Irish as a graduate assistant (David Zalubowski/Associated Press)

By the next season, Rees began his first year as quarterback coach at Notre Dame and Watt transitioned out of football and into the business world. He worked in the greater Chicago area, first with Array Sports & Entertainment as a director of business development and then as a broker with Aon.

But it appears all that time, he felt a calling to the game of football, especially while watching his good friend and former teammate rise through the coaching ranks.

“A lot of his friends were in the business world in Chicago,” said Chad Hetlet, Watt’s high school football coach at Glenbard West. “I think maybe he felt like he needed to get into that, but every time I would talk to him, he would talk about how much he missed football and how much he wanted to get back into it.

“He and Tommy Rees were roommates in college and super tight. I think that seeing another one of his good friends involved opened up the door for him in a sense of ‘I need to do this, and I probably need to do it now.’ But he's never wavered from how passionate he's been about Notre Dame and the game of football.”

Up until recently, the little coaching experience he had came from volunteering at camps hosted by his old high school but, after spending three years in the business world, Notre Dame had a graduate assistant vacancy. Watt earned the job and made his official coaching debut, at least in front of the media, at the lone Fighting Irish spring practice on March 5.

During the practice, Watt worked alongside offensive line coach Jeff Quinn and, when the tackles and interior linemen were split up, Watt took the tackles.

Was Watt a natural-born leader, ready to take the coaching world by storm? It was hard to say while watching from the noisy sidelines in the Irish Athletic Center for 15 minutes. But as a first-year coach, it's foolish to expect Watt to make the offensive line room his own. He's going to have a lot to learn from Quinn and his dynamic personality.

Still, given Watt's experiences in college football and the NFL, there's still a lot he can offer the offensive linemen in a unique and relatable way, especially given the prestige of playing the position at Notre Dame.

"There's no substitute for knowing exactly what the guys in the room have gone through, having lived in their shoes," said ESPN's Mike Golic Jr., a former offensive line teammate of Watts at Notre Dame. "I've said the same about Tommy [Rees] and the quarterbacks in this regard.

"Having been a Notre Dame offensive lineman, understanding what that means to you, understanding the pressure that comes with that position, but also how to execute it at a really high level, that's a tremendous resource for the guys in the room right now."

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Golic Jr. also says that Watt was always a player who gave his all every day, no matter what, and doesn't see why that mentality will be any different as a coach.

While all these traits will be valuable to an offensive line room returning six starters, Watt should make the biggest impact on the talented underclassmen, most of whom were four-star prospects and Rivals250 players.

“You interact with the grad assistant so much, especially for the guys that are in those roles as backups, as swing guys, that are running scout teams. They work with grad assistants a lot," Golic Jr. said...

"Certainly, Watt is going to help the starters out, but if I'm a young offensive lineman, who might not be getting a lot of playing time right now with that veteran group, Chris Watt is the guy I am going to go to and want to spend some extra time with after practice.”

This should prove to be even more useful in a season where any player or group of starters could miss a few weeks at the drop of a hat. This past week, only four LSU offensive linemen were available at practice because the rest were in quarantine. This may be an extreme example, but the better the second-string offensive linemen are prepared, the more Notre Dame can adapt to the inevitable swings of playing college football during the COVID-19 Pandemic.

For that reason alone, it's difficult to see Watt as anything but a major asset to Notre Dame this fall and, if he's anything like long-time friend Coach Rees, for several more seasons to come.

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