Rakes Report #210: A lesson in leavin'
Spring football begins with a new-look offensive staff, welcome home Micah Strewsberry and a toast to the ACC champions.
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~optional musical accompaniment~
Hey folks, good morning. This is the quasi-spring camp kickoff edition but we’re not going to spend all that much time talking about specifics from the limited views of practice so far. If you want some observations from those windows, Patrick Engel of BlueandGold.com was kind enough to stop by the podcast and you can listen to that here. This was running a little long so we’re not going to dive in to last week’s confounding contribution to the New York Times op-ed page, but we may address that in podcast form in the near future.
There have been a few tiny changes on the football staffing front since we last gathered here. Tommy Rees left, which wouldn’t have surprised me in the least if you told me it was going to happen during the season, but after the positive conclusion and Sam Hartman’s commitment, I had let my guard down. Harry Hiestand retired, which wasn’t surprising after Rees left, but was still a fun bit of news to drop on Super Bowl Sunday. Brian Mason left for the NFL, which is heartbreaking but not the least bit of a shock considering he was damn good at his job. This new-look staff inherits a talented roster and some lofty expectations for Year Two of the Marcus Freeman Era.
As far as Rees leaving, my opinion hasn’t changed much since Jess, Jamie and I spoke in the immediate aftermath of the news, and I agree with Jess that this was the rare trio of sad, validating and potentially exciting. It was sad because Rees is an important figure in Notre Dame lore, I think he did good work as offensive coordinator and it seemed like he was getting the roster where he wanted/we needed it to really sing. It was validating because despite claims from some Irish fans that Rees would be better served as a grad assistant in the Sun Belt, he was chosen by the greatest college football coach of all time to be his offensive coordinator, so if you had hypothetically been saying Rees was good at his job and there wasn’t a vast conspiracy to prop him up, you’d look pretty smart. And it was exciting because we could accelerate the process of seeing what Freeman wanted to do with his offense and while he had done well it’s not like Rees had set an impossible-to-clear bar.
I had imagined the Freeman tenure to be cycling through exciting big-dollar offensive coordinator hires every two or three years, mercenaries to go out and put up points as he handled recruiting, culture and the other phases of the game. His initial search seemed to go in that direction, as I think Collin Klein from Kansas State and Andy Ludwig from Utah checked the advanced stats boxes and could have brought a lot to the job even if they had some question marks (for Klein, experience; for Ludwig, a dearth of explosive passing attacks throughout his career). When the Ludwig recruitment fell apart, they quickly went in-house with tight end coach Gerad Parker, going in a very different direction.
With Parker, Freeman is betting on familiarity with his message and consistency throughout the locker room, an approach that could certainly pay off even if it wasn’t my initial vision. Parker does not have a ton of play-calling experience and was a hire onto Rees’ offensive staff by Freeman, a head coach who has conceded not having a complete feel for offense yet, so that’s perhaps red flag adjacent. But the subsequent hires created a sort of Megazord offensive coordinator with Parker: New offensive line coach Joe Rudolph has years of coordinator experience at Wisconsin and Pitt. New quarterback coach Gino Guidugli was both offensive and passing game coordinator at Cincinnati. Running back coach Deland McCullough, who has coached in a wide variety of schemes, was promoted to running game coordinator. It’s possible too many cooks will spoil the broth, but with Freeman’s leadership and Parker’s certain desire to prove he wasn’t a fallback hire there’s a clear path to cohesiveness and success.
This fall the offense should present plenty of opportunities for the staff. There is an accomplished quarterback, a wonderful running back room, two NFL tackles, a good center, plenty of options at guard, quality (if slightly unproven) tight ends and a wide receiver group that has had a major glow-up since the nadir of last season. Parker and company should be able to scheme up some really cool stuff and there is tremendous upside if the young receivers are a step or two ahead of the now somewhat loftier expectations.
Overall, I think the new offensive hires as well as Marty Biagi to replace Mason as special teams coordinator all clear the pass/fail line, even with the understanding that assessing assistant hires is a tricky deal. But long term, this coordinator hiring process has underscored a previous concern about Freeman’s approach. Klein and Ludwig would have both been good additions and shown the head coach’s mind was in the right place, but they did fall on the conservative end of the good hire spectrum. Here was Freeman’s response at a press conference last month when asked what he wants the offense to be:
”It still goes down to complementary football and that's what I love more than anything is that you can have varying tempos, you can really control the clock if you need to. It's still an offense predicated on being able to run the ball.
“I want to be able to run the ball. This is not going to be a pass-first offense, but it really creates opportunities to have success in the pass game because your ability to be able to run the ball, and all those things go together for complementary football.
You can look at statistics, you can look at any numbers you want, but to me, from my defensive background, the ability to play complementary football and to have an offense that doesn't always have to go 1,000 miles an hour, but also doesn't have to huddle every single snap is really what it takes me to have a successful program[,] a successful team on both sides of the ball.”
This comes in addition to repeated assertions he wants the program to be built around the lines of scrimmage. That is a good idea — a great idea! — and plays to some of Notre Dame’s traditional recruiting strengths but I pray “this is not going to be a pass-first offense” is specifically talking about the upcoming Irish team and not every edition to come after it. The level of recruiting you would have to pull off to be a run-first team capable of winning a national championship in the expanded playoff era is not something we have any evidence the Irish can achieve. You can establish a really high floor with defense and running the ball — a make-the-playoff floor, even — but most of the time your ceiling in modern college football is going to be established by passing explosivity.
But it’s also important to look at actions. In the 2023 class, Freeman brought in a quality quarterback prospect, a bundle of talented wide receivers and Jeremiyah Love, a Top 100 tailback-plus who should be deadly anywhere on the field. The top two recruits in the 2024 class so far are a quarterback and wide receiver both ranked in the Top 40. He pulled Virginia Tech wideout Kaleb Smith out of the transfer portal early in the offseason. It’s not like Freeman is ignoring offensive skill talent to build a big dumb football team, so ideally we are just in a transition phase as he gets his footing and realizes that while it’s satisfying to grind opponents into dust (Clemson game, hello) and protect your defense, there is a similar joy in bombing away over top of them haplessly. In promising news, I did like this quote from tight end Holden Staes this weekend: "I think we're gonna throw the ball a lot deeper this year." Sam Hartman, please show your head coach the way.
(One thing I’m excited to monitor this season is how Wisconsin’s offensive transition goes. For his first season in Madison, Luke Fickell brought in Phil Longo, coordinator of those wide-open, go-go, pass-happy North Carolina offenses we’ve faced the last three seasons. I don’t think it’s necessarily a wise idea for Notre Dame to go full air raid, but if Fickell and Longo can make it work in blustery conditions against quality Big Ten defenses, that would be something to note.)
That is all Big Picture Philosophical Stuff. In the near term, Notre Dame is set to have perhaps its best offense since Will Fuller left campus and a defense that needs some guys to step up but features plenty of options to potentially do that. Perhaps most importantly, the start of camp brought some new jersey numbers: Deion Colzie is now 0, Chris Tyree is 2 and Tobias Merriweather is 5, which should all make them a few tenths of a seconds faster through science. Jaylen Sneed moving to 3 is a very promising sign for his breakout potential at linebacker.
It is probably not a good sign of my own mental health that finding out about cool players switching to single digits and seeing 25 seconds of gold-helmeted practice clips gets the neurons firing to such a degree but hey, we’re all broken together.
Few more Rees notes (imagine I sent this out a month ago): I don’t see any potential Rees success in Tuscaloosa reflecting poorly on Notre Dame. Our entire theory of the case for years here has been that the Fighting Irish program has been doing so much right but just needs more overall talent to get over the hump. If Rees looks smarter with better talent, cool. Also, him being successful presents another potential head coaching option down the road, even if it seems like he might end up as an NFL guy at the end of his journey. If he had left to take a random Power 5 offensive coordinator gig that would be one thing, but going to learn under Saban is a dream for a football junky and that job has been a springboard for the last decade. It’s still very weird seeing photos of him in crimson, though. Do not approve.
Complaints about Rees’ recruiting were justifiable in the early going but as mentioned above the tag team of him and Freeman produced a quality 2023 class on offense and they had a good jump on 2024. After he left there was some grousing along the lines of “Now maybe Notre Dame will be able to recruit a quarterback” but the last three guys to commit to Rees were Kenny Minchey (a top 200 prospect who has very much looked the part in the earliest days of his first camp), C.J. Carr (one of the top quarterback prospects in his class) and the guy who has thrown the most touchdown passes in the history of the Atlantic Coast Conference. I think there’s a lot of reason to be excited about Guidugli, who developed Desmond Ridder from a three-star recruit to a third-round draft pick, but Rees developed a higher ranked three-star recruit into a fifth-round draft pick and winningest quarterback in school history and that seems to have been shrugged off somewhat quickly.
Freeman said last week all the coaches were approached for other jobs, which is a sign of a well put together staff. If position coaches are leaving to be coordinators, coordinators are leaving to be head coaches or anyone is leaving for the NFL, that’s just how this works. If there are a flurry of lateral moves that don’t involve Saban or Texas oil money, we can start getting concerned.
Finally: Brian Kelly vs. Tommy Rees falls on November 4, Bayou Bengals vs. Tide again landing on the same day as Notre Dame’s game with Clemson. Schedule-makers, come on.
After the adventures of the offensive coordinator search, Notre Dame did not dally in hiring Mike Brey’s replacement, locking in Penn State coach Micah Shrewsberry three days after the Nittany Lions’ season came to an end. It was a nice bit of kismet to have an Indiana native who was previously a head college basketball coach literally in South Bend put together a strong season with the vacancy. It seems like Shrewsberry really wanted to get home but the Irish still put together a competitive offer to pry him away from another power conference team so kudos for that. (And kudos to Brey: Not that a tweet is any sort of big lift, but this was a nice move.)
The one potential knock on Shrewsberry is that he’s only been a Division I head coach for two years, and while I think it’s reasonable to be concerned about such a short track record, he checks pretty much every other box. Brad Stevens will gush about him to anyone who asks and it’s not like the experience at IUSB isn’t helpful – at some point, coaching basketball is coaching basketball. He also spent time at Purdue under Matt Painter, meaning he knows exactly what not to do to get repeatedly eliminated by double-digit seeds come March.
I was going to begrudgingly accept it if the administration zagged after Brey and went with a defense-first guy even if that’s the opposite of my personal preference, but thankfully it seems like we’re going to continue to play an offense-first brand of basketball with a lot of threes in the air. Here’s a line from The Athletic:
Penn State is modern basketball, loaded with dangerous shooters at every position that Shrewsberry practically directs into the proper spot from the sidelines.
I love the sound of that. Washington Post, what can you tell me?
This season, Shrewsberry developed a unique style built around unconventional personnel. The Nittany Lions control pace and operate their offense through Jalen Pickett, a burly 6-foot-4 guard who often plays in the post and serves as a fulcrum for four capable outside shooters. It is not Shrewsberry’s preferred style of play — because he doesn’t have one.
Hmm okay that last part seems to conflict somewhat with everything else I’ve seen but I think the thing we can take away from this is Shrewsberry likes to have a lot of shooters on the floor which seems like it will translate to a modern form of basketball that’s fun to watch. Penn State was 13th in KenPom offensive rating this year, with some solid players but nowhere near a surfeit of NBA prospects.
Shrewsberry signed a seven-year deal and inherits a roster we will charitably call in flux so it’s not like there’s any immediate pressure on him but it does seem like he’s starting to looking into patching holes pretty quickly, likely at the expense of Penn State’s 2023 class but that’s okay with me. Ideally some promises were made to him about transfers that might also apply to some other Irish programs but I’m hopeful this might be a quicker turnaround than initially expected.
I am just excited that this seems like a massive commitment to basketball at Notre Dame. Niele Ivey is doing wonderful work with an impossibly bright long- and short-term future (more on that immediately below) and now Shrewsberry can ideally inject some energy into the men’s side of the equation. Bookstore, I beg of you: On football weekends, please have a prominent basketball display. It’s the only time of year many fans are back and it would be nice for them (and me – I’m mainly concerned about me) to see that you care and have the option to buy merchandise. Perhaps put them next to Marcus Freeman’s Boutique Hoodie Collection for a special section that will make you a great deal of money.
Want to conclude by congratulating Niele Ivey and her squad on a really successful 2022-23 campaign. In her third year at the helm Ivey brought in an outright ACC regular season title and a coach of the year award, in addition to making another Sweet Sixteen and knocking off UConn back in December. Any chance at a deep run went down with Olivia Miles (my heart) but the fact the team rallied to not just win that game in Louisville to grab the ACC crown (Sonia Citron put on one of the most badass performances you will ever see) but then also scratched their way to the Sweet Sixteen despite missing their starting backcourt is an impressive piece of business. Two No. 1 seeds didn’t even make the second weekend from their home floor, nor did fellow No. 3 seed Duke, but the Irish gutted it out down Miles and Dara Mabrey. (Mabrey sisters, we love you.) The effort against Mississippi State wasn’t pretty but sometimes you must eschew any attempt at pleasing aesthetics on the hardwood and pummel your opponent with length and rebounds and loose rocks until you are still standing while they no longer can.
Excited for next season and the seasons beyond that: Miles is hopefully back healthy as early as possible, Citron and Maddie Westbeld will be rocks, Cass Prosper and K.K. Bransford are just scratching the surface and then you’re bringing in two more five-star freshmen (including Hannah Hidalgo, who should be a delight backing up Miles) and ideally a transfer post player. A lot to feel good about.
That’s it for now. Will check in to review the Blue-Gold Game if not before. I hope you all are well, apologies it’s been a light Q1 in both the podcast and newsletter realm but it was good to catch up. Be kind to yourself and each other. Go Irish.
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