Editor’s note: This article is part of the Program Builders series, focusing on the behind-the-scenes executives and people fueling the future growth of their sports.
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Six months after Notre Dame played for a national championship, Pete Bevacqua turned the floor over to Marcus Freeman. The athletic director greenlit the head coach to ask for anything he wanted. Flanked by deputy athletic director Ron Powlus and general manager Mike Martin at a sitdown in mid-July, Bevacqua wanted to know how the football program could make national title runs more frequently than once per decade. He wanted to know what Notre Dame required to win it all for the first time in 37 years, the longest gap between titles in school history.
But what could Freeman want? Notre Dame’s indoor practice facility has been here barely longer than he has. Its stadium renovations aren’t quite a decade old. Shields Hall, the future 150,000-square-foot home of the football operations center, will open next year. Notre Dame just re-signed with NBC at a dollar figure high enough to keep the program independent yet competitive with power-conference foes pulling in north of $50 million per year. Freeman already has an eight-figure contract extension of his own. And the College Football Playoff keeps rewriting its rules in Notre Dame’s favor, giving it access to a first-round bye and potentially better at-large odds if the field expands.
“We have what we need,” Bevacqua said. “Are you gonna play in the national championship game every year? No. Unfortunately, there’s too many good teams. But we’re gonna keep knocking on that door.
“We have to win national championships in football.”
Bevacqua opens meetings by talking about Notre Dame winning a national title, which last happened before he was a freshman student from Connecticut. To administrators, donors and trustees, that’s no small change in messaging for a program that has historically gotten in its own way. Ten years ago, school president Rev. John Jenkins was profiled in the New York Times, stating Notre Dame would opt out of big-time college football if the sport moved toward a pay-for-play model. As Jenkins spoke, bulldozers were already working on the $400 million renovation to Notre Dame Stadium, dubbed the Campus Crossroads Project.
Notre Dame was slow in adopting pathways for players to enroll a semester early because the administration was concerned about the practice’s impact on freshman orientation. Now the school is comfortable changing its academic calendar to accommodate the College Football Playoff.
Former athletic director Jack Swarbrick said Notre Dame would never have taken its football and gone home, but the school was right to attempt to lead the sport away from its current state of barely regulated name, image and likeness money. It failed. But it was worth a try.
“Wherever the bar moved to, we were gonna move,” Swarbrick said. “You advocate for the position you’d like to see occur, but in the background you’re always saying we’re not gonna let Notre Dame football fail.”
Yet avoiding failure is not the same thing as winning a national title. There’s catching lightning in a bottle for one season, and then there’s pouring the foundation on something more durable. That starts with Notre Dame’s holy trinity of football buildings: a renovated stadium, an indoor practice facility and a new operations center. Two of those projects are done, and the third could be by the time Notre Dame opens Freeman’s fifth season as head coach at Lambeau Field against Wisconsin in 2026.
They are all part of the reason Notre Dame believes it can now produce College Football Playoff runs in perpetuity. It might seem like Notre Dame has everything to hold its reservation at college football’s adult table for the long run — acknowledging that every coach wants more NIL funding.
But faith in where Notre Dame football is headed doesn’t require a Hail Mary anymore, and every little bit still helps.
The Mendoza College of Business sits off the southwest corner of Notre Dame Stadium and is under construction, like much of the campus. Overhead, the building is shaped like a capital H. When it’s done, it will look more like a capital A. Considering the school’s profile around Notre Dame, the alphabetical metaphor probably fits.
Namesake Tom Mendoza is an ardent supporter of the football program and helped start Notre Dame’s NIL collective with Brady Quinn. Business remains one of the most popular majors, both around the campus and within the football team. When the school started a sports analytics program four years ago, it did so with athletes’ schedules in mind. Then the faculty made sure the football staff knew about it. When Freeman took the head coaching job, one of his early meetings was a fireside chat with Mendoza College dean Martijn Cremers. But Cremers didn’t come to the football facility to talk in front of the team. Freeman went to the business school to talk in front of the student body.
“If you went in a laboratory and designed the perfect coach for Notre Dame, it would be Marcus Freeman,” Bevacqua said. “He’s become not just the football coach at Notre Dame, he’s become such a part of this university and this campus.”
The path by which Notre Dame positioned itself to keep competing for championships didn’t start in the business school, but it can be explained there. Among the theories taught and employed at Mendoza is the Flywheel Effect, popularized in the book “Good to Great” by Jim Collins. Without knowing it, Notre Dame football has made this theory an operating principle.
As Collins describes it, imagine a massive wheel mounted on an axle. The job is to get this heavy wheel to spin at a high speed. One push won’t do it. Not two. Not 10. Maybe not 100. But once the wheel spins with force, it creates its own momentum. It won’t be stopped by minor obstructions (i.e. injuries, staff turnover, even losses). There’s no way to know which push was most important in the flywheel reaching this self-sustaining velocity. It’s just obvious when it does.
The Notre Dame football flywheel is spinning, both inside the program and beyond its walls.
As Freeman has grown into the job, the admissions office has become more of a partner with the football program, both in high school recruiting and the transfer portal. Irish coordinator salaries have almost tripled in the past six years. NIL is no longer a roadblock to player acquisition or retention; in general, the Irish don’t lose talent they want to keep and rarely miss on portal targets they’re desperate to sign. When Freeman needed a new strength coach a year ago, Notre Dame funded an NFL hire. When injuries rocked the Irish roster last season, the program didn’t seem to miss a beat. When Bevacqua extended Freeman last December, days before the first-round game against Indiana, he paid him like a coach expected to make the national title game. When Freeman needed a new running backs coach last winter, he pulled Penn State’s Ja’Juan Seider, the only position coach in college football with a group better than the Irish.
When Notre Dame football needs resources, it doesn’t go wanting.
Some of this started under Brian Kelly, who professionalized the program to the point it could take a chance on a first-time head coach. Swarbrick got Notre Dame into the right rooms in the construction of the College Football Playoff. Bevacqua got it on the right golf courses, counting Donald Trump, Roger Goodell and Greg Sankey as playing partners this summer. When Notre Dame needed to meet the school’s 100-75 fundraising rule for Shields Hall — before breaking ground on a large capital project, 100 percent of the money must be committed and 75 percent must be in hand — the development office went into warp drive before the end of Jenkins’ presidential term on June 1, 2024. Dirt moved with six weeks to spare.
Freeman didn’t start this wheel spinning, but he helped it achieve inexorable momentum last winter by beating Georgia and Penn State in a seven-day span. The Sugar Bowl was Notre Dame’s first major bowl win in 31 years. The Orange Bowl felt like something bigger, the program’s most significant win since the 1993 Game of the Century against Florida State.
“The Georgia win changed everything,” said Mendoza, who watched the Orange Bowl alongside Tony Rice, Notre Dame’s last national championship-winning quarterback, and Tim Brown, its last Heisman Trophy winner. “Notre Dame used to think it could win. Maybe it knew it could win. Now it expects to win. Marcus can sell playing for a national championship and everything else that comes with it at Notre Dame. The kids feel it. The players we’re attracting feel it.”
Freeman stood at the 50-yard line on a Saturday night in mid-June as Notre Dame hosted 21 official visitors. A dozen of the recruits were already committed. Nine were still up for grabs.
Before Freeman talked, the players and their parents — a group that included NFL alumni Larry Fitzgerald, Thomas Davis and Jermichael Finley — watched a video on the stadium’s screen showing the parents of former players, including Riley Leonard’s, talking about the Notre Dame experience.
Within a month, eight of the uncommitted prospects had picked Notre Dame. By the end of summer, the Irish had landed 11 of the 12 uncommitted prospects they’d hosted for official visits, including two 247Composite five-stars in cornerback Khary Adams and tight end Ian Premer.
The biggest reasons why Notre Dame believes it can keep knocking on the CFP door are still in high school. With 27 commitments for 2026, Freeman is on track to sign the program’s highest-rated recruiting class in 13 years. The Irish are yet to suffer a decommitment after watching 18 walk over the previous three cycles.
“You go into the semifinals game and you’re losing starters, putting backups in,” Freeman said, “but if you don’t have the depth that you can put somebody in and get the job done, then all of a sudden that becomes a hole and it becomes a deficiency and you lose.”
Notre Dame could have fumbled away the goodwill of last season when general manager Chad Bowden left for USC in February. From the start of the CFP to the start of spring practice, Notre Dame landed two commitments, both on the offensive line, hardly a position that requires a recruiting full-court press.
Notre Dame also lost presumptive recruiting director Caleb Davis to San Diego State. When Freeman tabbed Mike Martin from the Detroit Lions to become general manager — after an aggressive pursuit of James Blanchard from Texas Tech — he rebooted the recruiting operation alongside new director of recruiting Carter Auman, who graduated from Notre Dame during Freeman’s first offseason as head coach.
Organization picked up. For all Bowden’s energy, he had a habit of giving little warning of what he needed and when he needed it. That start-up approach, move fast and break stuff, had worked. It also felt like the Irish were due for something new. After last season, the program was no longer a startup. It wanted to be a Fortune 500 company. So it had to act like one.
There are no leprechaun costumes or gold boomboxes anymore. There’s talk of branding and generational wealth, ideas floated about how Notre Dame can become business partners with its players. When Martin sets up calls for professors, alumni or former players with prospects, he produces one-page overviews that include other schools in play, GPA, and parents’ professions. They arrive in advance.
There’s even a text chain for prospects’ moms. The entire operation feels buttoned up.
“It’s getting the talent,” Bevacqua said. “Fingers crossed, knock on wood, we are firing on all cylinders right now with recruiting.”
And National Signing Day is still four months away.
Televisions line the second floor of Notre Dame’s indoor practice facility, a gathering space that overlooks the field below. During the second week of August camp, the screens replay Notre Dame’s run through the CFP, with highlights of wins against Indiana, Georgia and Penn State. Everyone knows how it all ended against Ohio State. The longest season in school history still lingers around here, as much as Freeman would prefer it didn’t.
“They’re valuable lessons that you learn from last year, but I continue to remind them: 2024 has nothing to do with this 2025 team,” Freeman said. “Yes, let’s utilize the lessons. Let’s utilize some of those good and bad things that we learned from last year, but you do that no matter what the previous experience was. They understand that.
“We try to stop talking about that ‘24 year.”
Good luck with that.
The last time Notre Dame made the national championship game, the hangover was harsh. So was the realization the Irish weren’t as close to the mountaintop as they appeared before kickoff of that 42-14 loss to Alabama. Kelly interviewed with the Philadelphia Eagles, starting quarterback Everett Golson got suspended after spring practice and the program was out of the title chase by late September. Notre Dame ended that season against Rutgers in the Pinstripe Bowl.
The Ohio State game felt different. So did everything leading up to it. But when it came for Notre Dame’s title shot, the team on the other sideline still had the most talent.
“I would point to depth as the No. 1 difference now,” Swarbrick said. “Our first D-line was really good that year. Alabama’s third D-line was really good. It was all the difference in the world.
“Sport always exposes your weaknesses. If your nutrition program isn’t right, if your strength conditioning program isn’t right, If recruiting doesn’t produce the quality of player and the depth, it always gets exposed. And I think the program is as solid across the board as any time in my memory.”
Notre Dame will begin its difficult encore at No. 10 Miami on Sunday night of Labor Day weekend. It will have the national stage to itself, with a first-time starting quarterback and a new defensive coordinator. The Irish added five potential starters in the transfer portal. Behind the practice fields, Shields Hall continues to go up, windows added, bricks laid. The facility stretches an entire block.
For the first time in a long time, Notre Dame enters a season where winning a national title doesn’t feel like a rote talking point. The Irish are betting favorites to return to the CFP and win double-digit games. If they get there, Freeman can lean into last season’s experiences. So can his roster. Whether he wants to talk about it in August or not.
“To win a national championship in any sport, you gotta be good; we’re good,” Bevacqua said. “You gotta stay healthy. And no matter how good you are, you’re gonna have to get lucky a couple of times. But I really feel we’re positioned to keep knocking on that door.
“There is no secret, no doubt, no hesitation that we want to win national championships in football.”
The wheel keeps spinning.
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(Photo: Michael Reaves / Getty Images)
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