Everything you need to know about Notre Dame’s first fall camp practice

Or — it’s just the first practice so chill out

Notre Dame Football opened up its fall camp with practice one on Thursday. It’s safe to say that fans everywhere are eagerly awaiting any and all info that comes out of the Irish sessions — but can we trust fans to remain calm?

Notre Dame is in the midst of a REAL quarterback competition for the first time in a number of years, and while the fan preference has steadily been on CJ Carr’s side, it does seem like there is plenty of confidence with Kenny Minchey,

So what went down?

According to multiple reports, the first team offense to start practice looked like this:

QB — Kenny Minchey
RB — Jeremiyah Love
WR — Jaden Greathouse
WR — Malachi Fields
WR — Jordan Faison
TE — Eli Raridon
LT — Anthonie Knapp
LG — Billy Schrauth
C — Ashton Craig
RG — Sullivan Absher
RT — Aamil Wagner

Obviously CJ Carr got plenty of reps as Freeman and Denbrock orchestrate this QB competition.

The big news coming out of practice were the three interceptions Carr threw (two via Tae Johnson and 1 via Karson Hobbs). The context of those interceptions is mostly missing, although one of the picks by Johnson was an amazing snatch and Hobbs got his off of a dropped catch by KK Smith.

So… perhaps we should be cautiously curious as to how this all unfolds.

Defensively, the Irish have a two deep that is one of the best in the country top to bottom. The first team defense for the day consisted of:

DE — Joshua Burnham
DT — Donovan Hinish
DT — Gabe Rubio
DE — Boubacar Traore
LB — Drayk Bowen
LB — Jaylen Sneed
NB — DeVonta Smith
CB — Leonard Moore
S — Luke Talich
S — Adon Shuler
CB — Christian Gray

Rotating in with the first team were DE Bryce Young and LB Kynstonn Viliamu-Asa.

Speaking of rotating… it’s a core principle for any good defense — especially along the defensive line. Along with Young, the Irish have Jason Onye, Jared Dawson, and Junior Tuihalamaka to put in the trenches.

All of these “depth charts” are likely to change and mutate over the next few weeks, so take day one (although a very important start) with a grain of salt.

Marcus Freeman, for example, is looking for consistency from the players to establish a pecking order, and spoke about it multiple times throughout his opening press conference.

“Again, it’s going to be consistency, right? I’ve always said, ‘They will determine who’s the starting quarterback, right?’ We want to see guys that are consistent. We want our quarterbacks, all of them to be consistent. But who can be the most consistent? Who can take care of the football? Who can continue to keep our offense moving forward? And again, that play happening consistently.”

“So, I’ve always said this, ‘That they’ll determine who’s the starting quarterback.’ Today was Day One. We’ll grade it every day. We’ll put them in similar challenging situations. They’ll rotate between groups. At some point, when a starter’s ready to be named, we have to name one.”

“Consistency is the number one criteria for any position. Because I’m a firm believer in consistency builds trust, and coaches are going to play players they trust. At the end of the day, no matter how athletic you are, how highly recruited you are, if the coach doesn’t trust you, we can’t put you out there consistently.”

“So that’s the number one key to being on the playing field, is being consistent every single day, every play in terms of what you’re asked to do.”

“Yeah, it starts with consistency. I said all the time, I don’t want to judge you off of a good day or a bad day. Everybody has a good or bad day, but more so I’m going to evaluate you and judge you off of who you are consistently. That’s as a person, that’s as a football player and that’s how you earn trust. It’s not you had a good day today, I trust you, or you had a bad day today.

“I don’t trust you. It’s like, who are you consistently. That’s, to me, how trust is earned. Who you are, your actions consistently. And that’s how we’re going to gain the trust of our players. And that’s how the players are going to gain the trust of their teammates and their coaches. And so that’s more important than anything. It is an action that consistently doing something. But there’s also, we also say trust. There’s a part of trust that’s a noun, right? It’s, it’s a choice. We say that to choose to trust beyond knowing before we go out and take that field, we have to trust that… make a choice to trust each other, that we’re prepared, we’re ready to go out here and win this game. And I often challenge ‘em with that before we go take the field.”

Notre Dame is still dealing with some injury issues, and Marcus Freeman spoke about Boubacar Traore, Charles Jagusah, and Cooper Flanagan.

“Yeah, Boubacar is more of a progression. He’ll be ready to go. We just want to slowly increase the load we ask him to perform in practice.

“With Coop and Charles, they’ll be back during the season. I don’t know — there’s not a hard date that we’re going to say, ‘This is the game they’ll be back. But they’ll be back this year.

“Charles just had a procedure to clean up to sew back his wound. We had to close up his wound. But that’s not going to delay his return more than a couple of days. So, it’s a progression. But we don’t want to put a timeline on it.

“We don’t want to put a timeline on it and say, ‘This is the exact game they’re going to be back’ because with rehabilitation, it can all change based on how they’re progressing.”

Jordan Botelho is also out until around October with a torn pec, but it was reported that he was putting in a lot of work individually and looked to be possibly progressing quicker.

The full Freeman presser is below. Among the many other things he talks about is; the need to move on from 2024, Sullivan Absher, Tae Johnson, the marriage of Eli Raridon, new defensive coordinator Chris Ash, and much more.

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