College Football

How Marcus Freeman constructed a Notre Dame team on the brink of winning a title

Updated Jan. 16, 2025 2:50 p.m. ET

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Michael Cohen

College Football and College Basketball Writer

Asking college football fans to list the programs whose rosters contain the highest number of five-star recruits will inevitably produce a handful or more of predictable answers. Alabama, which has won six national championships over the last 15 years, might be the first school that anyone mentions. And sure enough, the Crimson Tide led the country with 17 former five-star prospects on its roster, according to the 247Sports Team Talent Composite. Georgia, Ohio State and Texas would be logical guesses, too, such is the recruiting power at institutions most folks would consider blue bloods. All three ranked among the top five nationally in the five-star arms race for 2024. And all three qualified for this year's College Football Playoff, with the Buckeyes still alive in their pursuit of a national championship. 

Four more entrants to the expanded 12-team format — Clemson, Oregon, Penn State and Tennessee — were among the 23 programs nationwide whose rosters housed multiple five-star prospects, from Alabama and its star-studded perch atop the hierarchy to the sextet of schools the base of this metaphorical totem pole with exactly two such recruiting gems apiece: USC, Ole Miss, North Carolina, Kentucky, Arkansas and TCU, which made a stunning run to the national title game in 2022. All told, nearly 60% of this season's College Football Playoff participants landed squarely among the collection of teams that is densest with top-end talent. 

Though it was likely somewhat intuitive for fans to place unlikely qualifiers Arizona State, Boise State and SMU on the outside of the sport's five-star oligarchy looking in, a much smaller percentage of onlookers would have also included Notre Dame, winners of eight national championships in the Associated Press and Coaches Poll era, which dates to 1936, and three more national titles before that. But sure enough, the version of Notre Dame that will face the Buckeyes at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Monday night has but a single five-star recruit in its midst, the same number that graced the rosters at SMU, Utah, Louisville, Texas Tech, Syracuse and Kansas this season. 

"Winning helps everything," Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman said after his team defeated Penn State, which had five five-star recruits, in the Orange Bowl. "There's a lot of coaches that are on the road right now recruiting, and fortunately for us, the best recruiting we can do is winning."

But how exactly are the Fighting Irish winning, and winning at such an elite level, without a handful or more of the players who were regarded among the best in the country coming out of high school? Even last year's Michigan team, which leaned on high-end player development rather than supreme player acquisition to earn the school's first national championship of the 21st century, had two former five-star prospects on the roster in quarterback J.J. McCarthy and cornerback Will Johnson. The only five-star prospect at Notre Dame is junior linebacker Jaylen Sneed, who ranks sixth on the team in tackles with 50 and was the No. 34 overall player in the 2022 recruiting cycle. 

Instead, Freeman and his coaching staff have amassed the deepest collection of four-star prospects in the country with 57 of them on this year's roster alone, which is two more than Georgia and Ohio State, four more than Oklahoma, and seven more than Alabama, Texas and Oregon. Such a high volume of blue-chip talent — albeit almost entirely four-star recruits rather than five-star phenoms — still lands the Fighting Irish among the top five rosters in the country for average prospect score, according to 247Sports, trailing only Alabama (93.79), Ohio State (93.29), Georgia (92.85) and Texas (91.98) in that category. Notre Dame's score of 91.14 is the program's second-highest mark since the Team Talent Composite was first measured in 2015.

"Five stars is a subjective preview of what someone thinks that [a player] could be in college," said former 247Sports director of recruiting Steve Wiltfong, who is now the vice president of national college football recruiting and the transfer portal for On3, during an interview with FOX Sports. "Everyone gets a chance to go write their own story. And if you're a first-round draft pick [when you leave college], you should have been a five-star recruit. These guys [at Notre Dame] have a chance to hear some of their names called very early in the draft, and that's truly what they are, and not what they were given prior to their careers at Notre Dame or anywhere else."

For the duration of Freeman's tenure as head coach, which began when he was elevated from defensive coordinator to replace Brian Kelly on Dec. 3, 2021, the Fighting Irish have thrived in the upper echelon of four-star recruits. In 2022, Freeman's first recruiting class was headlined by Sneed, the lone five-star prospect on the current roster, but also included an astonishing 17 players rated between No. 109 overall in outside linebacker Josh Burnham to No. 365 overall in quarterback Steve Angeli, whose gutsy relief appearance against Penn State produced a critical field goal while starter Riley Leonard was being evaluated for a concussion. In 2023, Freeman was unable to sign any of the top 60 players in the country but succeeded in landing 15 players ranked between No. 61 overall in offensive lineman Charles Jagusah, who could step in at left tackle against Ohio State on Monday night after missing most of the season due to injury, and No. 285 overall in offensive lineman Sullivan Absher, a special teams contributor. Freeman's most recent recruiting haul, in 2024, featured 10 players rated from No. 41 overall in linebacker Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa, who had four tackles in the win over Penn State, and No. 251 overall in running back Aneyas Williams, who caught five passes for 66 yards against the Nittany Lions.

Freeman's philosophy of targeted player identification and an unwavering belief in on-campus development continues to ring true in the transfer portal, where Notre Dame's last three batches of newcomers have ranked 75th nationally in 2022, 38th nationally in 2023 and 40th nationally in 2024, a far cry from the juggernaut group added by Ohio State this past winter. Only twice during that three-year span have the Fighting Irish even signed players rated among the top 40 transfers in the country for any given cycle — former Northwestern safety Brandon Joseph was rated the No. 17 overall transfer in '22; former Wake Forest quarterback Sam Hartman was rated the No. 7 overall transfer in '23 — and both of them have since progressed to the NFL. 

But that doesn't mean the impact of Notre Dame's transfers is insignificant, just as the absence of former five-star prospects hasn't prevented the Fighting Irish from contending for a national title. Quarterback Riley Leonard, a transfer from Duke rated No. 44 overall and a former three-star recruit coming out of high school, was among the best dual-threat players in the country with 866 rushing yards and 16 touchdowns alongside more than 2,600 passing yards and 19 more scores. Wideout Beaux Collins, the No. 313 overall transfer after a trio of modest seasons at Clemson, is now Notre Dame's second-leading receiver with 37 catches for 458 yards and three touchdowns. Defensive back Rod Heard II, formerly of Northwestern, was the No. 250 overall transfer and chipped in with three tackles, including one sack, against Penn State after finishing high school ranked outside the top 900 players in his class.  

"What do I think the country is learning about our program?" Leonard said after the Orange Bowl. "I think the biggest thing is just [that] culture wins. You see a bunch of talented guys across our locker room, but you can see that anywhere in the country. I think at the end of the day it's [about] which guys are putting their bodies on the line and doing everything they can for the man next to them. Nobody is thinking about draft stocks or next year or anything like that, any type of individual glory. We're all thinking about the man beside us. I think we kind of proved throughout the season that culture wins, and [Notre Dame] is a special place for a reason."

Many industry experts believe this year's run to the national championship game could vault Notre Dame to an even higher plane, especially as the spotlight on Freeman continues to swell. He's quickly become one of the most dynamic personalities in college football at just 39 years old — Freeman celebrated his birthday last week — and now he's on the cusp of guiding arguably the sport's most widely recognized brand to a title for the first time since 1988, an achievement that would make him an instant legend. Even the Chicago Bears have expressed interest in interviewing Freeman for their head-coaching vacancy. 

It would be almost impossible for recruits not to notice, from four stars to five stars and everyone in between. 

"I don't think a lot of kids, a lot of up-and-coming national high school football players, were aware of Marcus Freeman in the same way that they're aware of Kirby Smart [at Georgia] and coaches of that magnitude," Wiltfong told FOX Sports. "But now that they're getting an opportunity to see how he operates, oh man, it's gonna be a big deal when people know they're gonna get on the phone with Marcus Freeman and how passionate he is about Notre Dame. It's gonna be intoxicating. I think they can be a consistent winner year in and year out."

Michael Cohen covers college football and basketball for FOX Sports with an emphasis on the Big Ten. Follow him at @Michael_Cohen13.

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Michael Cohen