Jack Swarbrick’s phone has been buzzing a lot lately. His favorite messages and calls are the ones from former Notre Dame players, sharing in the joy of a run to the national championship game and thanking the former athletic director for making what, at the time, appeared to be a very risky hire.
“It’s extraordinarily rewarding,” Swarbrick recalled by phone this week as he prepared to head to Atlanta to see Notre Dame play Ohio State. “I’m so happy for this person that I believed in, that he’s reached this spot.”
When Swarbrick hired Marcus Freeman to be the new Fighting Irish head football coach back in December 2021, Freeman was just 35 years old. He’d never been a head coach before at any level. He’d only been in South Bend for one season, serving as the Notre Dame defensive coordinator under Brian Kelly. He’d made a great impression on both Swarbrick and the players, but it was far from a sure thing.
“You’re very conscious of the risk,” Swarbrick said. “I understood that, and I accepted it — but Notre Dame’s history of hiring assistants had not been good. It worked out when they hired Knute Rockne, but since then, it has been pretty shaky.
“You can be a great assistant and not make the step to successful head coach.”
But Swarbrick wasn’t deterred by that. He’d received a great deal of inbound interest in the position. It is Notre Dame, after all. But he was intrigued by the internal candidate, a rising star in the profession who had made a huge impact in his year in South Bend. Kyren Williams shared with Swarbrick that he’d specifically planned his route through the football facility so he could pop his head into Freeman’s office to chat with him. The other players loved him, too.
When Swarbrick met with Freeman for their formal interview, the meeting lasted four hours. The two men were in sync, and Swarbrick could see the myriad changes college sports would be facing in the coming years. The name, image and likeness (NIL) era was already underway, but the courts were already beginning to reshape the enterprise in different ways beyond that. Schools are expected to share revenue directly with their athletes beginning this fall.
“I saw almost an advantage in having somebody who wasn’t set in their ways as a head coach,” Swarbrick said. “Because the world was shifting, and you’ve got to be able to shift with it. He clearly demonstrated that when we talked, so that that gave me a lot of confidence as well that he could do it.”
Swarbrick thought about Dabo Swinney, one of the sport’s most successful head coaches in the current era. He’d been promoted from within, and he’d won two national titles at Clemson. Ohio State head coach Ryan Day, who will stand on the sideline opposite Freeman on Monday night, was another internal promotion. It didn’t scare Swarbrick.
He knew if he went with Freeman, it would be because he believed Freeman ready right now. He wanted the coach to know that, too. This wasn’t about achieving greatness someday; it was about already being a great head coach now because he was prepared. Because Swarbrick had attended practices and seen him interact with players. Because he just innately knew it.
Freeman was an excellent recruiter. He cared about player development. And he understood the culture of the Notre Dame football program. Those were Swarbrick’s three priorities during the hiring process, and Freeman checked all three boxes.
Then, Swarbrick met with seven players, all team leaders. They told him that they believed they had the best culture in all of college football, even after their head coach had left for LSU. And he’ll never forget what they told him next.
“Brian Kelly didn’t build this culture. We did. We own this culture,” the players told Swarbrick. “Don’t f--- this up. Don’t bring somebody in here who wants to change the culture.”
That reinforced what Swarbrick was thinking. He looked for reasons why he shouldn’t hire Freeman and couldn’t come up with anything. When the players heard the news officially, the entire room erupted in cheers.
“Jack Swarbrick and Father John Jenkins deserve a lot of the credit for having courage and for making a decision to hire me at that time,” Freeman says now.
Three seasons later, they look brilliant. He’s gone 33-9 with the most top-25 wins of any Irish head coach over his first three seasons. Sure, Freeman has suffered the bumps and bruises that come along with learning on the go as a first-time head coach. Losses to Marshall and Northern Illinois certainly come to mind.
But Freeman has also taken the same team that lost to NIU in Week 2 all the way to the precipice of a national championship. He’s won big game after big game, pushing all the right buttons to get the most of out of his players no matter what. The Irish have endured a myriad of injuries, particularly along the offensive and defensive lines, and they have barely skipped a beat. They have an elite defense, one of the best running backs in the country and a fearless leader in quarterback Riley Leonard.
This Notre Dame team has a ton of NFL talent on its roster, but it has less than that of its upcoming opponent. It doesn’t always win games in the prettiest fashion. But it is the true definition of a team, a group that believes it is stronger together than apart.
“At the end of the day, it’s guys who are putting their bodies on the line and doing everything they can for the man next to them,” Leonard said. “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 proved throughout the season that culture wins, and it’s a special place for a reason.”
Freeman believes that this team has been tested by its lowest moment — that home loss to Northern Illinois. He’s never shied away from discussing it, and he told Leonard the day after it happened that someday Leonard would be grateful for the lessons it would teach him.
“It’s hard for me to even say I’m thankful for it, but I am,” Leonard said before the first-round College Football Playoff game. “(Coach) said he was thankful for, in the previous years, similar losses, that they’ve (helped him grow) as a person. And I just sat there like, ‘Dude, there’s no way. There’s no way I’m ever going to say that.’ But here we are.
“It drove us the rest of the year. (Freeman) always said to ‘keep the pain’ before every game. He said, ‘Keep that pain, because you don’t want to have that feeling again.’”
And they haven’t since. They’ve won 13 consecutive games, including gritty wins over No. 2 seed Georgia and No. 6 seed Penn State in each of the past two weeks. The program that hadn’t won a meaningful postseason game in decades has suddenly won a few in a row. The players point to Freeman’s leadership as a key reason why that is. It’s hard to imagine anyone else handling a loss like the one to NIU with as much grace as Freeman had, and it’s hard to imagine anyone else getting his team to respond as impressively as Notre Dame has in the months since that embarrassing loss.
The school noticed the grace and grit of the rebound, and like Swarbrick three years ago, believed in Freeman before the biggest results came. Notre Dame demonstrated its belief to the tune of a high-paying contract extension — a source told NBC Sports that the deal extends through the 2030 season — announced before the College Football Playoff even began.
Another bet placed on this young coach, who was absolutely worth the risk.