Editor’s Note: The first in a two-part series looking at the Notre Dame football program’s off-the-field push to evolve into a national champion.
SOUTH BEND, Ind. — A little less than a year ago, Marcus Freeman’s approach to roster management took a relatively quiet but decidedly momentous step with the hiring of Matt Jansen as the Notre Dame football program’s director of scouting.
College football’s dizzying evolution almost demanded it. The decision by now third-year head coach Freeman to plug the 36-year-old Jansen into the role and how that plays with the rest of the pieces in Notre Dame’s football burgeoning infrastructure may actually put the Irish ahead of the curve in that regard.
At least that’s what Freeman is angling for.
A peek inside the process offers nothing that contradicts that notion.
► Submitting three FutureCast predictions in favor of Notre Dame
► Notre Dame Football Transfer Tracker for 2023-24 offseason
► Notre Dame Football 2024 Scholarship Chart
► Notre Dame football depth chart projection heading into summer workouts
► Notre Dame football will open 2024 season in prime time at Texas A&M
—————————————————————
Perhaps the best illustration of that is the way Jensen prepares — seemingly excessively so — for the next transfer portal cycle that starts Dec. 9, and when he prepares for it. In fact, he’s on the brink of starting to accrue 30 to 50 candidates at each position group, a tiny sector of whom in turn could be added to the Notre Dame roster for the 2025 season.
“It’s a really sound process,” Jansen told Inside ND Sports. “It’s a process that emphasizes and values being over-prepared for anything. What you’ve just got to know, as a scout, is that a lot of your work may never see the light of day.”
But the work that does see the light of day could be the difference in Notre Dame being a perennial playoff team in the new expanded format or an intermittent one.
That Notre Dame under Freeman is able to stack so many segments that play similarly dynamically in the big picture is both a testament to the 38-year-old Ohio State graduate’s vision as well as perhaps unparalleled sync with the academic side of campus.
The Irish, it turns out, can compete in the NIL space — at least in today’s snapshot of it. There’s the ongoing construction of the Jack and Kathy Shields Family Hall, a 150,000-square foot needed piece of pragmatism — as well as a recruiting magnet — set to open in the fall of 2026 next door to the 20-year-old Guglielmino Athletics Complex.
More tangible signs of momentum include a 2025 recruiting class sitting at No. 1 in the Rivals team rankings seven months before the next National Signing Day and a start on the 2026 class that has the Irish already well-positioned to flourish in that cycle.
While Freeman’s growing pains as a head coach on the sideline and in game-day operations have been in plain sight, his meteoric growth in program-building has been more subtle and anecdotal in the public eye.
But very powerful and very real, nonetheless.
In addition to hiring Jansen, the retention this winter of director of recruiting Chad Bowden and promoting him to assistant athletic director of player personnel was another seismic development that makes Notre Dame’s aspiration of winning in the playoff — not just showing up — closer to a possibility than a wish.
Bowden came to Notre Dame from Cincinnati in early 2021 after then-head coach Brian Kelly hired Freeman to replace Clark Lea as defensive coordinator. And he stayed and grew in responsibility and overall program impact after Freeman replaced Kelly when the latter parachuted out to LSU in late November of that same year.
The son of former major league baseball general manager Jim Bowden is known for his creativity on the recruiting front and his strong relationship-building. What will be on display in his newest role as well is his evaluation skills.
“Chad is as good of a personnel person that I’ve been around at this level,” Jansen said. “And that involves recruiting. That involves evaluation, gathering of information. Chad is someone that can also take an idea that may seem a little out there, and then make it work.
“And kids are really attracted to what he tells them about this place. And it’s all genuine coming from him and it’s real, and he can build real genuine connections with people. When you talk about an evaluator, I think Chad does a really good job of understanding how a player will project and his vision long term with the roster as well.”
Jansen, meanwhile, isn’t Notre Dame football’s first director of scouting, but he’s been asked to contribute, and so far has delivered, on more fronts.
In addition to turning transfer portal shopping into a science, Jansen is involved with the evaluation of recruits, even though he’s not part of wooing them. He scouts opponents to provide personnel strengths and nuances, but stays away from suggesting X’s and O’s.
And he scouts Notre Dame’s own roster several times a year to address blind spots and help with longer-term projections.
All of which overlap each other.
For instance, scouting Duke, which hosted the Irish last September, helped give Jansen an early and thorough look at eventual transfers Riley Leonard and RJ Oben. Evaluating recruits, meanwhile, helps Jansen see how the current ND roster pieces fit together now and how they may or may not later.
And giving ND’s own roster a thorough appraisal helps bring clarity to all the other areas.
“When we’re talking about our own roster, these coaches know the players better than I do,” Jansen said. “The thing I’m looking at — and the thing I want to express to coach Freeman and Chad — is how quickly these guys are progressing, and is the vision changing for this player?
“So, how does a player look in spring football compared to how he looks in fall camp? How does he look at the end of the season based on where I thought he’d be in spring football? And not everyone is going to be linear all the time, but you want to see guys that are going to be progressing. And we have quite a few of those.
“I think one thing you try to do is you try and just say, ‘This is what he can do. This is how he can help the roster and this is how it fits into the whole global world of our team, our opponents, what’s out there in college football.’ And you’re just trying to give an unbiased feeling about it.
“It’s more, ‘This is where we are. This is where we could get to with some of these guys when they develop. And this is where potentially we may want to explore different avenues.’”
The transfer portal is becoming an increasingly critical one, and not just at Notre Dame. Among the now 134 FBS schools, only Clemson and the three service academies completely passed this cycle.
Not that Notre Dame didn’t have to warm up to the idea.
It took eight recruiting cycles for the Irish football program to finally dip its toe into the grad transfer waters after the NCAA first introduced and enacted the concept in 2006, complete with no sit-out year for only those sorts of football transfers at that time.
The Irish only added three more scholarship-to-scholarship graduate imports over the ensuing five cycles that followed Florida defensive back Cody Riggs’ breakthrough transfer in 2014.
It took three weeks for Freeman last offseason to amass more than all those years combined. He finished with 10, including three who arrived as recruited walk-ons. This offseason the number is 11 total, including one non-grad transfer (QB Leonard) and three walk-ons — and 12 total transfers if you count 24-year-old Australian import James Rendell, whose eligibility window could end up anywhere from one to three years.
Freeman remains committed to primarily building through recruiting, but is equally adamant about enhancing through the transfer portal.
Which created the need for someone with a résumé and a passion like Jansen’s.
“The thing that I noticed about college football — and this was back in 2019 — was they had recruiting departments that had popped up everywhere,” Jansen said. “Personnel, all that. But it was so focused on high school yet.
“And you had coaches, GAs and analysts working on the game plan piece and schematics. But there was a piece that was missing that’s a crucial piece of an NFL model. And that is, for lack of a better term, the pro scouting side.”
Jansen took a sort of winding road to arrive there, even though growing up in Houston he always wanted to build and develop talent.
But for baseball teams.
“The thing about baseball is how intricate their building processes are,” he said. “And now it takes years to build a winner and things like that. Really influenced, growing up in Houston, following the Astros.
“They had a couple of different rounds over the course of my lifetime. Just seeing the different ways from building under the Bagwell and Biggio days and then they had to rebuild it with nothing.
“And then how they built it back up through a farm system and really just the entire idea of putting a team together that’s good enough to go beat another team has always been really intriguing to me.”
He eventually married that love with his love for football, and took aim at finding a path to an NFL scouting job.
“At the time I was coming up there weren’t personnel departments in college football yet,” Jansen said. “That kind of happened after I had already gone to work in the NFL. So, I knew to scout, I at least had to get involved in the football program. How do you go about doing that? I didn’t really know.
“So, when I was in high school, I wrote basically every scout in the NFL a letter basically asking how did you get where you are? To try to find guys who might have had a similar path to me, the one I was going to go on.
“I heard back from some. Some really weren’t going to help you, but the one who really did help me was a guy by the name of Joe Hortiz [now the general manager of the Los Angeles Chargers]. They just took Joe Alt and Cam Hart there in the NFL Draft. He was an area scout with the Ravens at the time. And Joe didn’t play college football either.
“So, Joe gave me some really good advice about how to break in, and I followed it to a tee. But the biggest one that really drew me at the time was being a student coach somewhere, which is what Joe was at Auburn when he was in college.”
Jansen found his opening at Texas Tech under the late, great head coach Mike Leach, who took him on a a student assistant coach.
“[USC coach] Lincoln Riley was a student coach there when I was there. Had some good GAs there who started as students who are now in the NFL and across college football as well, so I knew that was a school that I wanted to take my path that way.
“I had to be an equipment guy my first semester. I didn’t know anything about equipment, but what it did was get in the door, right. Make connections. And then through that, you meet scouts when they come in and through that you get an internship. Through that, you do a good job and they call you back to come back and eventually offer you a job. That’s kind of how it started.”
How it kept going was Jansen becoming really good at it — first as a college scouting intern for three years with the NFL’s Houston Texans, then a full-time gig as a player personnel assistant with the Baltimore Ravens. Then it was four more years with the Texans, this time as the team’s college scouting coordinator.
In 2019, West Virginia head coach Neal Brown hired Jansen, who quickly worked his way into a series of promotions and saw his responsibilities grow along the way.
“There were starting to become a lot of parallels from the NFL coming into college football at that time,” Jansen said, “about the transfer portal and how that was going to find a way to affect how you have to divvy up the evaluation responsibility.
“Not only that, there was a crucial piece missing of the advance scouting process. To me, in college football we were doing all this work on the schematic side with analysts and working a week ahead with GAs and things. But nobody was really looking at it from the player perspective and how our players match up against their players, which is a common piece of NFL scouting.
“And so, we set out in 2020 to kind of build up that area at West Virginia, and really build it to a really good spot that they’re taking it and running with it now. And now we’re doing the same thing here at Notre Dame.”
Coming Saturday: Digging into the details of Notre Dame’s portal plan, how to project players from lower divisions, the importance of including potential walk-ons in the scouting process, and the value of a scout’s eye in game-planning for an opponent.
—————————————————————
• Talk with Notre Dame fans on The Insider Lounge.
• Subscribe to the Inside ND Sports podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, Podbean or Pocket Casts.
• Subscribe to the Inside ND Sports channel on YouTube.
• Follow us on Twitter: @insideNDsports, @EHansenND and @TJamesND.
• Like us on Facebook: Inside ND Sports
• Follow us on Instagram: @insideNDsports
