Why Notre Dame’s Title Hopes Are Defying Every Expectation This Season
Notre Dame came so close in 2024—just one game shy of grabbing that elusive championship. Now, standing on the cusp of the 2025 season, many are wondering: can the Fighting Irish truly flip from very good to downright magnificent? It’s tempting to ask if luck will finally tip their way, but here’s the kicker—it’s not luck at all. With a defense that refuses to get blown out, a ruthless ground game, and a receiving corps poised to break a years-long drought, the 2025 Irish have the blueprints for greatness. Whether redshirt freshman C.J. Carr can steady the ship under center remains an intriguing question mark, yet Notre Dame’s resilience and depth suggest this might be the year where “good” means serious threat. So why settle for good when you can be great? LEARN MORE.
Notre Dame came up one game short of a championship in 2024. But they have the chance to be an even better team in 2025.
When it comes to Notre Dame Fighting Irish football, I prefer to think in binary.
The Irish are very good every year, save for 2016, when they went 4-8. “Will Notre Dame be good this year?” is a question that sheds only a little light on how the Irish will affect the season.
Instead, there are two kinds of Notre Dame football seasons: Years in which Notre Dame is good, and years in which Notre Dame is good.
In 2025, it will be the latter. Notre Dame will be good.
The No. 6 Irish open their season with a Sunday night blockbuster at No. 10 Miami (7:30 p.m. ET, ABC). The Irish are just 2.5-point favorites, which sounds about right considering our Opta supercomputer gives them a 52.9% chance to win.
Either way, it’ll be best to avoid overreacting to what Notre Dame does in the opener. The Irish, no matter what Week 1 hijinks ensue, have everything it takes to get back to a College Football Playoff semifinal and maybe beyond. The supercomputer also gives them 9.9 projected wins, with only Ohio State (10.5) and Penn State (10.2) expected to have more.
There are years in which Notre Dame is a regular very good team, and there are years in which the program is a real threat. Here’s why I think 2025 is the latter.
A Defense That Cannot Get Blown Out
One of football’s more annoying truisms is that an elite defense “keeps you in every game.” That’s often not true, but head coach Marcus Freeman has given the theory a pretty good run in his first three years leading Notre Dame.
The Irish have, amazingly, not allowed more than 38 points in any of Freeman’s 38 games at the helm. They’re the only program in FBS that’s pulled that off over the last three seasons. Georgia has coughed up three of those games and lost one. Ohio State is 0-2 in them, as are Alabama and Michigan. Texas lost to Oklahoma in 2022 when the Sooners put 41 on the Longhorns at the Cotton Bowl.
Freeman has lost some stinkers, no doubt. His early season losses to Marshall (2022) and Northern Illinois (2024) were embarrassing. But the Irish have not suffered anything close to a blowout in his three seasons, with their highest margins of defeat coming against Ohio State (twice by 11 points, including last year’s national title game) and Louisville (13 in a lackluster showing in 2023).
The Irish are in every game, no matter who they’re playing, and I believe the primary reason is the elite secondaries under Freeman, who has added defensive coordinator Chris Ash to the coaching staff.
Last year’s defense gave up a 33.1% pass success rate – eighth-lowest in FBS. The secondary was the star of the show, giving up a 47.6% burn rate that ranked second in the country. (Funny enough, it was NIU that finished first, albeit against a MAC schedule.)
Notre Dame had elite cornerbacks (Benjamin Morrison, Leonard Moore) and an elite safety group, led by All-American Xavier Watts. Moore and safety Adon Shuler return to headline a DB room that includes Christian Gray and should once again be one of the best in the sport.
A Running Game You Can Count On
Notre Dame had one of the most productive run games in college football last year. The Irish averaged 6.2 yards per run play – the seventh-best mark in FBS. They were well above average in both efficiency (43.2% success rate, compared to 39.8% nationally) and explosiveness (8.9% explosive run rate, compared to 6.9%). Their 4.3 yards gained before contact were sixth-most.
And Notre Dame’s offensive line wasn’t even that good last year. The Irish dealt with an endless series of injuries that started in fall camp, when starting left tackle Charles Jagusah tore his right pec. He missed the regular season and popped back into the lineup at guard in the Orange Bowl semifinal, a shockingly quick return. He only made that return because the rest of Notre Dame’s line was also ravaged by injury.
Both of Notre Dame’s starting guards missed time, and starting center Ashton Craig was out for the year after the first three games.
The result: Notre Dame gave up a 52.6% run disruption rate – a bottom-25 mark nationally. (The FBS average was 43%.) On more than half the Irish’s runs, a defender blew up a gap at the point of attack, forcing Notre Dame’s runners to adjust on the fly.
So they did. Quarterback Riley Leonard was a legit dual threat, averaging 6.1 yards per scramble and 5.6 per designed run. The Irish also had three really good running backs: Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price combined for 1,871 rushing yards in 2024. They averaged 6.9 and 6.4 yards per carry, respectively, while Aneyas Williams averaged 6.4.
It was arguably the best RB group in the sport, and all of those tailbacks are back.
Redshirt freshman C.J. Carr doesn’t have Leonard’s mobility at quarterback, but if you mix in a line that doesn’t resemble a hospital ward, this will be an outstanding run game again.
Finally, Wide Receivers
It’s been the same issue every year: Notre Dame just hasn’t had headlining wideouts.
The program’s last 1,000-yard pass catcher in a season was Chase Claypool in 2019, but that undersells the program’s lack of top-end production at the position.
Tight end Michael “Baby Gronk” Mayer had back-to-back 800-yard seasons in 2021 and 2022, but other than him, no Notre Dame target has even reached 750 yards in a season since 2019.
That streak is going to end this year, thanks to one of these players:
- Malachi Fields, a transfer from Virginia who’s coming off back-to-back 800-yard campaigns in an otherwise pretty hopeless Hoos offense
- Jaden Greathouse, who was third on the Irish in targets (55) but led the way with 592 yards and posted a standout 67.3% burn rate
- Will Pauling, an all-Big Ten receiver at Wisconsin in 2023 who transferred to South Bend this year and was quickly named a team captain
It’s the best Notre Dame receiving group in at least a half-decade, probably longer.
A QB Who Isn’t a Bigger Question Mark Than Anyone Else’s QB
Carr didn’t take a game snap as a true freshman. He injured his throwing elbow in practice early in the season, ceding the backup job the rest of the way to Steve Angeli.
Carr then won a three-way quarterback battle that unfolded between spring ball and fall camp, with Angeli transferring to Syracuse and sophomore Kenny Minchey taking second string. We know very little about Carr, other than that Notre Dame thinks he’s better than those two.
He was a highly sought-after four-star prospect in the class of 2024 and has stayed on schedule by winning the job this fall. That’s enough to be optimistic about, particularly in an environment in which only a handful of teams have quarterbacks who are definitively good and even most of those are somewhere short of great.
When the best quarterback in the sport might be Cade Klubnik, a promising redshirt freshman doesn’t leave the Irish so far behind.
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The post Notre Dame Predictions: Luck Has Nothing to Do With the Irish’s Title Chances appeared first on Opta Analyst.
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