Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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26 AUGUST 2023 BLUE & GOLD ILLUSTRATED more in 2021. Brunelle did not play at all in his lone season with the program. Peitsch played in one game in three sea- sons despite arriving as the No. 1 long snapper in the country per Kohl's. Every decision is different. The circum- stances are always unique. Brunelle landed on his feet at another superb institution in Yale, but he has only 4 career catches. Johnson went to UCF and is still search- ing for his first career catch. He went back into the portal in December. As of July, his destination was not announced. He might not ever get that first catch after all. Offord played in 12 games with nine starts at Buffalo in 2022. He had 30 tack- les, 2 tackles for loss and 1 interception. He also had 8 passes broken up, which would have been No. 1 on the Notre Dame roster. He's an example of a player understanding his situation and going to a smaller school to fulfill the need of playing time. Pyne, a career backup at Notre Dame who only started those 10 games be- cause Tyler Buchner went down with a severe shoulder injury, has a chance to do the same at the most important position in the sport. Some transfers are looked back on fondly. See: Pyne. He did all he could. Some are hardly remembered. The names of those players are for the reader to decide. HOMAGE TO MICHAEL MAYER If a class is only going to contain 17 signees, one of them better be an ab- solute head-turner. Michael Mayer was that and more for Notre Dame. Including tight ends, the Irish's class of 2020 only contained five pass catch- ers out of high school. Mayer, fellow tight end Kevin Bauman, Johnson, Brunelle and Xavier Watts. As docu- mented in the previous section, John- son and Brunelle transferred after one season. Watts has since made a posi- tion switch to safety. Bauman has been useful when healthy, but he missed 10 games with an ACL injury last year and did not crack the two-deep in his first two seasons. Mayer was the saving grace of the 2020 pass-catching contingent. All he did was catch 180 passes for 2,099 yards and 18 touchdowns in three seasons. No Notre Dame tight end has ever had better numbers in any of those three categories. The "graduating champions" shtick doesn't matter when speaking of a player like Mayer. It was evident after a successful first season he was going to hear his name called early in the NFL Draft following his junior season. He's the type of player who will forever be revered by blue-and-gold faithful. And if he famously returns to South Bend at any point to finish his degree like Jerome Bettis did in recent years, it'll make his success story even more en- dearing. He doesn't have to go about it like Bettis and come back decades later, though; Baltimore Ravens safety Kyle Hamilton was in South Bend this past spring to rack up more credits. He was a first-round draft choice in 2022 after his junior season in 2021. Mayer can do it the Bettis way. He can do it the Hamilton way. Heck, he can do it the Mayer way — whatever that may be. After one of the most stellar indi- vidual careers in Notre Dame history, he can do no wrong. "He's surefire," Freeman told NFL Network in April. "You know what you're getting in Michael Mayer. I've never been around a guy with such a lack of deficiencies. You hesitate to say that about a guy because someone is like, 'No, there is something wrong.' "No, Michael Mayer is a great prac- tice player. He's a great game player. Kevin Bauman is the oldest Irish tight end in a position group that contains six scholarship players. PHOTO BY CHAD WEAVER