Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM OCT. 26, 2024 17 me,'" Hurleman said. "I wanna play as many snaps as I can. How else can I get on the field?'" Hurleman became a gunner on the punt team. He played on kickoff. He played on kickoff return. For every rep possible, he was there. At the end of the 2023 season, the Pa- triot League named Hurleman its special teams player of the year. On offense, he didn't need the ball to make an impact. "He was happy enough just to go out there and try and knock DBs on their a--," Colgate strength coach Dakota Daily said. "That was his whole thing." Of course, he wasn't done. When Hurleman arrived in South Bend, he walked into Biagi's office and asked him, point blank, how he could play at Notre Dame. He didn't have to ask twice. "It happened pretty quick," Biagi said. "Then it just got to the point, obviously, where we go, 'Hey this is a guy that can, not just contribute, but really be a core four person.'" RUNNING THROUGH A WALL Hurleman committed to Notre Dame March 12. With three months until he would enroll in the summer, he met with Daily and went to work. "I kind of took over his transition into that world," Daily said. "I said, 'We're just gonna get you as fast and as strong as possible.'" Daily put Hurleman on a train- ing program with four to five days of workouts each week. Two of those days were "high days," which featured in- tense lower-body training. Hurleman endured maximum-effort bilateral and single-leg workouts, after intense sprinting and distance running on the field. The other days were "low days," which focused on recovering his legs and strengthening his arms. By the end of his program, Hurleman was handling weights that only linemen at Colgate had touched. He hit athletic testing numbers Daily hadn't seen from him before. "He didn't really have an ounce of fat on him half the time, but he was out there grinding, and when nobody was looking," Daily said. Hurleman squatted about 460-465 pounds at Colgate, and he benched 300 and cleaned 275. He was not tall, so he set out to be as strong, athletic and ex- plosive as he could be. His work ethic, his dad recalled, was apparent from a young age. Hurleman woke up at 5 a.m. to deliver newspapers from the time he was 11 years old until high school graduation. He lives for the weight room, and if there were 90 of him, Daily's job would be easy. He would sometimes " bro out," as Daily described it, and sneak in some curls in front of the mirror. But that was 100 percent fine. "I could tell him to run through a wall and he would do it," Daily said. "He al- ways wanted to be in here. He was al- ways pushing himself, always going above whatever his number was sup- posed to be for that day." At Notre Dame, Hurleman immedi- ately saw results from his spring training. After his first summer workout at the Guglielmino Athletics Complex, Hurleman's testing numbers were up there with Notre Dame's starters. He has always been confident in himself, but that day reinforced the idea that he belonged on the field. "If I see my name right next to them, I'm like, 'Hell yeah,'" Hurleman said. "Or there are instances where I'm beat- ing a lot of those guys, and I'm like, 'Hey, why not? I can clearly do this.'" As he began to make a name for himself, his dad cautioned him to stay humble. "You're not a four-star," Jason Hurleman told his son. "You're not a five-star. You might not even have any stars next to your name. You gotta work hard every day." He did. And when Notre Dame's kickoff team trotted onto the field for the opening kickoff Aug. 31 in front of 110,000 people at Kyle Field in College Station, Texas, there was No. 37, ready to go. 'A LITTLE DELUSIONAL' Notre Dame's pregame warmups end with a punt. The punt returner jogs out toward midfield, all alone. The punt team boots it away, and while the return man tracks it through the air, all 100-plus players run to mob him and huddle up before heading back to the locker room. On Sept. 28, as the green-clad Irish pre- pared for a season-defining game against Louisville, they mobbed Hurleman. "Completely humbling, from our per- spective," Jason Hurleman said. "What he's accomplished has certainly ex- ceeded my expectations." Hurleman has the athleticism to return punts for Notre Dame, but he earned the job by earning his coaches' trust. Biagi pointed to a return during the 49-7 win over Stanford in which Hurleman could have let the ball bounce toward the goal line, but he picked it up and put the Irish at the 18-yard line instead of around the 7. Near the shadow of your own goal line, those 11 yards make a world of difference. "My special teams coach at Colgate, he was very ada- mant on being a smart decision-maker," Hurleman said. "Trying to get the 10-yard average and then just making smart deci- sions. … Just get the ball to the offense." In securing the punt returner role, Hurleman further solidified his sta- tus as a significant player on the Irish. Notre Dame head coach Marcus Free- man explained that he's a textbook ex- ample of recruiting outside the 85-man scholarship limit, and why he hopes college football never loses that. "Max has been an amazing addition to our program," Freeman said. "He fits this place, but he's also a really good football player that came in here with the right mindset and has earned every- thing he's gotten." Hurleman has no plans to slow down any time soon, but he does look back on his time in the transfer portal and what others told him — from a good place, of course — about his chances to play at Notre Dame. He laughs about it now, but there were people who "gave their two cents" into Hurleman's choice to join the Irish. Even he admits that at the time, it seemed a little crazy. "To make a decision like this, maybe you need to be a little delusional and have a lit- tle irrational confidence," Hurleman said. It's becoming more rational by the week for Hurleman. ✦ "He fits this place, but he's also a really good football player that came in here with the right mindset and has earned everything he's gotten." HEAD COACH MARCUS FREEMAN ON HURLEMAN