Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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BLUEGOLDONLINE.COM SEPT. 13, 2025 9 UNDER THE DOME "He's a guy that's very confident. At some points, maybe a little bit over- confident. But you want that in your quarterback. You want the quarterback to say, 'I want the ball in my hands. Ev- ery play. When the game is on the line. And I believe that I'm going to make the right decision.' He has a lot of those intangibles outside the physical skill set that many people see that you want your quarterback to have." He's got the "it" factor. Kids nowa- days are calling it "aura." It doesn't matter what you call it. It just matters that the quarterback you're putting on the field possesses it. By all accounts, Carr does. It was essentially a tiebreaker in a competition as close as any Free- man has ever witnessed, and the hope for Notre Dame is that it shows up on Saturdays all fall long. "You want him to make good deci- sions," Freeman said. "Every play can't be a touchdown. Every play, it can't be a bomb. Trust the game plan. Trust what you see. Be who you are and win this play. I don't want to put a numerical expectation on him. "Be the best version of CJ Carr. Make those guys around you better. That's something he does really well; he raises the play of those guys around him through his words, through his actions, through his competitive spirit. Be that guy." If he is that guy, the Fighting Irish are in business. FROM CARR'S PERSPECTIVE Exactly one week after it happened, Carr didn't even remember the day of the week he was named Notre Dame's starting quarterback. But he remembers every ensuing phone call. One of the first went out to his prede- cessor — Riley Leonard. Leonard's message was more self- assuring than invigorating. There isn't much a redshirt freshman as confident as Carr, not yet mentally accosted by the pressure cooker of the title he now holds, needs to be told to get into the right headspace. "Just be myself," Carr said Leonard told him. "Go out there and let it loose. You've practiced and prepared for the last two years for this moment com- ing up and the moments to come. And, you're ready." Ready as he'll ever be. He's never done this before, leading a college foot- ball team onto a field as QB1. Heck, he's never even attempted a pass in a college football game. All those feels of who he was at Saline (Mich.) High School before this — basi- cally the man, the myth and the legend, being that he was Lloyd Carr's grandson at a school 20 minutes south of Ann Ar- bor — had to have come rushing back, though, after Freeman called him into his office early last week to break the news that he'd be starting against the Hurricanes. What day was that, again? Inconse- quential. Carr is No. 1 on a depth chart again, a place that's always felt like home. Those feelings of his past life, one that made him the highly heralded recruit who made good on projections and became a collegiate starter sooner than later, actually probably never went anywhere all along. This is who he is. His personal life hasn't changed in the last week and a half despite the life-changing tag of Notre Dame starter getting slapped next to his name. "It's not that different; you're really in that building right there for most of the day," Carr said, gesturing to the Guglielmino Athletics Complex. Doing it in high school is one thing and doing it in college is another. Carr's aware of that. But he's also got a certain unflappability about him — a calm presence that grabs your undi- vided attention if you're with him for so long as a few seconds — that makes you wonder, is it really so different after all? Isn't this kid just going to let it rip in his very first start and turn heads from the very beginning? That is the way he wants it to be, any- way. "I'm really excited about his eager- ness to kind of dive in the deep end," Notre Dame offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock said. "He wants a lot of re- sponsibility. He wants it on his shoul- ders. And that's obviously what you want from someone who's as competi- tive as he is and plays the quarterback position." Competitiveness. That's the thing, in Carr's own point of view, that separated him from his offseason quarterback competition sparring partner, Minchey. It's not that Minchey isn't competitive; Carr said the two pushed each other on and off the field all year. The battle was as close as Freeman and anyone else of importance let on. It's just that Carr is ultra-competi- tive. There isn't much he won't do to win, if anything. He said he walked out of the final scrimmage of fall camp thinking, "I gave myself a really good shot to be named [the starter]." And he was correct. "My willingness to come in here ev- ery day and get better and compete my butt off has really helped me in football throughout my whole career," Carr said. Even with all that's been said and done since the start of camp, since the day Carr arrived on campus as an early enrollee in December 2023, he's still hu- man. He admitted a mental anchor was uprooted from his day-to-day when he got the nod from Freeman. Because if he didn't get that nod, well, his life would be way too similar to what it was in the fall of 2024 when he stood on the sideline for every single Notre Dame game. Yeah, he'd be the backup instead of the fourth-stringer, but not starting is not starting. Starting is starting, meanwhile. And Carr's doing it. He's been a football guy all his life, and he's started plenty of football games before. But these first two of 2025 are bigger. He couldn't be more excited to be a part of it — a big part of it. ✦ "I just had to make a difficult decision, and I had to trust my gut a little bit. What I felt like we needed going into Week 1 against this opponent was who will be able to handle that decision the right way. I think all of those things played into my decision." HEAD COACH MARCUS FREEMAN ON NAMING CARR THE STARTER