Notre Dame will enter the 2025 football campaign the same way it finished last season, with hopes of returning to the National Championship game. A large portion of last year’s success came under the leadership of quarterback Riley Leonard, who has since taken his talent to the NFL. Leonard’s replacement is undoubtedly the most significant question mark surrounding this year’s fall camp. Who will be QB1 at Miami to begin the season: Kenny Minchey or CJ Carr?
“They will determine who’s the starting quarterback.” Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman stated. “We want to see guys that are consistent. We want our quarterbacks, all of them, to be consistent, but who can be the most consistent, who can take care of the football, and who can continue to keep our offense moving forward.”
“Today was day one,” Freeman said after Thursday’s practice. “We will grade it every day. We’ll put them in similar challenging situations. They’ll rotate between groups, and at some point, when a starter is ready to be named, we will have to name one.”
After two practices, both quarterbacks were consistently inconsistent. Carr finished Thursday’s practice with three interceptions while Minchey threw one of his own.
“Yesterday (Thursday) we had a bunch of turnovers in the quarterback room,” Carr admitted. “But I think if you looked at the overall picture, we had a lot of explosives from Kenny and I both. The receivers look good, the backs look good, and I think that’s attributed to just being able to reload and play the next play.”
Other than coach Freeman, the next most crucial onlooker who noticed those turnovers at practice was offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock. Like Carr, coach Denbrock took the bad plays with the good.
“Yesterday was a little bumpy at times,” Denbrock confessed. “That’ll happen sometimes. There’s some feast and famine moments, especially early in camp until you get your feet back on the ground and underneath you. They haven’t had a whole lot of live snaps where they could kind of experience some failure.”
Inexperience is an understatement as Carr and Minchey have only three college completions combined, with all three coming by way of Minchey, so mistakes should be expected early on. What they do after making those mistakes is something the Notre Dame staff will be evaluating over the next couple of weeks.
“It was fun yesterday, even though it wasn’t fun to see the turnovers,” Denbrock stated. “It was fun to see how their response was on the next play. I think in either young man’s situation, he bounced right back and made an explosive play. That is what you want to see. Eliminate the turnovers but have the ability and the resiliency to bounce back in tough situations.”
Reloading quickly is something Minchey attributes as one of his strengths. For him, moving forward after a letdown goes beyond the football field. It is a part of his makeup.
“I feel like I don’t let football as a whole define me, so I’m not going to let one singular play, whether good or bad,” Minchey admitted. “If it’s a good play, that’s great. I’m going to celebrate with my teammates, but I’m not going to let that blow my head up. And if it is a bad play, I know that it’s not going to define me as a person. I feel like that is my foundation for not letting myself get too high or too low.”
For Carr, reloading is a work in progress, but it is something he believes he has improved upon.
“I think that is something I struggled with in the past,” Carr admitted. “I’m a very competitive person and when it doesn’t go your way, you just want to know why right away. The issue is when you’re out there in the second period of team, and you throw a pick, it’s like you don’t have time to go out and watch the tape. You have to go play the next play. I think that’s a place I’ve grown.”
One play, one life is something coach Freeman has preached since he’s been at Notre Dame, so it is no surprise that Minchey and Carr feel the urgency to have the ability of reloading in their arsenal. And while each of them may have demonstrated that ability at Thursday’s practice, quarterback coach Gino Guidugli said, although they do have some similarities, they also have some differences.
“Both guys are really good in their routine and their preparation,” Guidugli said of their commonalities, “Both have really high football I.Q.s. It means a lot to the of them. Both of them have a lot of arm talent. CJ’s probably a little more vocal than Kenny is, and Kenny is probably a little more athletic than CJ.
“All in all, we have two really good quarterbacks that compete their butt off,” Guidugli continued. “And at the end of the day when we do have to name one, that guy is going to be better because of this competition and we are going to be a better team because of the competition.”
