Inside Notre Dame’s Offense: CJ Carr and Mike Denbrock See the Same Picture

CJ Carr is entering his third season in Mike Denbrock’s offense, and by now Notre Dame’s quarterback and his coordinator can settle most things with a look.

“Yeah, going into my third year with Den now, it’s been unbelievable,” Carr said during game-week availability ahead of Sunday’s opener against Wisconsin at Lambeau Field. “And I feel like we can kind of read each other’s minds a little bit. We’ll see a look in practice, and I’ll kind of just look over and he’ll give me the look, and I’m like, okay, we got it. We’re good.”

“And so being able to have that kind of connection with the guy after a couple years in the offense feels really good, feels really comfortable,” Carr said. “So excited to see what we do come Week 1.”

Carr threw for 2,741 yards with 24 touchdowns against six interceptions as a first-year starter last season, all of it while the offense was still being installed around him. Heading into Week 1, that part is finished. Carr was asked where the offense is better now than it was when camp opened.

“Yeah, I think with just the reps that we’ve had and the comfortability that we have within the scheme from top to bottom has been really good,” Carr said. “So there are definitely advantages to, you know, honing in on a team and really preparing for them.”

Camp reps and game-week reps ask different things of a quarterback. Notre Dame’s Week 1 depth chart answered most of the questions about who Carr will be working with, though right guard remains unsettled. Against Wisconsin, the list of answers is short and the reasoning behind each call gets explained.

Denbrock’s offense still starts from the run game, but what Carr is describing is speed — how fast the offense gets from a look to the right answer.

What Wisconsin Puts on Them

Denbrock was asked about the Badgers’ secondary and spent most of his answer in the box.

“Yeah, I mean, I think they mix up their coverages really well. I think they do a really good job with that,” Denbrock said. “So, we’re going to have to be on top of recognizing that. We’re going to have to do a great job in the run game of identifying when we’ve got to block safeties instead of corners and how they’re kind of constructing their run fits so they don’t out-hat us in the box and things like that.”

The weekly preparation for that is volume.

“Yeah, I mean, that’s kind of part of our weekly prep, where we kind of give them the full gamut of the coverage spectrum and make sure we’re all on the same page, whether that’s some of that’s walkthrough, some of that’s live reps, some of that’s against our own defense because they do a lot of the same things in some cases,” Denbrock said. “So, across the board, just making sure we give them the different looks that they can see.”

Jordan Faison led Notre Dame with 49 catches for 640 yards and four touchdowns last season. He sees the same problem from the receiver side.

“They got a lot of transfers in the secondary, so everything we see is going to be new,” Faison said. “Obviously, we get to see what their defense is, kind of the shapes and whatnot. But as far as players, it’s all new guys. So it’s going to be a fun challenge.”

What the Film Can’t Show

That is the split Notre Dame is working with. The scheme is on tape. The players running it are not.

“We watched a bunch of Wisconsin from last year, tried to watch a little bit of the new transfers that they’ve got, just some personnel tape, and treating it as similarly as you can to a normal week,” Carr said. “Obviously, it’s not. Got to be prepared for them to come out and they’re in a whole different plan against us, but we’ll see.”

Wisconsin’s first few series will show Notre Dame shapes it has studied, run by defensive backs it has never seen run them. Carr will have to diagnose and adjust in real time, without the recognition cues that come from watching specific players line up and rotate on film all week.

Notre Dame knows what Wisconsin runs. Finding out who is running it is a first-quarter job, and Carr and Denbrock have three years of practice at doing that without saying anything.