Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa on Track to Play for Notre Dame Football Against Rice

Star Notre Dame linebacker Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa is on track to play Saturday against Rice. Marcus Freeman said Thursday that the junior linebacker got through a full week of practice and that Notre Dame is optimistic about having him available, with the expectation that his contribution Saturday will come in a limited capacity.

“Yeah, Kyngstonn’s done a great job. He’s practiced well. Again, he’s been working to the point where he can play,” Freeman said when asked how Viliamu-Asa had practiced this week. “So he had a really good week of practice. Right now, we’re optimistic that he’ll be able to go on Saturday and be able to help us some.”

Notre Dame is planning for a limited role Saturday, not a starter’s volume of snaps. Viliamu-Asa, in his third season on the roster, put up 48 tackles, 7.5 tackles for loss, three sacks, two pass breakups, and an interception in 2025, a jump from the 38 tackles and three tackles for loss he recorded in 2024. Viliamu-Asa is a preseason All-American, but Notre Dame isn’t expecting, and doesn’t need, him to play at that level on an every-down basis this weekend.

A Return Notre Dame Can Manage

The program has run this play before. Notre Dame brought tight end Mitchell Evans back slowly in 2024 rather than dropping a full workload on him the moment he was cleared, and the same approach fits here. A handful of strategic snaps against Rice does the job, and nothing about Saturday requires finding out yet whether Viliamu-Asa can handle a full workload.

The schedule gives Notre Dame room to do it that way. Four games – Michigan State, Purdue, North Carolina, and Stanford – sit between Saturday and the Oct. 17 trip to BYU in Provo, which leaves a month to add snaps a week at a time. If Viliamu-Asa takes a small number of snaps against Rice, more against Michigan State, more at Purdue and North Carolina, and more against Stanford on Oct. 10, he arrives in Provo at full capacity instead of being asked to find it on the fly.

Discipline Over Volume

Rice complicates the “just get him a few reps” plan, because there is no such thing as a low-stress snap against a triple-option team.

“It still has principles that carry over when you prepare for Navy or Army, any of the triple-option offenses, but the biggest difference being they do a lot of stuff out of gun,” Freeman said when asked how Rice’s triple option stresses a defense differently than Navy’s. “But there’s going to be a good amount of plays that you’ve got to have somebody accounted for: the dive, the quarterback, and the pitch.”

Asked how he prepares his defensive backs for Rice’s play action without taking them out of the run game, Freeman put eye discipline at the center of the answer. Viliamu-Asa isn’t a defensive back, but Freeman’s answer speaks to the challenge of defending the option for any defender.

“So if you don’t have disciplined eyes and you start trying to do something that’s not your job, that’s when big plays occur. And so eye discipline is the most important key to accomplishing your responsibility.”

Behind the Starters

One of the players expected to handle some of Viliamu-Asa’s snaps against Wisconsin was sophomore Madden Faraimo, but that didn’t happen against the Badgers.

“As far as Madden didn’t play linebacker last game, just the game itself didn’t give us the opportunity to do that,” Freeman said. “But he was at linebacker, but he was valuable on special teams. He did some really good things in the special teams phases. And he’s really doing a good job as a linebacker.”

Nothing about that usage reads as a demotion, and Freeman did not frame it as one. “And so we want to play everybody. But at the end of the day, we have a plan for certain guys and who’s going out there on offense and defense and whose role is going to be on special teams,” he said. “But he was absolutely important for us to achieve the victory that we achieved on Saturday in his role. It was crucial.”

Faraimo had 16 tackles, three tackles for loss, and two sacks last season. He is in the linebacker plan. So is Viliamu-Asa, in whatever dose Saturday allows. What Notre Dame needs out of the next month is a linebacker rotation it can actually lean on in Provo: Viliamu-Asa ramped up to a real workload rather than eased into one on short notice, and Faraimo’s role settled enough that a game plan can count on him at linebacker and not just on special teams.