What an eventful couple of weeks it has been for Marcus Freeman and the Notre Dame football program. The transfer portal opened on Monday, January 5th, with the Irish missing out on several early targets – or possibly just one-ish, we’ll get back to that in a bit, but whatever the behind-the-scenes story the vibes among the fan base were as dark as they’ve been in a long time. The College Football Playoff rug-yank in early December, followed by the two teams who most notably didn’t belong looking as terrible as we thought they would*, followed by NFL speculation about Freeman and uncertainty about his extension status, followed by an apparently lackluster opening to transfer portal recruiting that included Indiana surprisingly snagging Notre Dame’s top target, followed by the release of gut-wrenching footage of the team’s real-time reaction to the playoff snub from Peacock’s Here Come the Irish series, and capped off with a breathless headline from the South Bend Tribune about Freeman being accused of assaulting someone at a weekend wrestling event…

* Who could possibly have foreseen that Alabama, who rushed for -3 yards in the SEC championship game, would get stonewalled by an Indiana defense that had stymied Ohio State? Who, I ask you? No I’m not still bitter, why do you ask?

The mood was, charitably, ugly. In fact, the mood was so ugly that the dean of the Notre Dame football beat, Tim Prister, posted an article with the headline “When the Walls Come Tumbling Down” on the morning of Tuesday, January 6th. (Those of you who are careful readers may notice that this is barely over 24 hours after when we said the transfer portal officially opened.) Such a quick and dramatic reaction from a message board poster would be de rigeur, but from an actual beat writer, and the most veteran one on the beat at that, a guy who started at third base for the Irish for two years and knows D1 college sports? My goodness something must truly be rotten in Denmark for such a thing to occur. Message board posters called for the summary dismissal of GM Mike Martin, and some went so far as to say Freeman should go too for dereliction of duty. Really, really bad vibes, although even at that stage there were some hints that it was overblown.

Starting on Monday of this week and running into today, like Hulk Hogan raising an angry finger in the air just when he seemed about to pass out, Marcus got up off the mat and pulled a DDT into an RKO into a Stone Cold Stunner into a chokeslam into, yes, a power bomb.

Are those wrestling moves real? They’re about as real as the assault accusation from the erstwhile genuine wrestler who got mouthy with Freeman’s son – really – and concocted a story of how he was brutally accosted by the uncontrolled coach. The police reviewed the accusation, reviewed the three very different accounts from the accuser and his two friends, and watched the video, and probably rolled their eyes about the time they had wasted. As one 247 poster noted, go ahead and watch the video yourself, but all you’re going to see is a guy walking through a doorway. That’s it. Just like the early fears of transfer portal failure, this story ended up being much sound and fury signifying nothing – and the cherry on the sundae was Freeman’s press conference yesterday, in which he made his attachment to Notre Dame very clear.

You may have seen an answer to ND Insider’s Tyler Horka that sounded somewhat non-committal. What you likely didn’t see is Freeman’s full answer, or that Horka’s question was the third time someone asked him the same thing and he was visibly annoyed, or probably the other two answers, one to Eric Hansen and one to WSBT’s Pete Byrne. First, Horka’s full question and the response:

Q: Same line of questioning as Eric Hansen, which can only be a good thing. When it relates to the NFL, we’ve heard what you talk about, what it means for your program for that interest to be in you from the league. For you personally, what kind of interest do you have? I know you just turned 40, and you have your whole career ahead of you. Do you want to be an NFL head coach someday? And can you see that for yourself?

A: Do I want to be? I mean, I don’t really — I’ve never done it. I don’t know if it will — I don’t know enough about it. It may be sometime in the future, if it’s, if it’s the right time and it’s what I think is right for me, then maybe I’ll pursue it. But I don’t love wasting time thinking about things that aren’t right in front of me.

And so I don’t know what I’ll want in however many length of time, how much length of time from now, I don’t know. But I know right now that I am as convicted and motivated to being the best head coach of the Notre Dame football program as I can be.

Here is WSBT sports director Pete Byrne’s question, which was the first one Freeman fielded and came very early in the press conference:

Q: You can’t control what people say about you or when people talk about you — I think I heard your name mentioned 20 times yesterday when an NFL job opened up. I’m just curious in your words if you could share with us your plans for the immediate future.

A: I’m the head coach at Notre Dame. I said this before that individual recognition, individual success, NFL interest — those are all reflections of team success, right? And where this football program is. You know, Pete, I’ve used some of the interest from the NFL to personally gain wisdom from maybe some of the GMs or the front office executives that you get a chance to talk to about your players, but also about what they view is a successful coach.

Maybe it’s an NFL coach, but what are some of the things they’ve seen that have made a coach successful in their organization or franchise, and maybe not so successful? And so I utilize these opportunities, through conversations, to gain knowledge myself, to be the best head coach I can be of the Notre Dame football program. And so again, that’s where my mindset is. I don’t control the noise. But again, I know the noise that’s in my head and where my focus is.

Then a bit later there was a similar question from (I think) Eric Hansen:

Q: I want to circle back to your future, and I want to know how much of it was interest or curiosity on your part. Do you feel like you’re here at Notre Dame for the long-term or this is going to be an annual thing where you need to reevaluate?

A: I think I didn’t have to reevaluate, right? And other people may say I reevaluate. I didn’t ever have to reevaluate it. Again, the only statement I put out was, ‘Let’s run it back.’ And I was intentional about that. Like, I don’t need to come out with a statement every time one of these job openings happen. You know I’ll always say the future is uncertain. That’s what I tell our players — is what I tell myself. It’s the reality of life. But everything I want and everything that I need personally can be achieved right here as the head coach of this program.

And so I hope this is something we have to address every year. I really do, because it means we’re having a lot of success, right here, at Notre Dame. And if this isn’t something we’d have to address, then there’s bigger issues, I think, within what we’re doing as a football program. As your program has success, these types of things are going to occur.

That feels pretty definitive, and you can understand why he might have been a bit exasperated when Horka asked the question again.

So anyway, what transfers did the Irish actually get? With all this noise we lost sight of what the actual point of this article is, which is an excellent metaphor for the transfer portal season.

The Players

We’ll list all inbound players, notable misses, and outbound players here. Inbound players will be listed with their remaining eligibility inclusive of 2026, outbound players and notable misses will be listed with their destination school, and all players will be listed with their 247 transfer portal prospect rating. The rating is an inexact science at best, obviously, but it’s something. Finally, take a broad definition of “misses” – it’s a mix of true misses, sort-of misses, and maybe-the-interest-was-all-from-the-agent. Heady times we live in.

Inbound

  • DT Tionne Gray, 0.9400, Oregon, three years
  • WR Quincy Porter, 0.9400, Ohio State, three years
  • DT Francis Brewu, 0.9300, Pitt, two years
  • DE Keon Keeley, 0.9300, Alabama, two years
  • CB Jayden Sanders, 0.9200, Michigan, three years
  • CB DJ McKinney, 0.9100, Colorado, one year
  • WR Mylan Graham, 0.8900, Ohio State, three years
  • DT Armel Mukam, NR, Notre Dame, two years
  • K Spencer Porath, NR, Purdue, two years

With one day remaining for players to enter the portal, Notre Dame currently has the highest average portal player rating in the country. The reports of the program’s demise, as it turns out, were an exaggeration. Notre Dame addressed all of its primary needs in a very loud fashion and almost all of its secondary needs, with backup quarterback being the one spot they came up truly empty. The staff came into the portal window hoping to find a quarterback that had some experience but was willing to hold a clipboard for CJ Carr; as you might imagine, that’s an exceedingly narrow needle to thread. While the undergraduate transfer portal window closes tommorrow graduates still have no restrictions on transferring, so that could well be a spot the staff revisits after spring practice.

Everywhere else, boy oh boy. As a longtime Notre Dame fan – the 1993 Florida State game was the first one I watched on TV – there are two things about this list of players that are quite salient. First, it’s objectively true that only one of the eight transfer portal wins from other schools is a graduate transfer. That’s a very welcome shock; as Freeman noted in his presser yesterday, more flexibility on undergrad transfers was necessary for the program to stay competitive. The administration has yielded a bit on undergrads in recent years, but the floodgates opened this year. Second, it’s subjectively highly likely that most of these players got paid. We won’t go into the numbers that are floating around because it’s all rumor and conjecture, but common sense can give you a rough idea of who got what anyway. It wasn’t just money, Notre Dame still won’t win those prospects over, but Notre Dame was able to go toe-to-toe with some big players and make more competitive offers. Gray had no shortage of suitors. Tennessee, who as we’ll get into below took DT Xavier Gilliam from the Irish and has been throwing money around like candy, lost out on Brewu. Ohio State tried hard to get Porter and Graham back, and in a bit of delicious irony their fans have lamented that the Irish got the kids who are all about the bag.

Yes Irish fans, you are indeed finally the baddies on the recruiting trail.

Gray is an absolutely massive interior lineman, listed at 6’6″ and 336 pounds. He had a four-game redshirt in 2024 as a true freshman and last year played in 13 of Oregon’s 15 games, including extensive run in the playoff against James Madison, Texas Tech, and Indiana. He’s immediately the best true nose guard on the team.

Porter just wrapped his freshman season with the Buckeyes. Notre Dame recruited the former consensus five-star heavily in the 2025 cycle before losing him to Brian Hartline and Ohio State. Porter is a classic boundary receiver at 6’4″ and 210 pounds, and pairs a massive catch radius with sure hands and plus athleticism. He isn’t the fastest guy but he’s a nightmare to cover.

Brewu was an absolutely huge pickup, as the first DT in this portal class when the Irish very sorely needed one. At 6’2″ and 285 he doesn’t have the mass of Gray but he has absurd strength and quickness; he draws comparisons to Howard Cross, but his physical traits are probably slightly better. He’s a disruptor.

Keeley needs no introduction to Irish fans, certainly, given that he once headlined the 2023 class before flipping to Alabama. It was reportedly an emotional reunion with Freeman when he made his official visit to Notre Dame last week. Keeley came on slowly in his three years at Alabama, but they also moved him around a bit and had him add weight, and the transition from Saban to the less-structured DeBoer may not have been positive for him. Like Gray, he came on towards the end of the season and was noticeable in Alabama’s stretch run.

Sanders put up very solid production as a true freshman at Michigan last year, and they were not happy to see him go. This pickup may seem unnecessary at first, but consider that Leonard Moore and Christian Gray will both be gone after this season and that Notre Dame’s two primary corners have been among the team leaders in snaps the last couple of seasons. It’s clear the room would benefit from some depth.

McKinney takes the room from deep to ridiculous. He’s highly experienced, appearing in 40 games for Colorado and Oklahoma State, and showcases excellent man coverage skills; as ISD’s Jamie Uyeyama pointed out, McKinney has allowed just a 43% completion rate in man. In 2024 as the guy opposite Travis Hunter, McKinney posted 44 solo tackles, 3 INTs (including a pick six), 1 FF, 3.0 TFLs, and 9 PBUs. In 2025 he missed three-plus games with injury but still posted 5 PBUs and an INT, this time as the guy offenses stayed away from. He’s a producer.

Graham is another guy Notre Dame recruited heavily out of high school. He liked Notre Dame then but reportedly was concerned about keeping up on the academic side. His off-field work drew glowing reviews at Ohio State; while he hadn’t broken out yet there, he was stuck behind three NFL receivers and he still has elite athletic traits that don’t exist in any one guy in the Irish WR room right now. He was hosted by fellow Fort Wayne native and good friend Tae Johnson on his visit last week. Smart.

Mukam is technically retention versus a transfer portal win, but he did enter the portal and take official visits to Georgia Tech and Virginia. In yesterday’s presser Freeman had a great comment on that development:

Armel isn’t a guy we wanted to leave. At the end of the day, you have to support these young people. When he decided to go into the portal and visit a couple places, I was fully supportive of Armel. If he went somewhere else, I was going to be his biggest fan. But when he called in and said, Coach, I want to reconsider and come back. We had a need, I know he’ll help this football team. And so without hesitation, I told him we want him back.

Not hard to see why kids want to play for him.

Finally, Spencer Porath was a critical addition to the group. With Noah Burnette gone and no clear picture on how to get stability at kicker next year, grabbing one in the portal was absolutely crucial. For Purdue last year Porath was 24/24 on extra points and 15/17 on field goals, going 2/3 from 50+, 4/5 from 40-49, and 9/9 under 40 yards. Yes please. An interesting wrinkle here, incidentally, is that he wasn’t in the portal (which means he can’t be recruited, not that he can’t transfer). We don’t know the full story but likely either he reached out to Notre Dame himself or there was some kind of conversation between intermediaries.

Notable Misses

  • DT James Smith, 0.9600, Ohio State
  • DT Mateen Ibirogba, 0.9600, Texas Tech
  • WR Reed Harris, 0.9400, Arizona State
  • WR Nick Marsh, 0.9400, Indiana
  • DT Xavier Gilliam, 0.9400, Tennessee
  • CB Jontez Williams, 0.9300, USC
  • DE John Henry Daley, 0.9300, Michigan
  • DE Qua Russaw, 0.9300, Ohio State
  • TE Brody Foley, 0.9200, Louisville

Smith and Russaw, who played together in high school and at Alabama, were an unbreakable package deal. Notre Dame wanted Smith but not Russaw and they tried to make their case, but it wasn’t happening. The Irish accelerated with Gray after missing out on Smith.

Losing Ibirogba to Texas Tech is the one that really sent some fans into a spiral, but I was always skeptical of how much interest the staff actually had in him. He never visited Notre Dame; it was reported a couple of times that he had a tentative visit set up, but those reports very likely weren’t sourced from the Irish staff. I very strongly suspect that the narrative was agent-driven. He’s the #2 DT in 247’s transfer portal rankings behind Smith, so somebody clearly thinks he has potential, but… Ibirogba played two seasons at FCS Georgetown, where he was good but not dominant, before transferring to Wake Forest. He took a four-game redshirt in 2024 and then played in all 12 games in 2025 but had zero starts, while racking up all of 3.5 TFLs. He might be good for Tech, we’ll see, but limited production in your fourth year of college football isn’t a great sign. Good on him (and his agent) for securing the bag though.

The staff was interested in Reed Harris, who was solid for Boston College, but we’re not sure how seriously interested and in any case it doesn’t seem that Harris was all that interested in Notre Dame. We can’t fault him for moving from Boston to Tempe though.

Nick Marsh was a definite loss, and one that stings for a few reasons. Porter and Graham are great pickups and likely have more long-term upside, but Marsh is more of a sure thing for 2026 and that would’ve been a big boost. He’s from Michigan and is good friends with CJ Carr, which might have helped, but unfortunately he never made it to his Notre Dame visit because Kurt Cignetti told him the Hoosiers’ offer expired when he walked out the door and he took it. Reportedly his agent was furious with Cignetti, but it is what it is. The irony here is that if reports are to be believed, Notre Dame gave Porter the same money that Indiana gave Marsh. So had he asked, he likely would’ve gotten it. Alas.

The staff really liked Gilliam, who was productive as a redshirt freshman at Penn State in 2025, but ultimately he chose to follow former Penn State DC Jim Knowles to Tennessee. Varying stories are out there about what drove Gilliam to Knoxville, but ultimately it’s probably a mix of familiarity, comfort, and urgency.

Williams is another case where I think the fans were much more up in arms about it than the staff, and given that they landed Sanders and McKinney the staff was right to be placid. Notre Dame wanted Williams at nickel, USC wanted him as outside corner. It’s as simple as that. The Irish did fine in the end.

John Henry Daley put up some big numbers at Utah but also had some kind of unspecified Achilles injury in November of last year and is older, as he went on his LDS mission straight out of high school. He visited Notre Dame but reportedly left without an offer, and eventually decided to follow Kyle Whittingham to Michigan.

Finally, Brody Foley was another source of significant fan angst as an early-window failure. The staff canceled his visit right as he was getting on the road, which led even some of the more level-headed beat writers to wonder who was minding the store. Given the knowledge they all had of Freeman and Martin they might have paused for a bit, but instead their consternation added fuel to the fans’ flames. Allegedly, as it turns out, Foley and Notre Dame had rough financial parameters in place and when the Irish lost out on Marsh Foley’s representation contacted the staff and asked for WR1 money, since they now had some to spend. This (again, allegedly) went over like a lead balloon, as you might expect, and the staff canceled the visit on the spot.

Outbound

  • QB Kenny Minchey, 0.9200, Kentucky
  • DE Joshua Burnham, 0.8900, Indiana
  • S JaDon Blair, 0.8700, Missouri
  • CB Karson Hobbs, 0.8700, Florida State
  • CB Cree Thomas, 0.8700, Colorado
  • LB Bodie Kahoun, 0.8600, Boston College
  • LB Anthony Sacca, 0.8600, UCLA
  • WR KK Smith, 0.8600, Michigan State
  • S Taebron Bennie-Poweel, 0.8500, Boise State
  • RB Gi’Bran Payne, 0.8500, Cincinnati
  • WR Scrap Richardson, NR, no destination yet
  • S Ben Minich, NR, Miami-Ohio
  • QB Anthony Rezac, NR, South Dakota State
  • CB Chance Tucker, NR, no destination yet
  • LB Preston Zinter, NR, Rice

Minchey had a handshake deal in place with Nebraska and the next day signed with Kentucky, who you may remember had tapped Oregon OC/QB whisperer Will Stein to be their next head coach. Tough business. The staff would’ve loved to keep Burnham but they saw him as a two-down player, which is supported by PFF’s “true pass set” metrics, and he of course wanted to be a three-down player. Other than that, the list is older guys who paid their dues to get a Notre Dame degree and are now looking for a chance to play, or younger guys who have been passed by even younger guys.

The list of destinations pretty much tells you what you need to know. Which is not a knock on those guys – we of course wish them well and many of them were at the very least a key part of building the culture that is so important to Freeman and the program. All told though we have 15 players leaving and only one of them, Burnham, is headed to a team that has played in the 12-team playoff.