UHND.com - Notre Dame Football, Basketball, & Recruiting

MONEY
Reports are that Marcus Freeman’s new contract is in the range of $10M annually. The average NFL head coach salaries are roughly $6.5 - $7 million per year, with mid-to-high contracts in the $10M range. Freeman’s contract with Notre Dame certainly seems to be fairly equal to what he would make as an NFL head coach, so money ought not to be a major motivation for moving.

PRESTIGE
Todd Bowles, Brian Callahan, David Cullet, Brian Flores, Marcus Freeman, Nathaniel Hackett, Vance Joseph, Joe Judge, Kliff Kingsbury, Dan Quinn, Pat Shurmer, Brandon Staley. I would bet that if you asked a dozen average football fans to identify the teams coached by the list above, Freeman=Notre Dame would be named by at least 10, and (apart from their home town coach) it would be remarkable if two of the others would be correctly identified. Whether for reasons of love or hate, being head coach at Notre Dame is about as prestigious a head coaching job as it comes. Hey, Lou Holtz is not famous because he was the head coach of the New York Jets.

JOB SECURITY
At Notre Dame, success as a head coach relies to a great extent on one’s ability to manage the player recruiting process. Essentially every academically qualified high school player in the country is a potential commit. Among his many strengths, this appears to be Freeman’s greatest. In the NFL, the make-up of a team is conditioned by who is drafted when and by the general manager’s ability to manage the salary cap. The asset that makes Freeman so successful at the college level might well be irrelevant at the NFL level. And this success must come quickly. The average tenure for an NFL head coach is 3 to 4 years. Even Bob Davie, Charlie Weis, and Brian Kelly lasted longer than that at Notre Dame! This is the number of NFL head coaches who were fired over the last 9 years: 2017 – 7; 2018 – 8; 2019 – 5; 2020 – 7; 2021 – 8; 2022 – 5; 2023 – 9; 2024 – 7; and 2025 – 9.

Marcus can and certainly ought to be infatuated with all the NFL interest, but after he finishes listing the positives and the negatives on that long sheet, it seems to me that the options are obvious: either continue to be highly successful, compensated and acclaimed at ND or go to the NFL and be prepared to look for another job in about 5 years – and likely less if he can’t find a quarterback.