How the clear connection between Notre Dame coordinators can only be positive

You know when two uncles get together at the family function and there’s just no stopping them? One of them makes a joke that has the room rolling. Then the other comes up with one that’s even funnier. Suddenly, they’re the life of the party. That’s what Notre Dame’s coordinators currently have going on.

Unstoppable, in a serious sense.

No, Mike Denbrock and Al Golden are not giving Shane Gillis and John Mulaney runs for their money. Comedy isn’t in this pair’s wheelhouse. But coaching football definitely is, and the way they do it in tandem has to have Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman feeling as confident as he ever has heading into a season in charge of the Fighting Irish program.

The irony in the uncles analogy is that Denbrock and Golden actually rode together to a meetup at Freeman’s house recently. Instead of scheming up witty quips, though, they asked each other what keeps the other up at night in regard to going against each man’s unit. What does Denbrock do on offense that Golden can’t seem to catch up to? What looks does Golden give Denbrock that he can’t get around?

The answers are aplenty on each side.

“Trying to stop him every day with everything they got going on is hard,” Golden said, nodding in respectful homage to his colleague and counterpart in the Notre Dame Stadium media room. “It can be difficult. There are difficult days. There can be challenging days. There could be days where you have a short fuse and you have a bunch of different personalities, but man, it’s fun to go to work every day.”

“Al’s fantastic,” Denbrock said. “The whole defensive staff. The communication piece of all this between the two staffs in particular is vital to what we’re doing because we’re building a football team here and I need to know information from him and I hope he knows that when he needs something from me, he’s going to get it so we can make each other better.”

It’s been a while since both Notre Dame’s coordinators were middle-aged men who have been at their respective crafts for a while. Golden teamed up with Tommy Rees and Gerad Parker in his first two years in South Bend, for instance. Rees, to this day, is still just 32 years old. Last year, Parker, now 43, was effectively in his first all-encompassing stint as an offensive coordinator. If you go back to the 2021 season, Rees was still in his 20s and Freeman was in his first year at Notre Dame in his mid-30s.

Denbrock is 60. He’s seen and coached a lot of football.

It’s not as much about age as it is experiences and knowing how to evolve. Golden and Denbrock wouldn’t be this deep into their careers while still holding titles just under that of a head coach if they didn’t adapt over and over again to stay up with the times. Ahead of the times, even.

Denbrock said Saturday he floated an idea to Golden for a five- to 10-minute “mad scientist” practice period in which he’d attempt to install all kinds of motions and shifts for the Notre Dame offense. He’d let Golden in on what they look like because he wants Irish defensive players to at least be somewhat aware of what they were going to see. A drill with something so exotic everyone stops in their tracks wouldn’t be beneficial anybody. Denbrock is more into helping everybody in Blue and Gold, both sides of the ball.

“Learn how to do it the right way so it is actually a weapon,” Denbrock said.

Don’t let Denbrock’s amicable side detract from his cutthroat one, though. The Notre Dame offense won Saturday’s jersey scrimmage under the direction of Denbrock, and yet he was the only one who spoke to the media, Freeman and Golden being the others, who openly detested the effort.

“I’m really hard to please so I didn’t really like it, to be honest with you,” Denbrock said. “Do you guys know what the score was, 42-40? I mean, if you were asking me, if we would have played the way we’re capable of playing, I would have hoped that there would have been a little bigger margin there. But there are a lot of things we’re still growing from and cleaning up. I’m not going to sit here and say we’re any sort of a finished product in any way, shape or form.”

Never satisfied. Golden is the same way. That surfaced in response to a question signifying his system as something you’d see in the NFL .

“People name systems whatever they want to name them. That’s immaterial to me. What’s important is do we believe in what we’re teaching every day and trying to fight that chasm between goals and outcome,” Golden said. “That’s execution. That’s what we’re trying to every day do. You can call it whatever you want. We’re just trying to get better today and trying to execute whatever we have to do.”

That’s exactly what happens when it’s a meeting of the minds between Denbrock and Golden. Betterment. Growth. Progress. Forward movement.

Call it whatever you want.

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