How Notre Dame struck gold with freshman WR Jaden Greathouse

Jaden Greathouse is humble. The Notre Dame freshman only needed six words to prove it.

“I’m just steady walking my path,” he said Friday.

Ha. Walking. If ever.

Greathouse might as well be in a full-on sprint in his first collegiate fall camp. He’s been in go mode since the spring, really, when he culminated his the first 15 practices of his college career with 11 catches for 118 yards in Notre Dame’s Blue-Gold Game.

It’s more than the numbers with Greathouse, though. They don’t really matter this time of year anyway. Practice statistics are logged by the Fighting Irish for internal use, but fall camps are about passing eye tests and proving worth through assignment-sound football. Players and coaches examine who they’re working with from a subjective stance before games are actually played. They know what good football looks like. Conversely, they know when it’s bad.

Everyone has seemed to come to a consensus on Greathouse. Senior wide receiver Chris Tyree took a page out of Greathouse’s book (which is not a bad move at all considering Greathouse’s rapidly ascending acclaim at Notre Dame) and used six words to start his piece on his slot receiver position mate.

Then he used quite a few more to further paint the picture for how Greathouse seemingly became one of Notre Dame’s best pass-catchers from the moment the teenager arrived on campus in January.

“He’s a playmaker, simple as that,” Tyree said. “There have been so many plays I’ve watched even since spring ball up to now where he’ll just be open no matter what route you give him, no matter the coverage. He can always get open and he’s always getting the ball.”

“Route runner,” added junior Jayden Thomas, Notre Dame’s projected No. 1 wide receiver. “You can see it in his high school film. We see it every day in practice. He can really get in and out of breaks. He knows how to set the defenders up. It’s cool to see.”

Like Joey Chestnut eating hot dogs on the Fourth of July or Tiger Woods sinking putts in Sunday red, setting defenders up is what Greathouse does best.

“All my life I’ve been working on route running,” Greathouse said. “I’ve always loved being a receiver, being that guy that creates space and gets open. The main thing for me is trying to stay unpredictable. Never letting the DBs know what I’m going to do.”

That’s why despite his sizable frame at 6-1, 204 pounds and explosive enough burst to play outside, Greathouse is most confident and comfortable playing from the slot. It’s in the tight areas Greathouse feels like he can do the most with his unique ability to shake defenders and open himself up to the quarterback.

Greathouse used the words opportunity and creativity to describe playing slot receiver. They go hand in hand. There are more opportunities to be creative from the slot than there are farther outside the hashmarks.

Boundary and field receivers certainly posses other skills and traits that allow them to get open out wide, but here’s the difference between Greathouse and some other wideouts; he can play from those other two spots. Could they play from the slot? Probably not as well as Greathouse.

That edge traces back to mental chess matches.

“The defense kind of tells you what you’re supposed to do,” Greathouse said. “The defense tells you what route you’re supposed to run. It can definitely be tricky because the defense can put in some crazy kind of coverages, but for the most part they tell you where to go and you can figure out what you need to do.”

He was asked point-blank if that’s difficult. It wasn’t that he was less humble about answering that question than he was when he said he’s “walking” his path. This time, he was just being honest. Concisely — using half as many words as he did before.

“No, not really.”

That’s the kind of first-year player Notre Dame has in Greathouse; one who can step up to the line of scrimmage with three option routes in mind and pick one in the 10 or so seconds he has to make the right read before the ball is snapped — and do it with ease.

Remember, there was an in-game rep against Cal less than a year ago when then-freshman Tobias Merriweather clearly did not know what route to run when he stepped to the line. In fact, he was on the wrong side of the formation to begin with. His teammates had to direct him to the right alignment with 70,000-plus people watching in Notre Dame Stadium and millions more observing from home.

Greathouse has all fall to make a similar sort of freshman mistake. Even someone of his football savviness isn’t immune to them. He has shown enough in consistent reps with the twos and even some with the starters over nearly 30 practices now, though, that they’ll be few and far between.

Maybe it’s too much too soon, even for someone like Greathouse. But Notre Dame wide receivers coach Chansi Stuckey said this is the way it should be. It says everything about a program’s level of recruiting when a freshman can come in and people talk about him like he’s already caught 100 passes and 10 touchdowns.

“If they’re here without high expectations, we’ve got the wrong guys,” Stuckey said. “We should have the best in the country at every position, and I think we’re getting there with the wide receivers.”

Greathouse is a major reason why.

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