Preseason report card: Grading the 2024 Notre Dame offensive line

This story appears in the Blue & Gold Illustrated 2024 Notre Dame Football Preview. To order your copy of the 160-page, full-color, glossy magazine, which includes opponent previews, Fighting Irish position previews and position previews like this one, click here.

This is Part 4 in a four-part series previewing the Notre Dame offensive line.

Preseason Analysis Key
***** National Title
**** Top 10
*** Top 25
** Too Unproven
* Major Concern

STARTER **½

Notre Dame might have a top-25 starting contingent along the offensive line. But without Joe Alt, Blake Fisher and Zeke Correll, we’re really just not sure.

Three of the projected starters — Charles Jagusah, Ashton Craig and Billy Schrauth — are juniors or younger. The lone graduate student among the projected starters, right tackle Tosh Baker, has started only four games in his career. Jagusah, Craig and Schrauth have combined for seven starts.

Left guard Pat Coogan started all 13 games in 2023 and is quietly the commodity we know the most about, but even he is battling with Rocco Spindler for a starting job. The young trio and even Baker have potential to be rock-solid starters. We’ve just got to see it to believe it.

EXPERIENCE **

Allow this to be a continuation of the “starter” conversation. Notre Dame lost most of its experience among offensive linemen when Alt and Fisher went to the NFL after their junior seasons and Correll decided to enter the transfer portal and finish his career at North Carolina State.

Coogan was not even so much as a question mark at this time last year; he was not projected to be a starter. Now he’s the team’s most experienced starter in a position group in which experience is at a premium. At offensive line, it takes physical playing experience to become a good player. Notre Dame has a lot of student-athletes who simply need to play before we deem them good players.

DEPTH ***

It’s never depth that’s an issue for Notre Dame’s offensive line. Youth and inexperience? Perhaps. But the Fighting Irish have 16 scholarship offensive linemen. Within that number are bound to be enough capable players to put Notre Dame on the fringe of top-10 status.

Like with the starters, we haven’t seen enough of the reserves to know for sure if the group as a whole is safely within that barrier. But it’s optimistically pleasing knowing Alt was once a backup who only got his shot because of an injury to the starter and a few flailing attempts to replace him from players higher up the depth chart.

Does Notre Dame have another Alt waiting in the wings? Maybe. The Irish’s roster is generally more likely to be made up of guys like that than most other rosters in college football.

OVERALL GRADE ***

This is a reputation grade. It’s sort of unfathomable to think Notre Dame does not have one of the 25 best offensive lines in college football in any given year. But this is a group that feels much closer to 25 than 1.

So let’s be safe and say, for the purpose of this exercise, that Notre Dame’s offensive line is the 25th-best unit in the country. Think of it as, say, Texas A&M’s team this year. At that number, the top 10 is definitely within reach. Is No. 1? Probably not, realistically. But a couple big victories and all of a sudden you’re in that 5 to 10 range. The Notre Dame offensive line seems to be at that stage in its maturation.

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