There’s a history of Cincinnati influence in South Bend, including Kelly, who spent three seasons with the Bearcats before taking the Notre Dame job. A year before Kelly poached Freeman, he hired Bearcats defensive backs coach Mike Mickens, a Cincinnati alum who was a teammate of Freeman’s at Wayne High School outside of Dayton.

On the first day of 2021, then-coach Luke Fickell took his University of Cincinnati Bearcats football team to Atlanta to face the Georgia Bulldogs in the Peach Bowl. Still coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic,

FOX Sports' Michael Cohen explains how Marcus Freeman constructed Notre Dame's roster and how the Fighting Irish are winning at such an elite level without a handful of five-star prospects.