Notre Dame did not need long to see why Teddy Jarrard belongs in the conversation.
On the first day of fall camp in South Bend, the reclassified quarterback from Kennesaw, Ga., didn’t look like a player who should still be in high school. Wearing a red No. 9 jersey, the 6-foot-4, 210-pound Jarrard fit right in with backup quarterbacks Blake Hebert and Noah Grubbs and handled a coverage drill with ease, firing completions to first-year wide receivers Kaydon Finley and Bubba Frazier.
Irish offensive coordinator Mike Denbrock said the traits Notre Dame saw in Jarrard were familiar when compared with CJ Carr.
“I don't know if I was surprised by it, because he has a lot of the same characteristics that we saw when we recruited CJ (Carr) and knew of CJ,” said Denbrock, who was still at LSU when the Irish landed Carr’s commitment in early June of 2022. “He's a studier of the game.
He's a baller. He loves it.”
Jarrard has already worked his way into a real backup quarterback discussion, even if the depth chart still has him behind more experienced players for now. On Thursday, Hebert took snaps with the second-team offense while Jarrard and Grubbs worked with the deep reserves on third-string reps. Still, Marcus Freeman said this week it is “not unrealistic” for Jarrard to become the primary backup at some point this season, possibly even by the Sept. 6 opener against Wisconsin.
“Teddy is a talented football player,” Freeman said. “His physical skills, we’ve all seen in high school.
To be a guy who can reclassify a year up shows you that he’s intelligent, he puts the work in. How fast we can expedite this process to get him to where he's playing fast, that’s always the challenge.”
Notre Dame would prefer to keep a player who should be entering his senior year of high school in the background all season. But with Kenny Minchey having transferred to Kentucky last offseason, the Irish don’t have that kind of cushion at quarterback.
For Jarrard, the key issue has been whether he would fully dive into the learning curve that comes with arriving in June and being a spring behind the quarterbacks he is chasing.
“Hey, you got here in June,” Denbrock said. “You're a whole spring behind the two guys you're competing with. You've got to make a decision from a knowledge standpoint how hard you're willing to dig into this to give yourself as good an opportunity as you can when fall ball starts.”
So far, Jarrard has answered that challenge.
“He obviously has done a really nice job with that and put himself in a position where he can play faster and process,” Denbrock said. “I love any football player who is willing to dig deep into the process and learn the game and put himself in a position to help the football team win. Teddy is one of those guys.”
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