Notre Dame tackle Charles Jagusah out for season with torn pectoral muscle
Every football team with championship aspirations tends to have a big-time blindside protector. Notre Dame firmly believed it had one in sophomore Charles Jagusah.
Time to opt for option B.
Jagusah will be out for the upcoming season after recently injuring his right shoulder subsequently tearing his pectoral muscle, Blue & Gold learned Monday. Notre Dame’s public relations social media account confirmed the news and stated Jagusah will have surgery soon.
Jagusah was repping with the first team at left tackle, as expected, in three fall camp practices open to the media last week. He started the Sun Bowl to close the 2023 season after only playing five offensive snaps in the first 12 games of the season. He was behind NFL Draft picks Joe Alt and Blake Fisher on the Notre Dame depth chart as a true freshman.
With Alt going to the Los Angeles Chargers and Fisher getting with the Houston Texans, Jagusah vaulted to the top of the Fighting Irish pecking order at tackle. He’s had a firm grasp on the left tackle spot since Alt and Fisher left the program.
Graduate student Tosh Baker and junior Aamil Wagner have been competing with each other to take Fisher’s spot at right tackle, meanwhile, and the latter has had the upper hand in that battle by taking first-team reps early on in fall camp. Notre Dame will probably now have to slide one of them over to the left side of the line to fill the void left by Jagusah.
It’s a big one. Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman has spoken glowingly about Jagusah ever since he got the opportunity to make his first career start last December. Freeman noted Jagusah’s “natural ability” surfacing in his recruitment and then again when he got to South Bend last year.
“He has shown on scout team, he has shown in the bye weeks and the individual drills that he’s going to be a future great offense lineman for us,” Freeman said in December. “Throughout the first couple of practices, we rotated guys at different positions, but he continued to flourish at that left that position and has done a really good job.”
The feeling in South Bend has been that the Irish have at least a two-year starter in Jagusah even though he’s still a largely unproven commodity on Saturdays. So are Wagner and even Baker, though, for that matter, and Jagusah’s talent and potential are too much to ignore in a Notre Dame tackle group that does not feature the likes of Alt and Fisher.
Beyond Wagner and Baker, Notre Dame has been repping a trio of freshmen at tackle; Anthonie Knapp, Styles Prescod and Guerby Lambert. Knapp and Prescod were early enrollees. Lambert is widely considered to be the best long-term player at the position of the three — or maybe of anyone currently on the Notre Dame roster — but he has taken his first-year lumps in the early goings of fall camp.
All things considered, losing the best tackle the Irish have at the moment to a long-term injury was a brutal blow with less than four weeks until the Aug. 31 season-opener at Texas A&M.
