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Notre Dame tight end Kevin Bauman will spend sixth season in South Bend

IMG_9992by:Tyler Horka•01/30/25•

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Notre Dame tight end Kevin Bauman. (Photo by Chad Weaver/BGI)

If you’re a rising sixth-year senior in college football and you didn’t play much in your fifth season at a certain school, generally you’re on the lookout for somewhere else to spend that sixth season. Not Notre Dame tight end Kevin Bauman.

He’s staying in South Bend.

FightingIrish.com released a preliminary 2025-26 roster on Tuesday, and Bauman was not on it. Blue & Gold reached out to a university spokesperson to inquire if that meant Bauman’s extensive time at Notre Dame had come to a close. Turns out, it has not. Leaving Bauman off the roster was merely oversight, per our source.

“He is back,” the team representative said.

To put Bauman’s career into perspective, he arrived in the same recruiting class (2020) as position mate Michael Mayer. Bauman has exercised a medical redshirt, and he as the right to use the COVID waiver for the 2020 season. The two extra years equate to him being a sixth-year senior.

Mayer rewrote the Notre Dame record book at the tight end spot, finishing his career with 180 catches, 2,099 receiving yards and 18 receiving touchdowns. In two seasons with the Las Vegas Raiders, the early second-round NFL Draft selection in 2023 has 48 receptions for 460 yards and 2 touchdowns. He’s played in 25 games.

Bauman has not acquired anywhere near the accolades of Mayer, meanwhile. He’s rightfully got injuries to blame for that. He’s torn the ACL in both knees in his time at Notre Dame. He missed the entire 2023 season because of the latter of those two devastating injuries. The first occurred three games into the 2022 season. He missed the rest of that one, too.

Bauman returned to the field in 2024, though, and caught his first career touchdown in the late stages of Notre Dame’s 66-7 victory over Purdue in Week 2. It still stands as Bauman’s only career score. His teammates gleefully mobbed him on the field in the immediate aftermath of him securing the catch from quarterback Steve Angeli. They knew how much it meant to him, and he means a lot to them.

We’re seeing now how much Notre Dame means to Bauman.

He could have medically retired or transferred to a smaller school where he could try to rack up numbers in his final year of eligibility. Instead, he’s happy to be a part of a program that just played for the national championship and could be right in the mix to compete for another in 11 months.

There is nowhere else he’d rather be than Notre Dame during such an impressionable period of his life. He’s locked in for one last ride.

“It’s been a rollercoaster,” Bauman said at the beginning of his fifth season. “It’s been a big time of growth. I’ve learned a lot about myself as a person, as a football player, as a brother, a son, a friend, boyfriend. All these things about myself. It’s been a big time of growth.”

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