How previous coaching stops, friendship led Brian Mason to Notre Dame
Notre Dame head coach Marcus Freeman has a number of personal connections with the members of his first staff. But for special teams coordinator Brian Mason, those connections go a step further.
Obviously, Mason is at Notre Dame as a direct result of Freeman’s hiring choices. But this wasn’t the first time Freeman played a role in Mason getting a job.
“He was actually somebody that put me in touch with (Cincinnati head coach) Luke Fickell to get hired by him,” Mason said last week. “He’s a close friend of mine that I’ve known or coached alongside for close to a decade at three other institutions coming into this, and I really, really believe in him.”
Mason’s first FBS job, excluding stints as a graduate assistant at Kent State, Purdue and Ohio State, was at Cincinnati under Fickell. He shared those first two stops with Freeman, as well as overlapping at Cincinnati. Mason served as the recruiting coordinator in 2017 and moved into the special teams capacity the following year. Freeman was the defensive coordinator and linebackers coach from 2017-20.
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Of course, Mason was attracted to Notre Dame because of its prestige and recent football success, but he also has a strong belief in what Freeman has done and is doing.
“You could just tell early in his coaching career when we worked together at Kent State that he’s going to be a star,” Mason said. “There’s something special about the way he communicates. He’s got natural leadership to him. He relates to players, recruits. You could just tell he was going to be a really successful football coach. As he’s gotten more and more experience, he’s gotten even better.”
Most coaches don’t sign up to join a program when they don’t believe in the direction it is headed. But with Mason, one can be sure his words are not empty or just based on first impressions. The new guy knows Freeman just as well as anyone in South Bend.
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Mason brings big special teams goals with him from Cincinnati
When he spoke with the media last week, Mason was very clear about his intentions for his unit. He mentioned two specific goals: be much more aggressive come game time and have more starters play on special teams.
He was certainly aggressive with the Bearcats. Cincinnati led the nation with six blocked kicks in 2021. They also blocked three punts, which finished tied for seventh. To compare, Notre Dame blocked one kick and zero punts last season.
“We’re going to be aggressive and we want to be creative,” Mason said. “We do not want to be conservative. We want to find different ways that we can apply pressure and put stress on our opponent to create chaos.”
It remains to be seen how his latter goal, to have more starters play on special teams, turns out. But he made clear that Notre Dame did not reach the mark he would like to see when compared with the Bearcats.
“It wasn’t close,” Mason said when asked if Cincinnati and Notre Dame were comparable in that category.
