Kenny Minchey, Tommy Rees and the end of Notre Dames 2023 QB recruiting cycle saga

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Kenny Minchey sat in the visitors’ locker room at Father Ryan in September, waiting out a lightning delay that had suspended the first big game of his senior season. After starring at the Elite 11 Finals over the summer while sharing a stage with fellow 2023 prospects Dante Moore, Jackson Arnold and Christopher Vizzina, this was the kind of night when he was supposed to show he belonged with those top-ranked quarterbacks.
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But Nashville weather patterns wouldn’t cooperate, sending both teams indoors during the third quarter and sending Minchey searching for his headphones. While the rest of the Pope John Paul II roster tried to burn off nervous energy until the game resumed, Minchey kept to himself.
“He’s got his ear buds in, he’s not (screwing) around. He’s locked in, always,” said receiver Colin Cook. “Everybody else is chilling, trying to get on with their Friday night. Kenny’s sitting there, being Kenny.”
When the officials called both teams back to the field after 90 minutes of waiting, Minchey gathered up the starting offense and led with his words. Leading with his arm would come later. For a player who doesn’t talk much, who has been coaxed to embrace everything else that comes with being a quarterback, this kind of leadership was progress. So was the on-field performance that came next: Pope John Paul II torched Father Ryan, 49-35, and Minchey finished 11 of 15 for 292 yards and five touchdowns.
Minchey connected with Cook for a 52-yard touchdown on a go route where Minchey dropped a pass over Cook’s right shoulder under pressure. He hit Josh Mailander, a receiver who had moved from California to Tennessee last January and enrolled at Pope John Paul II because of Minchey, in stride for a 37-yard shot play. Mailander caught a 55-yard go route over his right shoulder in tight coverage, too, plus a 57-yard score for good measure.
“The throws he made in that game, I left wondering if he was the best quarterback in the country” said Pope John Paul II offensive coordinator Andrew Park. “It was that good.”
Notre Dame offensive coordinator Tommy Rees liked Minchey since the day he first worked him out at a summer camp 18 months ago. Back then, the Irish staff slotted Minchey behind Moore, Arnold and Vizzina on its recruiting board. But the Irish kept in touch as Minchey committed to Pittsburgh, Arnold committed to Oklahoma, Vizzina committed to Clemson and Moore’s recruitment took a hard turn away from South Bend. If four-star 2024 quarterback C.J. Carr’s commitment and potential reclassification ended Notre Dame’s chance at Moore, it never turned the Irish off Minchey, who signed with Notre Dame on Wednesday morning.
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But Notre Dame had to turn Minchey back on to the Irish.
There are a few resources around Pope John Paul II to keep that interest alive, but not many. Former Irish All-American Golden Tate came out of the program 16 years ago, when he was a teammate of current head coach Brian Sneed. Tate actually invited Sneed to Notre Dame’s win over Boston College during his junior year. The Catholic school background helped too, but Minchey didn’t grow up quoting “Rudy.”
Minchey wasn’t looking to make a change, either, not after Pitt had just turned out first-round pick Kenny Pickett. Around town, Minchey trained with Thomas Morris at QB Country, who had worked with former Irish starter Drew Pyne, who transferred out of Notre Dame after the regular season and committed to Arizona State this week. Basically, if Notre Dame was going to win over Minchey, it needed more than its brand name.
“Notre Dame being Notre Dame is not why he’s going there,” Park said. “He was really comfortable with Pitt and comfortable with those coaches. Other schools that came to our school when he was committed to Pitt that were upper echelon like Notre Dame when he was committed to Pitt, and he didn’t give them the time of day.
“I don’t know what it was about Notre Dame, but I know it wasn’t just the name. That’s not why he’s going to school there.”
Tommy Rees had just about given up.
No matter what had happened in the recruiting cycle so far or how much Notre Dame’s on-field product demanded improvement at the position, the offensive coordinator didn’t want to take a quarterback just to fill a locker. The Irish still had Tyler Buchner, Steve Angeli and Pyne on the roster. Carr was a long-term play. An incoming transfer that winter had already been made a priority. That’s all Notre Dame could do about an urgent need without an immediate opening.
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Rees had kept in touch with Minchey since offering him in July, right before the start of a dead period that meant the quarterback had to wait on seeing South Bend even if he wanted to visit. And it wasn’t clear Minchey wanted that look, anyway.
Finally, Rees sent a last-ditch text in November that felt both desperate and practical.
What would it take to get you here on an official visit?
Maybe Notre Dame’s recent winning streak had helped, including a blowout of No. 4 Clemson that steadied the season. And maybe Minchey’s own season had got him thinking about something other than Pittsburgh. A week after that dominant performance at Father Ryan, Minchey suffered a shoulder separation against Independence while trying to reach the ball over the goal line after spinning out of a tackle. A defender drilled Minchey in the back of that right shoulder, putting has senior season on a detour.
Minchey missed the next six games before returning for the playoffs, gutting out an opening-round win over Briarcrest before the shoulder didn’t respond in the second round against Brentwood Academy in a loss that ended Minchey’s prep career. Three days later, Minchey decommitted from Pittsburgh. Three days after that, Minchey accepted Rees’ invitation for an official visit, which unofficially wrapped up his recruitment for Notre Dame.
“I think his injury, I think he had more time to think about things and how it’s a big decision,” Sneed said. “I think that played into it a little bit. It’s a huge decision. And he felt good, he felt comfortable about it.”
Rees had kept Notre Dame in the running in part because the Minchey he saw in November was an enhanced version of the player he worked out two summers earlier. A couple of inches taller and more than a dozen pounds heavier, Minchey had the production to back up his potential. Minchey threw for 3,280 yards and 32 touchdowns in a full junior season. His senior year ended with a completion rate of nearly 70 percent and a 15-to-3 ratio of touchdowns to interceptions.
In between, Minchey thrived at the Elite 11 Finals in California, which bumped him up from a three-star prospect and helped trigger the Notre Dame offer and interest from other Power 5 programs looking for quarterback help. Minchey won the Elite 11 Pro Day event and finished among the 11 best quarterbacks at showcase, alongside Moore, Vizzina and Arnold. Minchey no longer saw himself as a cut below the national elite.
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He was the national elite.
“I think that is what he got out of it,” Park said. “I don’t know if it was validation, but that might be the word for it. He was validated with what he believed all along, that he could play at that level. I told him, your understanding of where to go with the football is elite. He understands where the football needs to go and when the football needs to go there.”
Next month, that decision-making process will take Minchey to Notre Dame as a mid-year enrollee, part of a recruiting class that will finish in the top 10 nationally in Marcus Freeman’s first full cycle. He’ll be joined by a top-100 running back (Jeremiyah Love) and three four-star receivers (Braylon James, Rico Flores and Jaden Greathouse) as the Irish restock to meet their biggest offensive needs. Minchey may not have been Notre Dame’s first quarterback choice when this cycle began, but it’s hard to argue he wasn’t the best fit during the stretch run.
Turns out, he wasn’t always Pope John Paul II’s first quarterback choice, either. But maybe that’s part of the appeal.
Before Sneed became the head coach at Pope John Paul II last winter, he was the program’s defensive coordinator for six seasons. That meant he practiced against Minchey before anyone outside the program knew who the quarterback really was. Ever so often, Sneed would watch Minchey pick apart the starting defense, a perfectly timed corner route here or a second-level throw over a linebacker there.
The staff thought enough of Minchey that he was in something resembling a quarterback competition going into his sophomore year, but senior Sawyer Watts won it. Still, what Minchey did with that information told the coaching staff that his time was coming. It was just a matter of when.
During practices, Minchey would stand behind Watts and turn mental reps into physical ones. When Watts took a snap, Minchey would mimic it. When Watts worked through his progressions, Minchey’s eyes would follow.
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“He has been preparing like he’s been a high-level college quarterback since his sophomore year,” Sneed said. “That mindset is what I think sets him apart from some of these other guys, and then the arm talent on top of it is a great combination. He’s probably the one that watches film the most on the team.”
Five games into that season, Watts went down with an ankle injury. He never got his job back. In his second start, Minchey upset Montgomery Bell Academy, which started senior tight end Zak Herbstreit and quarterback Marcel Reed, a four-star who flipped from Ole Miss to Texas A&M this week.
“He just turned it on, dude,” Cook said. “That was the biggest game, had Kirk Herbstreit there, had a whole bunch of people watching the game. Throwing it off one leg. Dude’s been doing the same thing since middle school, now he’s finally got a spotlight on him.
“Everyone looked at it was so eye-opening, but hell yeah, we’re finally playing football. Let’s go. Sixty-yard bomb touchdowns. I think he got his Tennessee offer the week after. He definitely balled out that game, for sure.”
The Pope John Paul II staff thought they had something special in Minchey before that night, they just weren’t sure he could be this good, this quickly. When Minchey was that good, they stuck with him both because of that talent and the fact he never stopped being the quarterback maximizing his mental reps.
During game weeks, Park will meet with Minchey on Mondays to go over the game plan during study hall or lunch. Then comes practices. On Friday mornings — the two had a running joke about meeting at exactly 7:14 a.m. — Park will ask Minchey what he wants to keep in the game plan and what he wants to discard. But Minchey has to defend decisions either way, meaning he has to have mastery of the game plan before editing it.
“I’m gonna trust him because I’m the guy that’s going out there and playing,” Park said. “From a high school standpoint, his film study knowledge and reading defense is really really good. Accuracy, arm strength. It’s really impressive.”
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The true appeal of Kenny Minchey to Notre Dame is what’s under the hood. The Irish wouldn’t have hawked down Minchey without all his raw ability: throwing a pass 50 yards with a flick of the wrist, choosing which shoulder to put a go route on. But it’s the film junkie, football nerd part of the game that took Minchey over the top.
“You look at him on Hudl, dude’s got seven hours of watching film. He just loves it. More film you watch, more prepared you are,” Cook said. “He finds joy in picking apart teams and killing them on Friday night.”
That feeling will be Notre Dame’s to mold starting next month. In the end, Kenny Minchey may turn out to be the quarterback the Irish needed and wanted, even if getting to this point wasn’t a straight line.
(Photo of Kenny Minchey courtesy of Pope John Paul II School)
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