The reinvention of Notre Dame’s defense appears to have gone hand in hand with Andrew Trumbetti’s own rebuild.
Andrew Trumbetti doesn’t want to talk much about last year. Or the year before that. Or the year before that.
Talking about last year would mean talking about playing for Brian VanGorder, and Trumbetti would rather talk about playing for Mike Elko. Because he’s going to not only play more for Notre Dame’s new defensive coordinator, he’s going to play better for Notre Dame’s new defensive coordinator and he’s going to enjoy it too.
That much Trumbetti believes.
“I’m just really hard on myself,” Trumbetti said. “You don’t really need to yell at me when I make a mistake. I’ll fix it myself. If I get someone yelling at me, I just start overthinking it. It makes it worse. Coach (Mike) Elston knows that, coach Elko knows that. I fix my mistakes and that’s it.”
Trumbetti has repaired a lot this off-season.
He’s up to 265 pounds and says he feels just as quick as when he was 10 pounds lighter. He’s playing both defensive end positions and appears comfortable at each based off last weekend’s open practice for the media. And he’s down to his final season in South Bend, which comes with its own motivational angle.
“Honestly, it’s my senior year, I have nothing to lose at this point,” Trumbetti said. “I have everything to prove, just playing. That’s it.”
That’s been a challenge for Trumbetti in past seasons and VanGorder didn’t help it. Trumbetti endured an illness that wiped out one off-season of weight gains a couple years ago. He tried to play strong side end under weight. He admitted he battled a crisis of confidence.
Trumbetti needed somebody at Notre Dame to believe in him before he would be all-in on himself. It appears that’s happened with the Elston-Elko combination.
“(Elko) gets on me when I need it,” Trumbetti said. “If I make a mental error, it’s not like he’s gonna make the biggest deal in the world about it.”
Is this just a case of the new staff connecting with Trumbetti in a way the old staff didn’t?
“Yeah,” Trumbetti said. “I don’t really want to speak too much on that, but yeah.”
Trumbetti laughed as he finished that quote, a nod that the change of voice in the defensive meeting room should be obvious to anyone covering the team, never mind those actually playing on it. And to that end Brian Kelly backed up his reinvented defensive end last weekend after one of his best practices.
Trumbetti not only showed speed against Notre Dame’s second-team offensive line at Culver but beating Liam Eichenberg, he showed some toughness too in the rodeo drill by throwing Tommy Kraemer out of the hole.
“He looks like the guy that we recruited out of high school,” Kelly said. “He was a dominating player in high school, had an edge about him. We did a poor job of developing him until this year. He is at that point where he’s gonna make an impact and it’s gonna be fun to watch.”
Notre Dame needs it within a defensive line that was short on stats last season and lost its two most productive players in Isaac Rochell and Jarron Jones. The Irish have a clear top five in Daelin Hayes, Jay Hayes, Jonathan Bonner, Jerry Tillery and Trumbetti, but that group posted zero sacks last season and four tackles for loss total.
On Wednesday, Kelly outlined the next tier of defensive linemen as Khalid Kareem, Micah Dew-Treadway, Kurt Hinish and Myron Tagovailoa-Amosa. Kareem barely played last season and the other three have never seen the field.
“I feel like a lot of younger the guys … they haven’t been exposed to other situations,” Trumbetti said. “Now they’ve really seen older guys pushing and working hard. They’re being held to that standard.
“We’ve had a lot of immaturity in the past. Guys are stepping up. We don’t have that many immature guys. We don’t really have any, honestly. Here and there. It’s not like it was in years past.”
