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In an era when it’s easy to leave, Xavier Watts stayed. Now, he might leave Notre Dame a national champion
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Xavier Watts stayed.
In an era of college football where there is little loyalty to the logo, and players and coaches too frequently bolt at the slightest inkling of adversity, Watts stayed.
After signing with the Fighting Irish after a hard-fought recruitment in 2020, Watts stayed in South Bend through a global pandemic, 2 position switches, multiple coordinators and position coaches, a head coaching change, the allure of the NFL, and the overtures and flirtations of agents, programs promising big NIL deals for a trip to the transfer portal.
No one would have batted an eye if Watts left.
That’s what happens nowadays, for better or worse.
It’s easier to leave.
In this contemporary moment of the sport where so much of what we thought we knew has flipped on its head and we are all left sitting with the embers of our old assumptions, it is wrong to suggest that the players and coaches who leave are quitting. The list of reasons to seek a fresh start are legion. The transfer portal, coupled with the radical idea that it is not immoral to pay human beings for being good at something that generates profits for others, has created new pathways to achievement and excellence. There are too many Jayden Daniels and Joe Burrow stories to suggest otherwise. Both quarterbacks in Monday night’s championship game are transfers, after all.
But it is courageous to stay. It takes grit to have faith in the eternal resilience of yourself, and to work, with your chin high and your eyes wide and come out clean and new on the other side.
That’s the path Watts chose. That he chose to stay when he had myriad reasons to go makes his story rare.
On Monday, that rare path ends with a singular opportunity, as Watts will captain Notre Dame as they take on Ohio State for the national championship. The Buckeyes are favored by 8.5 points, per DraftKings Sportsbook.
“This is a special place. It is about a community that is greater than football. But it’s one last chance to play football for Notre Dame,” Watts said after Notre Dame beat Penn State in a Playoff semifinal to clinch a spot in the title game.
Like most players at premier programs, the chance to win a championship was high on Watts’s list when he announced his return to Notre Dame in a video released in December 2023, shortly after the Fighting Irish dismantled Oregon State 40-8 in the Sun Bowl to cap a 10-win 2023 season.
Watts, the first 2-time consensus First-Team All-American at Notre Dame since Aaron Taylor, now a College Football Hall of Famer, pulled the feat in 1992 and 1993, will live that opportunity on Monday night.
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The road to Atlanta was long and winding.
A star receiver and safety from Omaha, Watts chose Notre Dame over home state Nebraska in late 2019, bucking immense local pressure at the height of Scott Frost era frenzy in the Cornhusker State. Widely viewed as a promising athlete who could play receiver or defensive back in college, Watts wanted the opportunity to play wide receiver. In a recruiting dogfight with the Cornhuskers, then-Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly and his offensive coordinator Tommy Rees promised Watts the opportunity to play on his preferred side of the ball.
“They (Kelly and Rees) really wanted me on campus,” Watts recalled to SDS. “They were genuine. They were kind to my family. They told me they would give me the chance to play wide receiver, and they did.”
After seeing action in only 2 games in 2020, Watts felt he was nearing a breakthrough into a depleted wide receiver corps in 2021 when Notre Dame’s new defensive coordinator, a young innovator named Marcus Freeman, intervened.
One week into his sophomore season, Freeman convinced the rest of the coaching staff to let him use Watts at rover linebacker.
“It was a position I had never played,” Watts recalled. “It was just a decision they made. There was no warning.”
After several practices at linebacker, Freeman settled on moving Watts to safety, where he needed an athlete and speed, especially after losing All-American safety Kyle Hamilton to an injury in a game that October. Watts made his defensive debut at safety on Nov. 5, 2021, making 3 tackles against a complicated Navy option. A week later, Watts made 5 tackles, including one that saved a touchdown in the open field where he beat a block attempt.
Suddenly, Freeman and the Fighting Irish had found something.
“It was a bye-week decision. We needed depth,” Freeman recalled this November, the week of Notre Dame’s final home game. “He was fast. He was physical. He did some things naturally that not everyone has the ability to do. He was still learning where to line up, where his body position should be, technique. But he had the ability to make plays almost instantly.”
* * * * * *
At programs across the country, players thrust into new roles they never expected or desired hit the portal, seeking destinations that will let them play where they want to play, even if it is not where the team needs them to play.
Watts didn’t blink.
If Notre Dame needed Watts to play safety, that’s what he was going to do. This journey wasn’t just about him. It was about the team and the family he left behind in Nebraska.
The family that raised Watts is why running from adversity or a change in circumstances isn’t in his DNA.
Watts learned plenty about adversity watching his father, Jeff Watts, growing up in Nebraska.
In 2003, while living in Minneapolis, the elder Watts, then just a young dad, was at a house party with friends when a vehicle pulled up to the party and started shooting. A bullet hit Watts and shattered part of his spine, paralyzing him from the waist down.
Over the years, Xavier watched his dad go from crime victim to small business owner, making ends meet for his family with hard work and accountability despite the hours of physical therapy and rehabilitation that accompany life in a chair.
“My dad didn’t make excuses. He’s accountable. It’s not about him. Seeing that has made me a better person and teammate,” Watts told SDS in 2023, shortly after being named an All-American for the first time.
Watching his dad, selflessness and work became non-negotiable to Watts.
That work ethic is why the path from converted wide receiver to All-American safety didn’t surprise Watts’ head coach at Burke High School, Paul Limongi.
“He was a great wide receiver. But he was probably the best safety I ever saw in over 25 years of coaching high school football, on my team or another team,” Limongi told SDS. “He had a nose for the football. He could deliver a big hit. He understands how plays develop. He’s just as natural a football player as you’ll find. And he won’t get outworked.”
Less than 2 full seasons after switching to safety, Watts won the Bronco Nagurski Award, which honors the best defensive player in college football. He finished the 2023 season with 7 interceptions, showing ball-hawking skills befitting his background as a wide receiver and finishing 4th on Notre Dame in tackles with 52, including 37 solo stops.
* * * * * *
As Notre Dame prepared for the Sun Bowl following the 2023 campaign, Watts knew he’d once again have a decision to make.
The whispers to leave Notre Dame behind were louder than ever.
NIL offers from agents were a constant late in the 2023 season. Watts could have commanded real, life-altering money on the open market. The NFL was also a viable option, as Watts’s ability to create turnovers and play multiple spots in coverage saw him rocketing up draft boards.
Yet again, Watts chose Notre Dame.
The decision has proved the right one.
This season, Watts ranks No. 2 on the Fighting Irish in tackles. Further, Notre Dame has produced a nation-leading 32 turnovers — and Watts has created 7 of them (6 interceptions, 1 fumble). His improvement across the board is reflected not only in a career-high 87.2 PFF grade, which includes an 88.9 grade in coverage, but in his ability to be, as defensive coordinator Al Golden puts it, a “coach on the field” for a complex defense.
“Xavier is great at getting players to the right spots, at making sure we are lined up right, at reading things pre-snap. That aspect of his growth is remarkable,” Golden told the media last month.
That progress makes it easy to forget that Watts arrived as a wide receiver.
“When we moved him to safety, I didn’t know he’d become the player he is now, an All-American and a captain,” Freeman said last week. “But you saw some flashes in 2021, from the first week he played safety. And tracking the ball and making plays, that is a natural ability he always had. To see the development from that raw talent to where he is now, one of the best players in the country is a testament to his God-given ability, but it’s also a testament to the work he’s put into this. He’s put so much work into what he’s become now.”
The best defensive player in most football games, Watts shines the brightest in Notre Dame’s biggest games.
In Notre Dame’s first-round win over Indiana, Watts delivered the biggest play of the game with the Hoosiers threatening to take an early lead and seize momentum in a tough road environment.
Against SEC champion Georgia in the Sugar Bowl, Watts’s ability to play as Golden’s single-high safety set the table for Notre Dame stuffing the Georgia running game and forcing first-time starter Gunner Stockton to try to win the game with his arm.
Stockton could not.
Watts finished with 7 tackles and a tackle for loss, winning Defensive MVP honors despite playing just over a half. Georgia coach Kirby Smart, a former First Team All-SEC safety, showered praise on Watts.
“He’s a special defensive back,” Smart told the media via telephone before the Sugar Bowl. “You can tell he’s a coach on the field for 2 great defensive coaches in Coach Freeman and Golden. He’s fast. He plays with a great understanding of leverage and with good technique. He reads plays. He’s just a winning player.”
A winning player for a program that has won 13 consecutive games.
A winning player who could sneak into the first round of April’s NFL Draft. Universally regarded as a top-5 safety in the draft on any big board, those “winning plays” stand out to at least one NFL executive who spoke to SDS.
“He’s top-2 on our safety board. On film, he makes winning play after winning play. He’s the smartest football player we’ve seen playing safety in this class in the way he finds the football and diagnoses plays. He is also really fast, which helps him close on bigger athletes in space. He’s a menace of a ball hawk. We think he starts Day 1 wherever he ends up.”
A winning player who could have gone elsewhere, but chose a different path, a harder one.
“I like to say, ‘All Chips In,” linebacker and fellow Notre Dame captain Jack Kiser told SDS after the Orange Bowl win. “Win the play. That’s the aggressive mentality that Xavier has every time he plays for Notre Dame. It’s about a standard you set for yourself and for the team. It’s a privilege to play with a guy like that.”
Watching Watts play football for the Fighting Irish is a privilege Notre Dame fans will enjoy one more time on Monday night.
Because in an era when so many players go, Xavier Watts stayed.
Neil Blackmon covers Florida football and the SEC for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
