How CJ Carr, the grandson of Michigan legends, became the QB tasked with ending Notre Dame’s title drought

Tammi Carr still remembers her son’s glare from the sideline of his friends’ game.

The Carr family had a rule. Their oldest son had to wait until seventh grade to play tackle football. They saw no need for him to take hits before then.

So CJ Carr and his friends stuck to flag football, coached by their dads, up until sixth grade, when the other parents let their sons switch to tackle.

“Just let me play!” CJ begged his parents. “Nope,” they responded. He had to wait one more year. So CJ went to his friends’ tackle football games that season and helped with the first-down sticks — sending darts with his eyes at his parents all the while — until they finally let him play the following year.

“I put the pads on, we played our first game, and I was like, ‘I’m never taking this off,’” Carr said. “Like, I want to go to practice every day, all day. I want to watch film. I cannot get enough of the sport.”

In many ways, Carr’s football trajectory seems like it was destined.

The grandson of two College Football Hall of Famers didn’t play with toys a lot as a kid and didn’t care much about Christmas presents — unless they were balls. He attended games in box seats at one of the country’s most iconic stadiums, but Tammi thought he loved watching the sport on TV just as much because he could rewind to rewatch plays. And his father, Jason, a former college player and coach, guided him behind the scenes the entire way, starting him on film study while he still was playing flag football.

That Carr ended up as the starting quarterback at Notre Dame, however, is the wrinkle the family didn’t foresee.

He grew up the oldest of three sons in Saline, Michigan — 10 miles from Ann Arbor — with two grandfathers who were Michigan football legends. Tammi’s father, Tom Curtis, was an All-America safety for the Wolverines. Jason’s father, Lloyd Carr, coached Michigan for 13 seasons, leading the Wolverines to five Big Ten titles and the 1997 national championship. Jason was a quarterback at Michigan. CJ’s younger brother Tommy is now a freshman quarterback at Michigan.

In that way, CJ has taken his own path. He decided Notre Dame — the hated school 175 miles away across the state border — was home instead. And after a redshirt season of waiting, he spent last fall trying to create his own legacy in South Bend, Indiana.

In his first season as a starter in 2025, Carr threw for 2,741 yards and 24 touchdowns for an Irish team that finished No. 10 in the Associated Press rankings and controversially missed the College Football Playoff by one spot. He was named second-team freshman All-America by The Athletic while playing alongside the best running back duo in the nation in Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price.

Now, with the departure of Love and Price to the NFL, he enters the 2026 season — which begins Sunday night against Wisconsin at Lambeau Field in Green Bay — under an even bigger spotlight. The Irish are ranked No. 4 in the preseason AP poll and harbor CFP championship hopes, and Carr is counted among the top quarterbacks in the nation and considered a preseason Heisman Trophy contender.

After Notre Dame’s second practice of camp this month, Carr recognized that the position he’s in this season is “a big deal,” even if he doesn’t see himself that way.

“This is the greatest university in the country, and you’re playing the greatest sport in America,” Carr said. “And so it’s a huge deal, as in I’m super grateful to be here and be the starting quarterback at Notre Dame. I get to come out here every day and play with my best friends and hang out and be in the locker room and be one of the guys. So it is a big deal in that way.

“Other people ask that question: Is it a big deal from the outside perspective? And from that way, no. It’s noise at the end of the day. What matters is the guys in that building and the opinions that they have of you.”

Even as he tries to block out the hype, much of Carr’s life has prepared him for these expectations.

Mental toughness

The definition of mental toughness was so ingrained in Carr’s head as a child that he can recite it even now, at 21, at the snap of a finger.

“I know it by heart,” Carr said. “It’s developing a mindset where you will not make or accept an excuse for your lack of success.”

Long before he was Notre Dame’s starter, Carr was, in his own words, “a soft kid.”

He was so competitive — and hated losing so much — that he had trouble reining in his emotions. A gifted baseball player as a child, he made an error at shortstop and then had to make the next play through tears in his eyes. He struck out and threw his helmet in disgust.

Jason tried to remedy the situation by preaching mental toughness.

“I’d be sitting on the bench just bawling,” Carr said. “It’s really embarrassing, thinking back to it now, and I’m sure it pissed my dad off so much. But every time I made an excuse or did something like that, he had (the definition) printed on his wall and he said, ‘Go read it.’”

Eventually Carr committed the words to memory, and when he grew older and beat his dad in basketball or chess, he threw the saying back at him. Tammi likes to say his father “Yoda-ed” him.

Tammi thinks CJ was the genetic beneficiary of the football instincts of Curtis, the Wolverines’ all-time interceptions leader with 25. She thinks her son inherited some of his leadership abilities from Lloyd Carr.

But Jason was the primary influence early in his career.

CJ’s earliest football memories were playing “The Amazing Catch Game” with his dad and Tommy in the backyard. They threw the football as high as it would go and dived all over the yard to grab it, leaving their clothes with holes and grass stains. By the end of the week, they had no good pants left, driving his mother crazy.

He tried many sports, and while he was good at baseball, Tammi could tell it wasn’t for him. He tried to pull hidden-ball tricks, got stuck in pickles intentionally so he could try to get out of them, messed with people’s timing while pitching.

“He just needed to entertain himself,” Tammi said. “So we weren’t surprised when baseball was kind of the first one to go, because he was just such a high-energy kid and it was too slow.”

It was always football.

Jason went down the coaching path after college. He was a graduate assistant at Vanderbilt and the wide receivers coach at Central Michigan. But he also knew from experience what the life of a college coach was like and decided he wanted to be present to coach his kids instead.

CJ said Jason was “secretly behind the scenes” of his entire sports career, advising him on not just how to play the game but how to be a good teammate, how to show the right body language.

Jason introduced CJ to film study, telling him of times as a player when he was certain a coach was wrong — until he looked at the tape. “The eyes in the sky never lie,” he told him. Tammi made fun of her husband at first for filming their sons in flag football, CJ remembered, but she eventually got on board, so Jason and his boys began what now has become a ritual: film sessions in his home office.

Jason coached them in youth sports and their first year of tackle football, wanting to make sure they knew proper technique in hitting and taking hits.

But then he stepped back.

“There’s a lot growing up with the Carr name in this area, and you get it anyway, right? ‘Oh, you’re just the quarterback because your last name is Carr,’” Tammi said. “He never wanted to be, ‘Oh, and your dad’s a coach.’ So he let the coaches do their jobs on the field, but it was always at home, the extra learning, and that came from them asking for it.”

Finding his home

Carr was born into a Michigan family through and through.

Tammi grew up in Miami, where Curtis played for the Dolphins and became a football news publisher. But she knew the Michigan fight song from a young age and remembers her father pretending to beat up her brother because he wore scarlet and gray.

She and Jason met as friends while attending Michigan, where Jason played in 20 games and threw for 114 yards from 1992-95 as a backup quarterback. His father, Lloyd Carr, joined the Michigan coaching staff under Bo Schembechler in 1980 and served as an assistant for 15 years under Schembechler and Gary Moeller before he took over as head coach in 1995.

CJ remembers sitting in box seats at Michigan games — not quite understanding as a young kid what a unique experience it was — and asking why they got to be up there, other fans telling him how his grandfather was a Michigan legend. CJ was just 3 when Lloyd retired from coaching, but he understood what his grandfather meant to the Wolverines.

Growing up near Ann Arbor with the Carr name was “interesting,” CJ said. “It was hard to hide when people heard your last name, which was weird and cool sometimes — and not other times.”

Tammi and former Saline High School coach Joe Palka witnessed the scrutiny from others on CJ because of his name.

“He lived under the microscope and lived under an eye of criticism all the time but really never wavered,” Palka said. “And I thought that was one of the most impressive things. When you’re growing up (with that legacy), everyone wants to take a shot at you. Everybody thinks that he’s a starting quarterback because his last name is Carr.

“Those are the types of things you have to live with when your grandfather has been the head coach at the University of Michigan and you’re having success at an early age.”

Palka, now the head coach at Division III Adrian College in Michigan, watched Carr develop for many years and said his athleticism was evident early. Carr got to Saline with a strong arm and good accuracy. He was a heady, intelligent player. And he had a focus and preparation — seen in everything from pregame warmups to how he took care of his body — that Palka knew was due to growing up under Jason’s guidance.

He also was incredibly competitive, whether in Palka’s P.E. class playing basketball or floor hockey or during spirited practices when he chirped at defensive coaches and starters.

“It didn’t matter what it was,” Palka said. “It could be a pickup basketball game or it could be a regional final. He was going to do everything in his power to win that thing.”

Those qualities earned Carr playing time as a freshman backup, and he even started a playoff game in January 2021 during a season delayed by COVID-19 when the starter was sick. He completed 20 of 28 passes for 231 yards with a touchdown and an interception, and he got his first recruiting offers from Michigan and Michigan State.

Carr was Saline’s starter from his sophomore season on, throwing for 8,135 yards and 78 touchdowns over his next three seasons. Palka said Carr wanted to know the “why” on everything but was very coachable. He developed patience and discipline, an ability to work through his reads and make good decisions, and mental toughness.

Among his most memorable games, Palka said, was a 2022 playoff loss to Belleville in which he threw for 383 yards and five touchdowns despite constant pressure. Belleville was quarterbacked in that game — and in Saline’s 2023 playoff loss — by current Michigan quarterback Bryce Underwood.

When it came to Carr’s recruitment, Tammi thought a lot of people just assumed Carr would go to Michigan, given his family’s history. But he wasn’t set on that.

“CJ always wanted to be his own guy, and he told me that from the start,” Palka said. “He didn’t want to go just where people thought he should go. He wanted to go where he believed he belonged, and that definitely ended up being Notre Dame.”

Notre Dame and Carr’s lead recruiter, Tommy Rees, were on Carr heavily from the start. Palka remembers Rees showing up at Saline one day when Carr was going to throw for an Ohio State staffer and staying the whole day in a standoff. Rees wasn’t going to leave until Ohio State did.

When Marcus Freeman became the Irish head coach in December 2021, it became even more serious. Tammi knew Freeman was authentic and cared about his players, the kind of coach a mother wants her son to play for.

She said they made CJ visit other schools to expand his horizons and make certain Notre Dame was where he wanted to be. He would tell them: “I am silently committed to Notre Dame in my head, so you can keep making me go to places, but that’s not changing.”

They realized CJ felt that Notre Dame was his place. He was at home there. So they supported him. All of the family did.

As Tammi tells it, Lloyd Carr, now 81, always will love Michigan. But he loves CJ more.

“We’re all-in with our boys. It doesn’t matter where,” Tammi said. “My father-in-law will tell you that watching CJ play was harder than any game he ever coached. It’s agonizing for family to watch. But it’s not hard because it’s Notre Dame. It’s hard because you care so much about that person on the field.”

‘I know what hard is’

The one person who would have loved CJ picking Notre Dame was his youngest brother, Chad, who died in November 2015 at age 5 from diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma, or DIPG, an aggressive brain tumor.

While CJ and Tommy “came out of the womb” loving sports, Chad was different. He hit one T-ball, ran to first base and went to sit on Tammi’s lap.

“I’m done,” he told her. “I want to go to the park.”

He loved bugs and animals. He loved music and wanted to have dance parties with his brothers. He loved potty humor, anything to do with poop or farts or boogers. He loved playing pranks.

In November, around the 10-year anniversary of Chad’s death, CJ wrote a moving piece for The Players’ Tribune about his brother, one of a few times he has addressed the topic publicly. He wrote about Chad’s battle with DIPG and how it affected him. But more so he wanted to write about who Chad was as a person, always happy and smiling and laughing.

One thing that brought Chad joy was watching Michigan games with his family — and cheering for the other team. That’s how the Carrs know that Chad would have cracked up at his older brother choosing Notre Dame.

“It was all about getting a rise out of us,” CJ wrote. “He enjoyed that so much. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world.

“In some ways it was almost like Chad crammed 100 years of personality and laughs and dance moves into five years of life.”

When Chad was diagnosed with DIPG, the doctors told the family they had about a year with him. So they made the commitment to be together every day. Jason, who traveled for work a lot, left his job. Whatever Chad wanted to do, they did, even if CJ and Tommy missed school.

“We didn’t care,” Tammi said. “It was more important that they spend time together, and that became the priority. And then after Chad was gone, that didn’t change. We started this foundation ( the ChadTough Defeat DIPG Foundation ), and we knew it was like, either all-in or not, and we changed our entire lifestyle.”

CJ wrote in his tribute to Chad about trying to be strong for his family during Chad’s illness and after his death.

Tammi believes the loss gave her sons perspective about what’s important in life and what’s really hard, something they have carried with them as they face other challenges in life and football.

“I’m not downplaying (the pressure at Notre Dame) at all,” Tammi said. “Like CJ, I look at him in this pressure cooker, and as his mom I take on so much of that. I live every moment in every game. It’s terrifying.

“He doesn’t feel that way. He’s super confident. And he’ll say, ‘Hey, I know what hard is.’”

The family’s focus on being together didn’t change after Chad died on Nov. 23, 2015, when CJ was 10.

They poured themselves into their foundation, the mission to help other families fighting the disease and to eventually get out of the business because of a cure. And Tammi and Jason made it a point to be there for their sons, including their football careers, even if they had to divide and conquer game attendance when CJ arrived at Notre Dame and Tommy still was playing for Saline.

CJ wrote that he wished Chad could be at Notre Dame Stadium on Saturdays, screaming his head off, but he knows he’s there in spirit.

“Watching over me. Cheering me on. Hoping I do something awesome … or at least something funny.”

‘One of the guys’

Notre Dame quarterbacks coach Gino Guidugli sees the intensity when Carr plays ping-pong or Wiffle ball with his teammates on Fridays. He sees it when Carr plays Roblox with Guidugli’s 9-year-old. (“He’ll be talking crap about Roblox,” Guidugli said.) And of course he sees it on the practice field.

“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Come on, dude, next play. Why are you spending time talking to Boubacar (Traore, a defensive lineman)? Like, get the signal, let’s get the next play,’” Guidugli said.

Carr’s competitiveness has carried over to his time in South Bend, as has the way he works. Freeman said the way Carr prepared from the time he was a freshman learning behind starting quarterback Riley Leonard in 2024 — knowing he wasn’t going to play in the game — is what makes him different.

“A lot of people wait until they get the opportunity to say, ‘Oh, now I’m going to prepare, I’m going to watch extra film, I’m going to go out and do walk-throughs,’” Freeman said. “He did that the minute he walked in here. The way he prepares, add that with the experience and the confidence, let alone the talent that he has, it makes him who he is.”

Guidugli said that preparation fueled Carr’s confidence so that even as a freshman, he wasn’t apprehensive about making a check. He wasn’t scared to make a mistake because he believed in the work he put in.

Two years later, Freeman said Carr is like another coordinator on the field, able to read a defense and put the Irish in the right position so they can avoid a negative play.

Carr’s knowledge and experience are among a few factors, along with a veteran, talented defense, driving the preseason expectations for Notre Dame.

He won a training camp battle last August against Kenny Minchey and promptly was thrown into the fire with games against Miami and Texas A&M. He threw for 221 yards with two touchdowns and an interception in a three-point loss to the Hurricanes and 293 yards with a touchdown and an interception in a one-point loss to the Aggies.

The Irish didn’t lose another game, beating every team — all of them unranked except USC and Pittsburgh — by at least 10 points and by an average of 29.7 the rest of the way. Carr completed 66.7% of his passes while throwing 24 touchdown passes and six interceptions. His 168.1 passing efficiency rating set a Notre Dame record.

But the Irish didn’t get to see what Carr could do against more elite competition late in the year. They were left out of the CFP, and Notre Dame players opted not to play in another bowl game.

The Irish have operated with the mantra “Leave No Doubt” since then, and that of course extends to the competitive Carr.

“We’re going to keep the pain from last year and the hurt that we felt,” Carr said. “But it’s now ’26, and we’ve got to go out and put together the best Notre Dame 2026 football team we can and show it on the field week in and week out.”

Carr said springtime for him is never enough football. He thinks to himself: “Ah, I’ve just got to go to class on Tuesday? This is boring. Like, just let me go practice.” But it gave him plenty of time to prepare for a high-intensity camp going up against the elite Notre Dame defense.

He spent his offseason fine-turning mechanics with quarterback trainer Will Hewlett, working on strength and conditioning with Notre Dame coach Loren Landow, working with physical therapist and trainer Tom Gormely and getting in the film room with Guidugli. He attended the Manning Passing Academy and went on some team bonding trips with his teammates, which served a purpose beyond fun.

When Carr thinks about how his leadership is different in his second season starting, he points to knowing all of his teammates better.

He went with a group of receivers and quarterbacks to Jacksonville, Florida, to train and play golf, and he said sleeping on a bunk next to guys and “smelling their dirty laundry in the morning” formed a new sort of bond. He and defensive stars Leonard Moore, Adon Shuler and Drayk Bowen accompanied Freeman on a media tour to New York. And he went with other teammates to concerts, including seeing Rüfüs Du Sol at Wrigley Field.

One of the biggest names in college football this season swears nobody recognized him at Wrigley.

“No, no, no, no. I’m not big-time,” he said. “Nobody knows who I am.”

Carr makes a distinction there between embracing being the quarterback tasked with guiding the Irish to their first national championship since 1988 and worrying about being a college football star. He says he tries to block out the outside hype by staying off social media, though sometimes that effort is disrupted.

“You’ll have your mom calling you on a Saturday, like, ‘Did you see this?’” he said. “And it’s like, ‘All right, relax.’”

Guidugli said Carr sees himself “as one of the guys,” so hyperfocused on improving at football that he can block out the noise.

“That’s what makes him such a great teammate,” Guidugli said. “He doesn’t put himself on a pedestal. He doesn’t see himself any different than a freshman who just walked in the door. He’s just a Notre Dame football player in his eyes.

“In a locker room, that’s what guys want in that position. Usually those guys are prima donnas or think they’re a little bit above everybody else. CJ is just one of the guys.”

And the guys know they have in Carr a leader who’s determined to win, in everything he does.

“If he doesn’t win, he’s going to tell you, ‘Let’s play again,’ and he’s going to do it until he wins,” said Bowen, a senior linebacker. “He’s one of those guys that it never really turns off for him.

“When he gets on the football field and gets to do his thing and he gets to jaw at you a little bit, it makes you mad. But at the end of the day, you respect it and you love him for it.”