Malik Zaire Confident He Can Be the Savior Notre Dame Has Been Waiting For

SOUTH BEND, Ind. — Notre Dame head coach Brian Kelly came to Archbishop Alter High outside of Dayton, Ohio, last year to recruit another football player to Notre Dame. He had already gotten quarterback Malik Zaire from there a year earlier.

Alter principal Lourdes Lambert saw this as a great chance. When you think of Notre Dame coaches, you think of legends: Knute Rockne, Ara Parseghian, Lou Holtz. Now Kelly was coming. So Lambert asked that when Kelly arrived that someone bring him to her office so she could meet with him.

When he did, he sat down to meet her, and there were pleasantries. And then…

"I just don't know why you're not starting Malik," she remembers saying. "I don't know Everett Golson, and I'm sure he's lovely, but I just don't see why there's any debate. Malik should be starting."

"Poor man. He was caught off guard," she said.

There is something delicious about Kelly, known for his occasional bouts of hotheadedness, being called into a principal's office and chewed out for starting Golson over Zaire as if he'd been caught clapping erasers together.

But Golson would start anyway. And he started great. And then he lost his confidence, fell apart and took the team with him.

Now it's Zaire's turn.

Mark Humphrey/Associated Press

Golson transferred to Florida State because of Zaire's footsteps, not to mention his stellar start in Notre Dame's Music City Bowl victory over LSU.

His development, the patience…to…wait…his…turn—he surely is going crazy waiting for this sentence to end—has been an issue.

Zaire now gets the most visible job in college football. Starting quarterback. Notre Dame.

Can he save the Irish?

"Oh, I have 100 percent confidence in myself to be able to handle the job," Zaire said.

And anyone who knows him knows he has been saying that since the day he signed on with the Irish.

"Everyone feels that way to some extent," said receiver Chris Brown, who calls Zaire his "little bro."

"But Malik always said it out loud."

Zaire doesn't talk like your prototypical Notre Dame quarterback. He talks a lot. About himself. He talked openly the past two years about how he should have been starting. And when you hear the things he says—like his belief that the Irish will win all their games—you expect a certain cockiness and excessive self-absorption. You expect a person who you would like to have a comeuppance. Somehow in person, though, he doesn't come off that way.

In fact, he comes off as exactly what Notre Dame needs after last season's collapse: a confident leader whose main goals are (1) to win games and (2) to keep getting better until he is the best.

"Really? It's so nice to hear that," Zaire's mother, Stacy Carter, said. "I hope they all rally around him…

"Instead of him getting on their nerves. You probably heard about how he got along with his high school coach. Oh my gosh, Malik used to drive him crazy. He would do me the same way. He drove me crazy."

This is one of the trickiest, most important parts about coaching, and maybe parenting. It's a part people don't talk about much: confidence management. You have to build up some players' confidence. And you have to tear down others' so they know there are still things to learn.

"I agree 100 percent," said Notre Dame associate head coach Mike Denbrock. "You also have to find out what's real confidence and what's just talk. Malik is real confidence. And who wants to recruit a quarterback who doesn't want to be a starter from day one? I hope they all come in the door that way. That's not a bad thing.

"Yeah, there might be frustration when it doesn't come to fruition right off the bat. But what Malik has done with that frustration is point himself in a positive direction."

Well, not always. Zaire had an impossible time waiting. He told ND Insider's Mike Vorel this fall that he felt Golson was picked as the starter last year before any competition ever began: "It was like an unwritten thing: 'He's going to be the guy.'"

Zaire also complained about not getting reps in practice and just standing around for hours.

These are the comments that had people wondering about him.

Former Notre Dame coach Charlie Weis brought in top quarterback recruit Jimmy Clausen years ago, and it was a big show of ego. Clausen arrived with an escort of stretch Hummers and announced his college choice at the College Football Hall of Fame in South Bend. It was a show unlike what Notre Dame was used to.

You wondered from Zaire's comments if the Irish were in for a repeat.

But I don't think so. Believe it or not, Zaire's confidence doesn't come with the air of entitlement. When he's asking why he isn't starting, he's actually asking what it is that he's missing so he can work on it.

"Yes, I was upset," Zaire told Bleacher Report. "Nobody likes sitting on the bench. But it was just part of maturity for me to be able to simplify things. You don't have to know everything. Just stay consistent to the basics.

"Quieting my mind is something I've developed [through] talking with people that are great role models to me. People that keep it real with me."

One of those people is Lambert, the high school principal, who texts regularly with Zaire. She said his confidence comes from faith. Another is his high school coach, Ed Domsitz, who said that Zaire thought he should have been starting as a freshman in high school, too, even though Alter was coming off a 15-0 championship season and had its quarterback returning.

"It was a growing experience for him," Domsitz said. "I spent a good deal of time talking with him. He had come to our camp as a sixth-grader, and he was reading all these books about quarterbacking and motivation. That helped form his philosophy, his outlook. Sometimes the greatest competitors are the toughest to coach.

"He feels he has got to make it happen every week, week in and week out. I'd tell him 'Stay within yourself. Do what you do well. Understand you have a supporting cast out there.'"

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This season, Mike Sanford becomes Zaire's third offensive coordinator in three years. He said that Zaire's success, and also maybe his biggest problem, is that he is so single-minded about reaching greatness.

If practice doesn't go right, Zaire might stay "out there two-and-a-half hours after to work on his throws," Sanford said. "Well, maybe not two-and-a-half hours. But he has to learn it's OK to make a few mistakes."

Brown knows Zaire can't accept that. He remembered the first time he met Zaire they went out throwing the ball around, and it wasn't going well. "I just wanted to have some reps," Brown said. "I was tired, and it was like 100 degrees. It wasn't going right. And he just wanted to keep going. There was no water out there!"

There's something to be said for the fact that Zaire is even still at Notre Dame. What we've seen more and more this fall is top recruits transferring away as soon as they realize they aren't starters. It happened at USC, where freshman quarterback Ricky Town has already left the team. Meanwhile, UCLA coach Jim Mora was publicly chewing out his freshman quarterback.

It's a new age in confidence management.

"Kids today, I think a lot of them feel like they deserve an opportunity to go out there and play right away," Denbrock said. "Some may feel their development is further down the line than it is. But there's always a place where the rubber meets the road.

"You're not going to sugarcoat anything for them. You have to be honest with them, say, 'Regardless if this is happening in the next 10 minutes, you're a valuable piece of the puzzle moving forward. Trust us as coaches to know the right time to put you out there.'"

Zaire said that he never would have left Notre Dame, that he would have considered that quitting. He figured his time would come. It just didn't happen soon enough.

Now it's here. Zaire still needs to grow up some. He said Sanford has already taught him about focusing on one thing at a time and also some technical things about his throwing base. But he is such a contrast to the fading confidence last year's team leader, Golson, was displaying.

Plus, Zaire did get evidence of his play in the bowl game.

"My confidence was always there," Zaire said. "The LSU game was just an opportunity to show other people that I'm here, too."

There might be some personality clashes with Kelly. Of course, Kelly might be patient if he doesn't want to be called back to the principal's office.

Greg Couch covers college football for Bleacher Report.