Notre dame’s title tandem at rb?
Jeremiyah Love and Jadarian Price spent 2025 running like the engine of a national title team. By the time the season ended, Notre Dame didn't have a national title, a playoff berth, or even a bowl game to point to. The numbers tell a story that doesn't quite add up, and it starts with a simple comparison to the two teams that actually won the trophy.
The Numbers Line Up. The Result Didn't.
Ohio State's 2024 championship rushing attack, TreVeyon Henderson and Quinshon Judkins, combined for 2,076 yards and 24 touchdowns. Indiana's 2025 championship tandem, Roman Hemby and Kaelon Black, combined for 2,160 yards and 17 touchdowns across their full playoff run. Both were built around a shutdown defense, a good-not-great passing game, and a two-back rushing attack doing the heavy lifting underneath it.
Notre Dame's Love and Price combined for 2,046 rushing yards and 29 rushing touchdowns in 2025. That's within shouting distance of Ohio State's yardage total and actually ahead of both title teams in touchdowns, by a wide margin. Love alone rushed for 1,372 yards and 18 scores on 199 carries, a 6.9 yards-per-carry average, and finished third in Heisman voting. Price added 674 yards and 11 more scores on just 113 carries, a 6.0 average, while also scoring twice on kickoff returns. Statistically, this was a title-caliber backfield sitting behind a defense that, by season's end, was allowing single digits per game in stretches and a redshirt freshman quarterback in CJ Carr who threw for 2,741 yards, 24 touchdowns and only 6 interceptions.
And Notre Dame missed the playoff entirely.
Did They Miss the Opportunity?
The short answer is yes, and it wasn't really the running backs' fault. Notre Dame opened the season 0-2, with back-to-back losses to Miami and Texas A&M decided by a combined four points, before Love and Price were fully unleashed. In that Miami opener, the tandem combined for just 16 carries and 78 yards, fewer touches than CJ Carr got as a first-time starter, as the staff leaned on bubble screens instead of establishing the run. Once the coaching staff committed to the ground game in earnest, Notre Dame won ten straight, and the backfield numbers from that stretch on look every bit like a championship rushing attack.
The math is almost cruel in hindsight. Notre Dame had the fourth-best odds in the country to win the national title according to some models, and still finished on the wrong side of the committee's final cutline, passed over in favor of No. 9 seed Alabama and No. 10 seed Miami in the last week of the selection process. The Irish opted out of a bowl game altogether rather than play a lesser postseason game after missing the field they felt they belonged in.
So yes, this was an opportunity missed, but a specific and narrow one: two winnable games in September buried a team that, by rushing production alone, matched or beat the two teams that actually cut down the nets. Ohio State and Indiana didn't have appreciably better rushing attacks than Notre Dame did. They just didn't lose games in September that a fully-loaded playoff team couldn't afford to lose. The lesson isn't that Love and Price weren't good enough. It's that in a 12-team field, there's still no margin for a bad start, no matter how good the roster gets by November.
The 2026 Room: A Passing Attack About to Overshadow the Backfield Again
Both Love and Price are gone, off to the NFL as the first two running backs drafted in this year's class, the first time any school has produced that exact draft-day distinction. That leaves a very different-looking backfield heading into fall camp, and once again, the storyline threatens to be about the quarterback, not the running backs.
CJ Carr returns as a redshirt sophomore and the presumptive Heisman frontrunner after a 24-touchdown, 6-interception debut season, completing two-thirds of his passes. For the first time since Ian Book in 2020, Notre Dame enters a season with a proven, returning starting quarterback, and the offseason conversation around South Bend has understandably centered on Carr and an offense built to feature him. It's almost the same dynamic that played out at both Ohio State and Indiana, where Will Howard and Fernando Mendoza (a Heisman winner himself) got most of the offseason attention while a two-back rushing committee quietly did just as much to win the title. If Notre Dame's backfield produces anywhere near what it did in 2025, it's likely to happen again in the shadow of Carr's passing numbers rather than in front of them.
Aneyas Williams: The Known Quantity
The presumptive lead back is Aneyas Williams, a junior who has spent two years watching and learning behind Love and Price. His numbers are modest by necessity. As a true freshman in 2024, he carried 34 times for 219 yards and 2 touchdowns, adding 18 catches for 172 yards, a full complementary season buried on the depth chart. In 2025, playing behind two established stars and dealing with limited opportunity, he carried just 24 times for 224 yards and 5 touchdowns, an eye-catching 9.3 yards per carry in a small sample, plus 2 catches for 40 yards. His career line sits at 58 carries, 443 yards, 7.6 yards per carry, and 7 touchdowns, along with 20 catches for 212 yards. He also has three career touchdown runs of 50-plus yards, evidence of real explosive ability whenever he has gotten the ball.
The obvious question is what Williams looks like with a real workload instead of a rotational one.
Projecting Williams at a Title-Team Workload
Here's where the Ohio State and Indiana tandems become useful benchmarks. Individually, the four backs who made up those two championship duos carried the ball at these volumes:
Quinshon Judkins: 194 carries
TreVeyon Henderson: roughly 143 carries
Roman Hemby: 230 carries
Kaelon Black: 186 carries
That averages out to roughly 188 carries per back across the two title tandems, essentially a season-long "one half of the tandem" workload. Give Williams that same number of carries and run it through his two different levels of efficiency, and the range is striking.
At his more proven, larger-sample 2024 rate of 6.4 yards per carry, 188 carries projects to roughly 1,200 yards. At his smaller-sample, considerably hotter 2025 rate of 9.3 yards per carry, the same workload would put him near 1,750 yards, almost certainly not sustainable at that per-carry clip once defenses build a full season of tape on him as the featured back, but a real signal of his ceiling. A reasonable midpoint, blending his two seasons and accounting for the fact that per-carry averages almost always come down as workload goes up, lands Williams somewhere in the 1,100 to 1,250 yard range on a true one-back-of-a-tandem workload, right in the same neighborhood Judkins, Henderson, Hemby and Black all occupied in their title seasons.
That's not a guarantee. It's a data point. But it says Williams doesn't need to reinvent himself to hit a title-caliber level of production. He just needs the carries, something he's never actually had at Notre Dame.
Who Joins Williams to Form the 2026 Tandem?
This is the more unsettled question, and it will likely be answered in fall camp rather than on paper.
The clearest option right now is redshirt sophomore Nolan James Jr., who made the most of a chaotic spring. With injuries wiping out much of the depth chart, including Williams for stretches and Young for the entire spring, James stepped into the lead role in team drills and made the most of it. He impressed evaluators with his pass protection, his hands out of the backfield and his overall feel for the position, exactly the traits new running backs coach Ja'Juan Seider prizes most in a back. His actual production on the field so far is thin, just 14 carries for 37 yards as a redshirt freshman in 2025, along with a single catch for 19 yards, a clear product of buried depth-chart status behind Love, Price and Williams rather than any real limitation. But the spring buzz is real, and coaches have already signaled he'll get a genuine chance to claim the No. 2 job, if not push for the top spot outright, once fall camp opens.
The most talented option might still be redshirt sophomore Kedren Young, a big back with what evaluators call some of the best "lead back" skills in the room, impressive feet and vision for his size. Young was in position to be the team's short-yardage back in 2025 before a season-ending knee injury in fall camp wiped out his year entirely, and he also missed all of spring practice in 2026 while recovering. If he's fully healthy by August, he brings a different, more physical style than Williams and would give Notre Dame the same kind of contrasting two-back look that Ohio State ran with Henderson's speed and Judkins' power.
Young's return matters for a specific reason beyond raw talent: Notre Dame had a real, documented problem finishing drives in 2025, and it's the exact area where a bigger, more physical back could move the needle. The Irish ranked 119th nationally in red-zone scoring percentage, and while some of that was a broken kicking operation, the offense had its own issues closing games out. Notre Dame failed to score at all on eight separate first-and-goal situations during the season, and on third-and-short specifically, the line converted just 12 of 27 snaps, a number both the coaching staff and outside analysts flagged as a real structural weakness. Jadarian Price, for all his explosiveness, fumbled three times inside the 10-yard line and lost two of them, and Notre Dame simply never settled on an identity in short-yardage situations, caught between power runs, RPOs, and a young quarterback who didn't yet have the same downhill rushing threat that Riley Leonard provided the year before.
A healthy Young is a direct answer to that problem. Evaluators specifically point to his frame and contact balance as goal-line tools that neither Williams nor James clearly offer in the same way, the classic short-area, north-south power back who can be trusted to fall forward for the tough yard instead of trying to bounce a run outside where there's no room to work. Pairing that skill set with what should be a deeper, more experienced offensive line in 2026 makes the fit even more promising. Notre Dame returns six linemen with career starts, including three who opened last season as starters, giving Joe Rudolph a bigger, more physically imposing group to work with than the patchwork line that struggled to consistently move people at the goal line in 2025. If that combination clicks, Young isn't just a wildcard for touches. He's a potential fix for the single biggest flaw in Notre Dame's 2025 offense.
The complication for Young is that health is not guaranteed, and James's spring showing means the No. 2 job is no longer a formality even if Young returns at full strength.
There's also a wildcard element behind them: incoming freshmen Jonaz Walton and Javian Osborne, both highly regarded prospects Seider recruited specifically for his scheme, plus a coaching philosophy worth watching closely. Seider ran a strict two-man rotation at Penn State, where Nicholas Singleton and Kaytron Allen combined for nearly 90 percent of the running back snaps in 2024. If he applies that same approach at Notre Dame, the room won't stay a four- or five-man committee for long. It will likely collapse into exactly the kind of tandem Ohio State and Indiana rode to championships, and all the noise this fall will be about which two names end up in it.
