Devin Fitzgerald, Jerome Bettis Jr. and Elijah Burress are among the youngest members of the Irish’s receiver room. All three aim to forge their own identities.
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SOUTH BEND, Ind. — After two hours of practice, with the 10-foot-tall fences doing little to muffle the bullhorn orders and corresponding groans, the huddle broke and the personalities sprung to life. As players walked in each direction, some to the locker room, others to interview areas and even more toward No. 3 Notre Dame’s brand-new $100-million football “family hall,” a trio lingered near midfield. You could hear them from three fields over.
“What’s the move for lunch today?” Devin Fitzgerald asked the other musketeers.
“Not gonna lie, I’m tryna stick to a diet, man,” Jerome Bettis Jr. responded.
“What do you mean, bro?” the third, Elijah Burress, tossed in.
“Not tryna look like my pops,” Bettis joked. The group immediately cracked up, drawing side-eyes from teammates who have become used to the three friends’ laughs thundering across the facility.
Fitzgerald, Bettis and Burress are the sons of three former NFL stars: Larry Fitzgerald, the Arizona Cardinals’ recent Hall of Fame inductee, Jerome Bettis, the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2015 inductee, and Plaxico Burress, a former four-time 1,000-yard receiver. This year, they happen to be among the youngest members of Notre Dame’s receiver room.
If you’re scratching your head — yep, their dads all are well over 40 (and, for some, 50). And yep, you are seeing more second-generation athletes across sports, the children of pros you watched not long ago, from Bronny James to Marvin Harrison Jr. to Trinity Rodman and so on.
In 2021, the NFL, NHL and NBA all had their highest rates of second-generation players, making up more than 3 percent of each league’s rosters, a testament to both genetics and the wealth built by modern athletes, which pays for a lot of private training. Around 2 percent of NCAA athletes turn professional. So the connections are also “killer,” Notre Dame’s trio said in unison.
Amid arguments over pros going back to school and college players getting paid like pros, their story is almost quaint: Fitzgerald, Bettis or Burress all said money didn’t play a factor in their commitment to Notre Dame. All three are among the Irish’s cheaper players. They agreed they’re here for the long haul, an anomaly in the transfer-portal era.
For aging fans of their dads, it’s alarming and nostalgic. For the players, it’s exhausting, with fans routinely asking for autographs (reasonable) and to FaceTime their fathers (less so).
“You learn to live with it,” Fitzgerald said. “But you want to be your own person, but that can be hard when people only know you for someone else. It’s a journey.”
Burress and Bettis arrived last spring, each hauling in their first collegiate passes as true freshmen. Then Devin, the biggest name among them, joined this year. Soon, they were passing tales of the 20-minute film breakdowns their dads would text them unprompted, bonding over a shared understanding of the unique pressure and privilege of their lives. The journey, suddenly, wasn’t isolated.
“They always say, ‘You need to be at the place where you’re going to grow,’” Burress recounted. “We all chose Notre Dame because there’s something about this place that was going to help us.”
Each recounts a similar experience: their first time on campus, touring on their official visit or a recruiting day, and wandering the plazas and Notre Dame Stadium’s halls. It was breathtaking, they said. Next, they watched a practice and met Coach Marcus Freeman, the stone-faced leader, still-youthful 40, which allows him to bounce between buddy and drill sergeant. “He said things would be hard, and no one shows up with what they’d done before meaning anything,” Bettis recalled. “I think it was supposed to be a warning.”
Sold.
None of their parents forced them to play football, they said, but they took to it for reasons too obvious to name. With that choice came consequences.
Teammates singled them out, targeting them with insults when they’d make the same type of mistake every 8-year-old flag football player does. Fitzgerald became a Pop Warner water boy for a season after other kids figured out his “pops” was on the Arizona Cardinals and wouldn’t stop taunting him on the field. In middle and high school, it became a game to decipher if the kid sitting next to you in algebra wanted to hang out after school because he needed a friend or because he thought Larry might pick you all up.
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“He had to become emotionally mature pretty young,” said Angie Nazario, Fitzgerald’s mom. He leaned on her, and he still calls her most nights, even now off at school. But he became quieter, she said, hoping to go less noticed in school and at camps, at least by his peers.
“By high school, though, these guys often prove they were a little bit of their own thing,” said Jason Jewell, Fitzgerald’s coach at Brophy College Preparatory School. “But most still recognize them by their dads, which can be a little jarring.”
As a senior, Fitzgerald caught 82 passes for 1,230 yards and 15 touchdowns, becoming a traveling spectacle in Arizona. But a season that typically would’ve brought crowds for his work on the field turned into a Larry Fitzgerald hunt among fans, all as Devin quietly went about his business, securing more than 50 scholarship offers. Except he was still “Larry Fitzgerald’s son.”
It’s fitting that Notre Dame, the 184-year-old institution that’s won 11 football national titles while refusing to join a conference in the face of the sport’s consistent pressure, hosts a story about what isn’t changing in college sports. The three players said they committed to nowhere-Indiana to become something of their own. Achieving that uniquity will be easier for Burress and Fitzgerald, whose fathers attended Michigan State and Pittsburgh, than for Bettis, who’s now sprinting the same hash marks his father bulldozed for 27 touchdowns between 1990 and 1992.
The school has a roughly $50 million annual deal with NBC, which exclusively broadcasts its football home games. Those eyes are nice. But Notre Dame, in their opinion, is one of few places that offers that level of attention while maintaining a form of isolation. South Bend is 100 miles from any major city. The trio goes unrecognized in the local Target. Practices are as intense as those at any of the other giants lining the AP poll. They just don’t leave the dining hall in a Bugatti, drifting into local lore each evening. In some ways, that’s intentional. Notre Dame attracts second-generation football players with the best, and is also currently housing the sons of Jermichael Finley, Thomas Davis, Bryant Young and Jim Flanigan Jr. as well. Its pitch deck goes something like this: Georgia and Texas produce stars. Freeman, they said, produces “men.”
And that’s exactly what college football did for their fathers, too, long before their names drew inquisitive looks in coffee shops.
“You always want to be you,” the young Fitzgerald said, mimicking Larry’s longtime message. “It feels like I’m getting to do that here.”
This friendship? “Divine intervention,” the trio agrees. They knew of each other before committing, they said, but made their choices independently. They didn’t discuss their dads until one day they were standing in line, waiting their turn during route-running drills. No doubt, it was a bit of a surprise when they learned their experiences were vastly similar. Who else knows what it’s like to listen to algebra classmates debate where your dad ranks in the top 100 NFL players of all time?
They’re each competing for playing time this fall as Notre Dame boasts one of the deepest wide receiver rooms in the country. That was also a selling point, they said, because it should translate to winning. The Irish are currently No. 3, and with only three ranked foes currently on the slate, Notre Dame is in playoff-or-bust territory, especially after last year’s College Football Playoff snub.
“Shoot, it’s championship or bust,” Fitzgerald joked before gathering himself and taking on a mockingly serious tone, looking around to see if Freeman and Co. were lurking: “We’re just taking it one day at a time.”
On this day: lunch. They settled on the dining hall, and after Fitzgerald began explaining how Notre Dame is the Augusta National Golf Course of colleges, they were shuttled away, bent over laughing. Having shown up at college, they’ve made some new friends.
“He told me he has some out-of-state guys now,” Nazario said, referencing a call from one of those August evenings. “‘Who knows? These might be the people you spend the rest of your life talking to,’ I told him.”
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That might not be half bad, Fitzgerald agreed.
