Gino Guidugli and his star pupil CJ Carr, Spring of 2026 (Photo: Chad Ryan/Fighting Irish Preview)
If you want to understand Gino Guidugli as a quarterbacks coach, just ask him about the three starting quarterbacks he has coached at Notre Dame.
Sam Hartman? “Sam’s like the ultimate pessimist, so you got to kind of talk Sam off the ledge.” Riley Leonard? “Riley’s like a golden retriever. Like, cuss him out, you can kick him, he’s gonna come back wagging his tail.”
And CJ Carr? Well, Carr is different, too.
“CJ’s just so dang smart that you got to be on your P’s and Q’s in there, because he’s gonna know it as well as you do,” Guidugli said. “It’s like you’re in there talking to another coach.”
Three quarterbacks. Three very different personalities. And Guidugli clearly understands exactly who he is coaching.
That matters because his current quarterback is a team captain, a Heisman candidate and the guy being asked to lead Notre Dame to a national championship. And Carr may have exactly the right guy coaching him.
Guidugli knows something about playing the position himself. The Fort Thomas, Kentucky native threw for 11,453 yards and 78 touchdowns at Cincinnati, took his shot at professional football and eventually went into coaching. He returned to Cincinnati, helped develop Desmond Ridder and worked his way up to offensive coordinator before Notre Dame hired him in 2023.
Now his job is helping Carr take the next step.
Carr’s physical ability has never really been the question. He has the arm and the confidence to make just about any throw on the field. In fact, sometimes the challenge is convincing him that just because he can make a throw doesn’t mean he should.
“He’s aggressive by nature,” Guidugli said. “He wants to throw the ball down the field. He wants to force the ball into tight windows. There’s not a throw that he doesn’t think that he can make.”
That made Wisconsin a pretty good early test. The Badgers were determined not to let Carr beat them over the top, so Guidugli’s message was simple: Don’t get impatient. Take what they give you.
Carr did.
One of Guidugli’s favorite plays wasn’t even a completion. On a play-action pass in the red zone, nothing was there and Carr simply threw the football away. “That was one of my proudest moments,” Guidugli said. “We’ve got to be situational masters, and you threw that ball away. Like, that is growth.”
Could Carr have shown that same patience a year ago?
“No. No, no.”
That “No. No, no” tells us quite a bit about how far Carr has come. Everybody knows Carr can make the spectacular throw. But sometimes the right play is the five-yard checkdown. Sometimes it’s throwing the football away. And sometimes it’s handing it off.
That’s exactly what Carr did on one of Aneyas Williams’ touchdowns against Wisconsin. Carr came to the line with a pass called, recognized what Wisconsin was giving him and checked Notre Dame into a run.
“You’re CJ Carr. Everybody’s talking about you for the Heisman. You check it to a run play,” Guidugli said. “That’s a pretty unselfish play.”
And maybe some of what makes Guidugli the coach he is goes back a lot further than Notre Dame or Cincinnati.
Guidugli lost his father shortly before Notre Dame opened the season against Wisconsin. Marcus Freeman knew his father from their years at Cincinnati and watched Guidugli balance an incredibly difficult personal week with preparing Carr and the Irish for the opener.
“He’s a family man. He’s a heck of a football coach, and I’m dang grateful he’s on the staff,” Freeman said.
When Guidugli talked about his dad Wednesday night, it didn’t take long to understand where some of his toughness came from.
His father was a teacher, coach and personal trainer, and Gino basically grew up in a boxing gym. By the time he was 10 or 11 years old, he was working out alongside NFL players.
“They’re busting my nose with a medicine ball, doing drills, and it was just like that was the expectation,” Guidugli recalled.
But here’s the part about his father that really caught my attention. Guidugli said his dad spent his life giving himself to other people and helping them “realize the potential that maybe they didn’t see.”
Sounds a little bit like coaching quarterbacks, doesn’t it?
And Guidugli says Notre Dame has changed him, too. Freeman often talks about Notre Dame changing your life if you let it, and Guidugli says his time in South Bend has brought him back to his faith.
“I’ve noticed myself kind of get back to my faith being here,” he said. “There’s just a calming sense. It’s like God just kind of calls you back.”
Guidugli certainly sounds like a guy who has found a home at Notre Dame. And nobody needs to remind him how high the expectations are this season.
There will be plenty written about CJ Carr this season. That’s what happens when you’re the quarterback at Notre Dame, you’re in the Heisman conversation and your team is expected to win a national championship.
But Carr isn’t getting there by himself. Gino Guidugli knows his quarterback — just like he knew Hartman and Leonard before him.
And right now, his job is to help CJ Carr become the quarterback Notre Dame believes he can be.