Cornerback Christian Gray has seen the good and the bad sides of being a starting cornerback at Notre Dame. He's routinely been one of the more praised a scrutinized players in the defensive backfield the last two seasons. The 2025 season got off to a rough start for Gray, but he's turned it around since then. He's been targeted 29 times this season; 12 of those targets came against Miami. He's allowed 19 receptions for 230 receiving yards and has struggled, at times, preventing the big play. Now, Gray is turning his season around after two strong performances against Arkansas and Boise State.
"That was great," Gray said about the defensive performance against Boise State. "That’s team glory. I’m happy that we got four interceptions and Leonard [Moore] got two interceptions. Tae [Johnson] got his first one and Luke [Talich] did too. I feel like we’re going to keep growing from there. We’re going to be an unstoppable defense."
The turnaround really began against Arkansas when the Irish traveled down to Fayetteville for the first time in program history. The Notre Dame defense held the high-powered Arkansas offense to just 13-points and 187 yards under their season average.
"We changed our mindset," Gray said when asked about flipping the switch against Arkansas. "We changed our mentality. After the Texas A&M loss, we knew that we weren’t really ourselves. We just returned back to ourselves, became the people with our back against the wall and everything else. What are you going to do? Are you going to fight back or are you going to die? We just started growing with that mentality, started fighting as hard as we could, got back to our routine and our real coverages. We just became ourselves again."
As we've seen, Gray has struggled, but as we all know playing field corner comes with it's own challenges. The St. Louis native took some time to adjust to being the full time field corner and has found his footing at the position.
"It’s a very big transition," Gray stated. "There’s so much over there. It’s all about alignments when you get to the field. You have to know who you’re going against, where they’re lining up and if they’re on the hashes or on the numbers. To the field it’s numbers. They line up on the numbers or close to the line. In the field it’s all about measure, knowing who you go against and playing to your leverage. I say the field is still better than the boundary though, in my eyes."
Handling adversity is a big aspect of playing the cornerback. Head coach Marcus Freeman has preached 'one play, one life' every since he arrived in South Bend. Gray, who is now a junior, has owned that mantra and has used it to help fuel his turnaround.
"I definitely say I’ve matured on that," Gray explained. "They catch a ball on me, so what? Next play I’m going to have to go shock them over here. It’s that mentality. You don’t want to just say ‘oh shoot, he just caught a ball.’ You want to say, ‘all right, next play I’m going to win this one.’ I’m going to win this one every time. I know my mentality just grew from that."
Notre Dame is on the brink of having the best cornerback duo in the country. Moore has been as advertised, now it's time for Gray to play like the player he's capable of being. If he continues to ascend, teams will have an extremely difficult time passing on this secondary. The next two weeks will be extremely crucial in Gray's return to form.
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