South Bend, Ind. – You probably wouldn’t have recognized Jeff Samardzija when he reported to Notre Dame last month. The Shark looked different.
The hard-angled face that makes him look as if he eats surfers for breakfast – as well as cornerbacks – is still there. You just see more of it. The long black locks sticking out of his helmet are long gone.
What’s this? Has he gone corporate? Trying to kiss up to Charlie Weis, his burr-headed coach? Samardzija doesn’t care what you think about his hair. He knows one thing.
It’ll play in Peoria.
Samardzija did just that this summer. If you’re wondering how this 6-foot-5, 218-pound touchdown machine came from the depths of Notre Dame’s bench to first-team All-American last season, you should have visited O’Brien Field in Peoria, Ill.
Go ahead and call his summer stint pitching in the Chicago Cubs organization a summer fling. He credits skills acquired on the baseball field for becoming arguably the premier receiver in college football.
“It’s something to do with baseball, always catching things and stuff,” said Samardzija, sitting in Notre Dame’s palatial year-old Guglielmino Athletics Complex. “A lot of it has to do with every year, 365 days a year, I’m playing sports. There’s no letdown. I’m always doing something with hand-eye coordination, whether it was hitting in high school or playing catch all the time.”
Samardzija’s idea of spring break is a slider on the outside corner. His versatility dates to Valparaiso (Ind.) High, where he started in football, basketball and baseball for three years and never missed a start, a streak of more than 160 games.
Then again, you could argue he took autumns off in 2003 and 2004. He played every game but only caught 24 passes over two years in Tyrone Willingham’s struggling offense.
However, Samardzija kept starring on Notre Dame’s baseball team and became a national figure on the football field last fall. Enriched by Weis’ knowledge gleaned from 15 years in the NFL, Samardzija set Notre Dame’s touchdown reception record with 15 and tied the school reception mark with 77, along with 1,249 yards.
He will be a big key at 6 p.m. MDT Saturday night in Atlanta when second-ranked Notre Dame opens the season at Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets are inexperienced in the secondary, and that’s one of Notre Dame’s question marks, too. Which passing attacks better exploit the other will likely prevail.
Playing before a packed house of more than 55,000 and a national TV audience will be a bit different from 3,800 watching him face the Lansing Lugnuts. But Samardzija sees similarities.
“The biggest thing about both sports is the competition aspect of it, especially in baseball when it’s just one-on-one,” Samardzija said. “Just you and the hitter. That competition for 27 outs in a game is so intense, you have to apply that to football.”
Samardzija balanced the two sports this summer, but he had to get up earlier to do it. After going 8-2 with a 4.33 ERA for Notre Dame last spring, Baseball America ranked him as the 20th- best amateur prospect in the country. The Cubs, obviously worried he would eventually choose football, waited until the fifth round to take him and shipped him to Boise. In the short-season Northwest League, he arrived at the stadium every day at 12:30 p.m., nearly three hours before his teammates, to get in his lifting and running for football.
“For me, that’s the ideal situation,” he said. “It’s all I had to do, to play sports.”
He also pitched well, hitting the gun at up to 96 mph. After going 1-1 with a 2.37 ERA in 19 innings in Boise, he moved up to Peoria and went 0-1 with a 3.27.
“He’s a great athlete,” said Lester Strode, the Cubs’ minor-league pitching coordinator. “He has a lot of upside to him: plus arm and good arm strength.”
Alas, he lasted only six weeks before returning for the start of Notre Dame’s camp. He ran pass patterns this summer, but they were against relief pitchers. Still, he picked up where he left off with Heisman Trophy favorite Brady Quinn. This is Notre Dame’s highest preseason ranking since 1993 and the Quinn-Samardzija connection is the main reason. It’s that dangerous.
“You really realize it when you’re gone for two or three months and then you come back and the first day everything still clicks,” Samardzija said. “That right there is a little bit of a wakeup call in saying, ‘Something’s special here.”‘
John Henderson can be reached at 303-954-1299 or jhenderson@denverpost.com.
