DeShone Kizer is stuck in a moment of self-reflection, having scrambled around the jarring juxtaposition that separates the Notre Dame quarterback’s present from his not so distant past.
Kizer has started nine games for the Irish this season. Notre Dame has won eight of them, keeping it positioned for a berth in the season-ending College Football Playoff heading into Saturday’s regular-season finale at Stanford. These are developments that would have been predicted by no one, least of all Kizer, earlier this year, when he was a distant third behind two other quarterbacks — Everett Golson and Malik Zaire — on the Irish depth chart and when football was sometimes the last thing on his mind.
But in times when his performance has been flawed this season, as it was in Saturday’s 19-16 victory over Boston College, when Kizer threw three interceptions and was, in the words of Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly, “humbled a little bit,” the perspective he has gained over the past eight months rushes to the surface.
“When you get thrown into a situation like this, you have to grow and mature as fast as you possibly can,” said Kizer, a 19-year-old redshirt freshman. “If you can’t mature, you can’t take yourself to the goals and give yourself the opportunity to achieve the mission you set out on.”
Given Kizer’s role reversal, which in less than a year has seen him go from rarely considered reserve wallowing in self-doubt to one of the faces of Notre Dame’s season, compartmentalizing his growth spurt to football would be understandable. But the added reality of watching his 19-year-old girlfriend endure the discovery and treatment of a tumor in her neck has provided Kizer with a more meaningful definition of adversity.
That journey, now in its eighth month, has thrown Kizer and his girlfriend, Elli Thatcher, on a topsy-turvy ride they could not have imagined when they began dating in 2014, 10 months before the diagnosis.
Like Kizer, Thatcher, a pre-med student at Ohio State, is in her second year of college and calls Toledo, Ohio, home. Although they went to different high schools, the quarterback and Thatcher began dating before heading to college, Kizer in South Bend and Thatcher in Columbus.
For years, Thatcher said, she had dealt with daily lightheadedness and dizziness she could not explain. When a lump on the right side of her neck began to develop, she realized she could no longer ignore it or the symptoms. A CT scan in March detected the tumor.
Ten minutes after she was told of the tumor’s presence, Thatcher called Kizer. “It was a phone call that was going to change his life and mine,” she said. “It’s something you don’t want to have to tell anyone. But it had to be done.”
The timing, she knew, was not ideal. He had been struggling to accept his understudy role at Notre Dame, and with a lack of confidence that he had not experienced in his award-winning high school career. Buried behind Golson and Zaire, Kizer said he began to get into his own head when he struggled to execute even the most basic throws in practice.
Thatcher and Kizer had talked about his struggles on the field, and Kizer’s father, Derek, had offered his own bit of tough love: He suggested that before Kizer could truly grow, he had to allow himself to hit rock bottom.
Kizer was nine minutes into a statistics review session on March 3 when his phone began to buzz against the three pencils in his pocket. After the third call, Kizer answered, quickly telling Thatcher that he was in a class and could not be bothered, and abruptly hung up.
Thatcher estimated that she called back 10 times before Kizer finally realized something was wrong. He left the room to learn that Thatcher’s problem dwarfed his own.
Just over a month later, as Thatcher underwent a 17-hour procedure that removed 95 percent of the tumor, Kizer sat in a waiting room inside Ohio State’s James Cancer Hospital and posted updates to the online blog he and Thatcher share. Once the operation was over, Kizer drove the 271 miles back to South Bend for the Irish’s spring game the next day, only to return to Columbus as soon as it was over.
In previous posts on the blog, Kizer had acknowledged finding himself distracted during spring workouts as his mind shifted to Thatcher’s condition at Ohio State. As tough as the situation was for each of them, Thatcher understood Kizer was doing all he could to manage both of his priorities.
“I knew football was something that would take his mind off of it and kind of cheer him up when days weren’t so good,” Thatcher said. “But then when he was at football, he was thinking about what I was doing and about how he wasn’t here. It was hard for him, at times, to balance everything, but we figured it out.”
Kizer was forced to figure out a plan on Sept. 12, when Zaire, who had become the starter when Golson transferred to Florida State, broke his ankle in a win over Virginia and was lost for the season. At times since then, Kizer has resembled the poised and trusted competitor his teammates have seen emerge. In other instances, he has shown the blemishes of what he was only nine games ago: a former third-stringer thrust without warning into the role of starter.
That transition was eased through the bond that developed between the quarterbacks this year on long drives to Columbus, where Kizer would spend time with Thatcher, and Zaire, another Ohio native, would visit friends. Kizer said he and Zaire have made the four-hour drive to Ohio State four or five times, bonding on the long car rides through discussions about life, football, game situations and how to thrive in the role of backup quarterback, unaware at the time that each would soon be named the starter.
“We were just able to talk through all the situations and become closer in that sense and truly become friends rather than just enemies on the field when it came to competing for the position,” Kizer said.
Now, Notre Dame is 10-1 and looking ahead to a possible playoff berth, and Kizer approaches the game with a renewed confidence. He has passed for 2,362 yards this season, with 18 touchdowns and nine interceptions, and his teammates have taken notice of the way he carries himself.
“He’s very comfortable,” Notre Dame center Nick Martin said. “I think he’s found his voice, which, no matter what age you are, when you are a quarterback, people are going to look to you to make plays and look to you to be the guy to lean on.”
Four hours away, Thatcher still has daily challenges: the surgery left half of her throat, her vocal cords and her tongue paralyzed, making swallowing and speaking difficult. And her left leg is paralyzed below the knee, a condition doctors fear will not change.
Although she has been unable to travel to South Bend, Thatcher saw Kizer play in person for the first time on Nov. 7, in Notre Dame’s 42-30 win over Pittsburgh. In some ways, she has connected her journey to Kizer’s. And Kizer, feeding off Thatcher’s recovery and his father’s advice, has risen from the depths of the spring through lessons that his sped-up football education never could have provided alone.
“You keep fighting day in and day out with issues at the time, and I eventually said, ‘You know what, this is it: I’m at my lowest,’” Kizer said. “It’s only up from here.”
