It had been a routine family outing, some shopping in Memphis; a meal and the short return drive home to Oxford, Mississippi, when Marty Biagi got the call of a lifetime.
Naturally, the family added a stop at a grocery store.
“When Coach (Marcus) Freeman originally hit me up and said, ‘Do you have time to talk?’ I was in a Kroger parking lot,” Biagi said. “And my wife (Rachael) was like, ‘We’re going to go inside and you just take as much time as you need.’
“When she came back out, I said, ‘Babe, I think there’s a good chance this is going to go in the right direction’ and she was ecstatic, I was ecstatic. It was just really cool.”
Added Rachael Biagi, “When Marcus, Coach Freeman, texted him we had to take a step back and just reflect on everything that just went on the past few weeks and how it all led up to that moment. For both of us, it was no doubt, no question in our minds that this was where God wanted us to be. It was just amazing.
“We had just been shopping in Memphis, had a couple days off, our son (Martin Jr., aka MJ) is obsessed with trains, and we went to go look for trains. On our way back, we had dinner, it was dark and we were just on our way back and that’s when Coach Freeman texted Marty.”
And that’s when Marty Biagi found, of all spots, a Kroger.
But in an instant, after having narrowly missed out on the LSU special teams coordinator post in a career in rapid ascent, Biagi found perspective.
“It was really cool,” said Biagi, a Shelbyville, Ky., native who first attended a Notre Dame home game in 1995 against Northwestern. “There were some different things going on, and without diving too much into it, my wife said, ‘If you haven’t seen how these pieces moved … and from a faith-based standpoint, which we are, even actually had been on about a 40-day fast and about 10 days into it got a call from Coach Freeman. I was just trying to have some more peace of mind and some clarity with some decisions going on. How some different things worked out.
“At the 11th hour to get a phone call unexpectedly from Coach Freeman just out of the blue, it’s awesome to see how God works, if we’ll just get out of His way, He’s got it. So it’s real cool. My wife is always reminding me, ‘Marty, don’t forget. God’s in the background. You’ve got to have that confidence and faith.’ This is just surreal, it’s awesome.”
A one-year stint at Notre Dame in 2016 had stoked Biagi’s internal spark to return to the school that, even though he had generated a successful playing career as a specialist at Marshall, remained No. 1 in his heart – and most importantly, the hearts of his family for the deeply connected and spiritually intertwined to the globally iconic hamlet mere minutes from Indiana’s northern border with Michigan and scarcely a half-hour away from the eastern shores of Lake Michigan.
See, Biagi traces his Fighting Irish fandom back decades, but his family traces its Notre Dame symmetry back generations. Biagi’s grandfather and grandmother on his mother’s side attended Notre Dame and St. Mary’s, respectively; Biagi’s father, Stephen, met wife, Marie, when they were undergraduate students again, respectively, at Notre Dame and St. Mary’s.
Then, Biagi’s brother, Michael, also met his wife and the two Notre Dame graduates married after college.
Biagi’s full-time, on-field assistant-coaching arrival beneath the shadows of Touchdown Jesus arrives on the heels of perhaps the greatest season of special teams play in Fighting Irish modern history. In earning FootballScoop’s 2022 Special Teams Coordinator the Year honor, Brian Mason was uncorking a unit that set program records for consecutive games with blocked kicks, directly turned the Clemson game into a blowout Notre Dame win and also, via trick play with Davis Sherwood, helped cap the enthralling, come-from-behind win against South Carolina in the Gator Bowl. The NFL's Indianapolis Colts named Mason their special teams coordinator last month.
Snared away from Lane Kiffin and Ole Miss, where he helped the Rebels to a top-3 finish in field goal proficiency within the Southeastern Conference; their three blocked kicks ranked top-20 nationally, Biagi also has serious special teams chops.
As he’s charged himself to become the lead recruiter of every prospect for the program, Freeman, having entered Year 2, also touted Biagi as an “elite recruiter and developer of talent.”
Meanwhile, Marie and Stephen Biagi still are trying to wrap their heads around a homecoming that’s been manifesting itself since the 1990s.
“It’s just been part of both our families for so many years,” Mrs. Biagi said. “My parents both graduated in 1933, my brother in 1966. So, we were always singing the Notre Dame fight song, always going up to Notre Dame for football game weekends. When I was young, it was just home. Every time we would go to Notre Dame over the years, it’s just like coming home again. It just has a special place in all of our hearts.
“It’s truly in Marty’s blood from both sides of the family, and he has always loved Notre Dame as well. All of our children have. It’s just a wonderful place to be.”
Scores of old VCR tapes helped Stephen Biagi envision something of a predestined path for his youngest son.
“Very proud for him, but can’t say I’m surprised because he has worked so hard trying to achieve every step of the way,” said the father. “It seemed almost inevitable that some day he would end up there at Notre Dame.
“He’s been working towards that since his first day that he decided he wanted to be a football coach.”
Rachael Biagi hailed from New Orleans, was finishing school at Nichols State and had not ventured much to the Midwest when she met her future husband, who coached at Baton Rouge, Louisiana-HBCU staple Southern University at the time.
She quickly was indoctrinated into the Biagi family team, despite Marty’s career progression that included eventual stops at Arkansas, Arkansas Pine-Bluff, Southern, South Dakota, North Texas, Purdue and Ole Miss.
“Notre Dame runs deeeeeep in his family,” Rachael Biagi said, holding extra ‘e’s’ for emphasis. “You go to his parents’ house, brother, siblings, it’s Notre Dame everything all over. Pictures, shirts, mugs. It runs deep. He grew up loving It and watching them all the time. It’s their family team.
“We always wanted to go back; we had loved it there the first time (in 2016). It’s a dream for him to coach there, especially while having his dad around to be able to see him coach there. He tries to pay it cool, but we knew he was extremely excited. His mom actually texted me, ‘We are just so proud of him and so excited for him.’ It’s really like a dream for them as well.”
Marty Biagi officially was named Notre Dame’s Special Teams Coordinator March 18; four days later, the Irish swarmed the Irish Athletics Center and LaBar Football Practice Fields for the first of their 15 spring sessions.
But Biagi’s love for Notre Dame shined from the outset.
“Especially for him in a leadership role and to be our coordinator, it’s just been awesome to have someone who truly is a Notre Dame guy be coaching our positions,” said All-America long-snapper Michael ‘Milk’ Vinson. “Not that any of our other guys haven’t, but to have a Notre Dame guy running our units, because we all want to be the best Notre Dame men possible, for him leading us has been awesome.”
Saturday has been circled in the Biagi household for a bit more than a month; the date slated for Notre Dame’s annual Blue-Gold Game. The date that, although not official, resonated when Marty Biagi made the call to his parents that he had earned a new job that fulfilled an old dream.
“I mean, I guess you’d like to say it was almost like ‘Rudy,’ where I got to call my dad and say, ‘Hey, your other son is going to Notre Dame,’” said Marty Biagi, a two-time FootballScoop Special Teams Coordinator of the Year finalist. “It was really cool. I had always told my wife that I would do anything, if it was the right situation, to get back. I always wanted my parents to see me coach a game at Notre Dame while they were living. They’re still living.
“2021 we played here, I was on the other side (with Purdue), so I was kind of like, ‘OK.’ Then this came about and it was really awesome, just to be able to say, ‘Hey, I don’t want to say we did it, but just in general, we did it.’ It’s something I’ve always had in my mind and in the background as a goal, because this place is so special.”
In the middle of a grocery store parking lot, Marty Biagi found a dream.