According to its website, 8,874 undergraduate students are enrolled at the University of Notre Dame. On top of that, the school has 3,935 graduate students. The vast majority of them walk around the South Bend, Indiana campus anonymously, but not Chicago Bears tight end Cole Kmet.
“Yeah, I’ve had a couple classes where I get a double-take looking at me like, ‘Why the heck is this guy in classes right now?’, Kmet laughed. “But it’s been cool, everyone’s been great, and it’s been fun to be back as part of the student body.”
Kmet played tight end for the Fighting Irish from 2017 to 2019, but he left school early to enter the NFL Draft. His hometown Bears picked him in the second round in 2020, and since then, he’s been working toward finishing his degree online.
Now, he’s back in South Bend, spending the spring semester finishing that process in person.
“The whole reason I wanted to come here was not only for the football aspect, but also for the academic aspect, and that was something that was really important to me, something I want to finish out, something I take a lot of pride in,” said Kmet. “Plus, I promised my mom that I would come back if I left early. So (I’m) fulfilling a promise, and fulfilling something I want to have in my bag for the rest of my life.”
The 23-year-old is in class two days a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays. When he’s not in class, he’s working out, or hanging out with his brother Casey, who plays on Notre Dame’s Baseball team. They’re living together in an 800 square-foot apartment in downtown South Bend.
Kmet says he’s having a blast living with his brother, but he admits the apartment isn’t the cleanest in town.
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“Oh, it gets trashed,” he laughed. “We have to designate clean-up times to make sure that we stay on top of it.”
The Lake Barrington-native is nine hours shy of his degree in political science, and he’s on track to graduate alongside Casey in May. He’s finishing his classwork by taking three electives, with his favorite being a class about Latin Poetry.
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He’ll finish in time to join the Bears for the team’s minicamps and training camp later this year as they hope to improve from a 3-14 2022 season.
