The second and final national signing day has come and gone with no movement for Notre Dame, who had all of their eventual signees known back in December during the early signing period.
Now the grades and rankings start to come out from those who are much smarter than myself on such things. Where did the three big outlets rank Notre Dame’s class and how many elite prospects were they able to bring in?
247 Sports: 17th
Of Notre Dame’s 19 signees, 247 ranks just one as a five-star talent (TE, Michael Mayer) and eight players as four-stars and eight more as three-stars.
ESPN: 14th
ESPN doesn’t give away their information or thoughts on recruiting for free but they do reveal their team rankings without cost. This is however the highest ranking any of the three services gave Brian Kelly’s Fighting Irish.
Rivals: 21st
Rivals, like 247, has Mayer ranked as a five-star recruit. However, Rivals lists nine players as four-star talents but just six as three-star caliber. This is the lowest of any of the three major outlets ranked the Fighting Irish.
Listen, you see the rankings and they leave you far from thrilled. I get that.
Clemson is ranked atop all of these and your usual super powers of Alabama, LSU, Georgia and the other regulars are right there as well.
The loss of Landen Bartleson hurts as depth at corner takes an obvious hit. I think it’s important to remember how high folks were on Chris Tyree just a few short weeks ago in these same rankings, yet his overall ranking went down the closer to national signing day we got.
When people say recruiting doesn’t matter, they’re lying. It does. Maybe it doesn’t always play out on the field but you aren’t a regular powerhouse if your team’s name isn’t at or towards the top of these lists with regularity.
That doesn’t mean you can’t still be bad or disappointing if your name does appear high. See Notre Dame under Charlie Weis or what our friends over at USC are going through right now.
It’s a class with a lot of potential, just few certain future stars. Here’s to hoping we look back on this class four years from now and are discussing how much it shocked the college football world for all the right reasons.