By now you’ve heard stories of former recruits who hated the fact they weren’t labeled five-star players coming out of high school and used that as motivation to become some of the best players in the NFL.
JJ Watt immediately comes to mind when typing that but there are a ton others as well.
What you will hear from folks though is that recruiting rankings don’t matter, that the amount of stars a player is labeled having don’t measure his heart and other predictable cliches as well.
If you’ve followed Notre Dame football for any real amount of time you can remember times when Charlie Weis and Bob Davie both brought in recruiting hauls regarded as some of the highest-ranked classes in the entire country, yet those classes didn’t exactly add up to having the desired results on the field.
With all of that said let’s not kid ourselves – it’s not the end of the world if you’re not within a magical number of say top-five or top-ten, but do you think Alabama, Clemson and LSU who have been mainstays in every recruiting ranking services top-ten for years would prefer to be ranked lower?
Recruiting rankings for a certain player or team can be over or underrated but at the end of the day, if you’re getting beat in the recruiting world with regularity then you’re bound to get beat on the field with regularity before long. If you don’t believe me then take a look back at the Tyrone Willingham era at Notre Dame.
Whether you like it or not today is a huge day for the future of all collegiate football programs but headed into it, the good news is it appears that it will be a very successful day for the Fighting Irish.