In the world of recruiting, rankings clearly matter. It’s no shock that when you look at the best teams nationally, they’re the ones who usually ranked the highest in team recruiting rankings during the previous three or four years. Maybe the top team doesn’t always have the top class, but you can bet they’re in or right there with the top-five nationally.
Another key part of recruiting comes to finding those diamonds in the rough. That isn’t to knock three-star talents, but the hype around them clearly isn’t the same when a five-star prospect visits campus or commits to a program.
We decided to go back and rank the top three-star players Notre Dame brought to campus dating to the start of Brian Kelly’s run at Notre Dame that began with the 2010 recruiting class. Here are the top 25 of those such players in the last roughly dozen years.
The 247Sports composite was used in each player’s star rating for this piece.