During my junior year of high school, the math team won the state championship in what some might consider unusual fashion. In the state competition, the team placed first in only one event. But a bunch of second-place finishes put the team over the top. It was a proud moment for the school.
But college football doesn’t allow the same cushion as high school math competitions. You need to finish first in several races to have any real shot at a national championship. Not the least of those races is for five-star recruits. And Notre Dame is far behind the sport’s best in that area.
Irish fans are smarting over five-star defensive tackle recruit Justin Scott picking Ohio State when Notre Dame seemed to be in the running. It wasn’t only that this happened or that Scott fit the profile of many past Irish signees. It was that it was the latest in a long list of five-star recruits to snub the program.
The numbers speak for themselves, and they don’t speak kindly about the Irish. Ohio State and Georgia’s 2024 recruiting classes have four and three five-star commits, respectively. Three more await the Bulldogs in their 2025 class. Going back to the 2014 class, the Irish have had two: [autotag]Michael Mayer[/autotag] and [autotag]Jaylen Sneed[/autotag].
So to recap, two programs that are in college football’s top tier have more five-star commits for 2024 than every Irish recruiting class spanning a decade combined. Florida has equaled that number for 2024. While there are several reasons the Irish haven’t been able to crack that top tier, this one has to be at or near the top of the list.
Taking all of this into consideration, it’s worth questioning when or if the Irish will attract a bunch of college football’s top recruits again. We know they have plenty of three- and four-star recruits, but those only will take you so far if you want to win a national championship. Eventually, you need to either get a regular piece of that five-star pie or develop your own players to be on that level. The Irish don’t have a recent track record of doing either.
Whether the Irish can get to that next level and stay there could depend on getting out of their own way. That means abandoning many of the things that the university seems resistant to. Particularly, will it choose to play ball in the NIL era, and will it relax its stringent academic requirements to some degree? As dirty as it sounds to Notre Dame, it might be the only way to end the national championship drought.
The pressure will be on [autotag]Marcus Freeman[/autotag], [autotag]Pete Bevacqua[/autotag] and the [autotag]Rev. John Jenkins[/autotag] to produce results before too long. They can go about business as usual and hope for the best, or they can follow the rest of college football’s top dogs so the program doesn’t get left behind. The choice sounds easy for us outsiders, but as we know all too well, Notre Dame often has caught up too late or not at all. When it comes to five-star recruiting, it would be better late than never.
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Follow Geoffrey on Twitter: @gfclark89
