No Evaluation Period or Camps Will be an Adjustment for Notre Dame
This weekend was supposed to be a huge visit weekend for Notre Dame. It was supposed to be one that could set things up for them to finish with multiple elite recruits on the offensive line and one of the top running backs in the country.
The visit weekend is now lost and college football programs need to be prepared to lose a lot more recruiting weekends going forward. Spring visits are already off the table, but there doesn’t appear to be a path which would allow the April/May evaluation period to take place either. So there will be no coaches on the road to watch players in person or to talk with coaches to learn more about a recruit.
As of today, all the camps Notre Dame was supposed to hold in June have to be considered as possible, but not likely. That means Irish Invasion (June 6), Quarterback Academy (June 6), Lineman’s Challenge (June 13), and 7-on-7 Passing Camp (June 13) could all be lost as well.
Notre Dame’s staff isn’t in a unique situation. Every program has to be preparing to lose these valuable camps. These camps helped lead to eventual offers for current Notre Dame players Jacob Lacey, Jayson and Justin Ademilola, Paul Moala, Micah Jones, and Jay Brunelle. 2021 commits Lorenzo Styles Jr. and Tyler Buchner were offered at camping at Notre Dame as well.
Notre Dame has used the spring evaluation period to offer players like Jack Kiser, TaRiq Bracy, Ramon Henderson, Clarence Lewis, Caleb Offord, and Joe Wilkins Jr. Keith Gilmore saw Ade Ogundeji at the Sound Mind Sound Body camp work out and then offered.
Jamir Jones was offered because of a camp workout. Tyler Eifert, Drue Tranquill, and Jonathan Bonner were too. Jalen Elliott and Troy Pride Jr. were evaluated in the spring before they were offered. It’s clear that these are valuable opportunities to evaluate recruits and without them, it’s going to be much harder to be right when offering the next group of 2021, 2022, and 2023 athletes.
Seeing a prospect compete in person is extremely valuable to college coaches. With their season going on in the fall, they don’t get the time to go out to games every Friday night. Having a prospect on campus and evaluating them off the field as well as how they project physically is also incredibly valuable. It’s looking like programs won’t have those chances to see these recruits in the near future.
In addition to that, they’ll also lose more evaluation tools like testing numbers from all camps and with track season being cut short, they won’t have track times to help determine the speed of certain players. All of that means they are going to have to rely on film almost exclusively.
Whether that is a good or bad thing depends on the people who are making the call to offer them. The staffs that do well picking out prospects on film can gain an edge the rest of this recruiting cycle and for the next one. The staffs who rely more on testing and seeing a kid in person may end up with some big misses as they fill out the 2021 class.
If coaches aren’t on the road in April or May, they need to be watching as much film as possible during the time they would have been on the road. They’ll have to dive a bit deeper than they typically do because now they’ll have the time to do so. We’ll see if they can take advantage of it and discover some prospects who may have been overlooked in the 2021 and 2022 cycles.