Getting Into the Club

Notre Dame fans don’t want to be close to winning it all. They don’t want “happy to be here” or to be relegated to a CFP contender.

They want to be in the club with Alabama and Clemson. That’s the group that has had regular appearances in the College Football Playoff and mixed in national championships. That wasn’t going to happen under Brian Kelly.

He reached his ceiling at Notre Dame and it’s one of the many reasons why Irish fans have embraced Marcus Freeman. Kelly brought the program five straight seasons of 10 wins or more, but Freeman has an ambitious work ethic with the potential to be better than that. In order to get there, Freeman knows that recruiting needs to get to another level.

That was Georgia’s approach and it finally paid off last season with a national championship that came from a roster filled with a bevy of blue-chip recruits. That’s a blueprint that Notre Dame can partially follow, but it really comes down to some specific areas of improvement.

Kelly’s tenure helped firmly establish the program as a place that can recruit and develop top talent at tight end and the offensive line. They had eight tight ends selected in the NFL Draft while Kelly was the head coach. Five of them went in the first three rounds. Nine offensive linemen were selected and each one of them went in the first three rounds. That’s about as impressive as it gets at those two positions.

(Note: the first three rounds means that a player is taken in the first 100 picks in an NFL Draft. That generally means they were a high impact player at the college level, which is why it’s a point of emphasis in this piece)

It’s looking at some other key positions where it’s obvious what separates a program like Clemson from Notre Dame over the last decade. And it’s not just the two elite quarterbacks they had who were first round picks.

Dabo Swinney’s program has been built on big time talent on the defensive line, at defensive back, and at wide receiver. That’s the biggest thing that has helped them win 10 or more games in 11-straight seasons. It’s apples to mangoes when looking at those positions and what the two programs have produced in terms of NFL Draft picks.

Notre Dame has had six wide receivers drafted since 2011 and that should soon be seven after Kevin Austin is taken on day three this year. Four of them have gone off the board in the first three rounds. Clemson has had 10 receivers taken over that same time with one more on the way when Justyn Ross is selected. Five of them went in the first three rounds.

It’s been 10 defensive linemen drafted from Notre Dame since ‘11 with only four in the first three rounds. Clemson has had 15 with 10 going on day one or day two of an NFL Draft.

The Irish have had nine defensive backs selected since ‘11, but only two went in the first three rounds. One will be added to those totals with Kyle Hamilton being a first round pick. Clemson has had 13 defensive backs drafted over that same timeframe. Seven of them went in the first three rounds and they should add two more to make it 15 overall and eight for the latter when cornerback Andrew Booth goes off the board fairly early.

That’s a significant gap at those positions, especially on the defensive line and at defensive back. It’s not a coincidence that it comes back to recruiting where Clemson has been more consistent signing talent at those positions.

Since the 2015 recruiting cycle, this is how they stack up at signing blue-chips (4 of 5-stars) at each position. The overall numbers aren’t that much greater for Clemson, but there is a massive difference if it’s broken down into recruits who were ranked in the top-100 overall. That number is listed in brackets.

It’s 29 to 4 for top-100 prospects at those spots. There isn’t much context that needs to be added to show how much better Notre Dame has to get at recruiting those positions. (For anyone wondering, it’s 36 top-100 prospects at those three positions for Ohio State over the same amount of time.)

We can already see things are changing under Marcus Freeman. They have two top-100 defensive linemen committed in 2023 (Keon Keeley‍  and Brenan Vernon‍) and a safety in the top-100 (Peyton Bowen‍). They very well could end up with a handful more top-100 D-linemen, defensive backs, and wide receivers in the class as well, which is in a different stratosphere of recruiting at those positions compared to the previous eight classes for the Irish.

Notre Dame and the phrase “closing the gap” has almost become a cliché, but this is a glimpse of what that actually means. The gap wasn’t getting closed under Kelly. It’s starting to in Freeman’s first full recruiting class.

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