Isaiah Rutherford Dad: "Pretty Cool" To Have Notre Dame Recruit Son

Reynard Rutherford knew all about Notre Dame growing up.

Even on the West Coast, the Irish were the only ones with their own network and everybody knew exactly where to find them on Saturday afternoons in the fall, on NBC.

“They were big, big-time,” Rutherford explains. “Rocket Ismail, Ricky Watters. I can go back and remember when Rocket Ismail took the punt return back.”

As Rutherford emerged as a record-setting running back at Benicia High School, colleges came calling, but not Notre Dame.

“I didn’t get recruited by Notre Dame coming out of high school,” says Rutherford, who went on to play at nearby Cal from 1991-1995.

He did wind up with an indirect tie to the program.

“I had a friend, Aaron Taylor, who ended up going there,” Rutherford says of Taylor, who was a two-time All-American offensive lineman for the Irish. “I knew him from high school and he went to a lot of camps there.

“When he went there, it was like, ‘Oh, I’ve got some familiarity there because I’ve got a friend who actually played there.’”

If the Irish have their way, Rutherford could have a much more direct tie to the program moving forward.

Notre Dame was one of several schools to offer Rutherford’s son, 2019 cornerback Isaiah Rutherford‍ a scholarship, but only one of seven to make the list of favorites he released on Father’s Day.

“For my son to get recruited by that program, it was kind of sentimental to me,” Reynard Rutherford acknowledges. “That was pretty cool…Knowing their tradition and how they’ve always been a cornerstone program that has always been at the forefront as far as having their own TV deals.”

The other schools to make the cut included Oklahoma, LSU, Alabama, Oregon, Colorado and of course, Cal.

For his part, Isaiah appreciates the resource he has in his father in dealing with the process.

“Obviously if your dad plays the same sport as you, he knows the do’s and the don’ts,” he says. “Recruiting-wise, he’s helped me a lot through that. It’s good to have somebody in my life like that.”

Reynard Rutherford also helped his son make the difficult decision to put down the basketball to devote himself to football, where he was receiving major attention.

“I quit hoops my freshman year and just focused on football,” says Isaiah. “He’s been telling me to work hard. You don’t know what can happen – I can be a five-star, anything can happen. You just have to keep your head down and keep working.”

But Mr. Rutherford isn’t going to steer his son to his alma mater.

“The goal for him is to find the best niche for him,” he explains. “I don’t know if it’s Cal, Notre Dame.

“I can’t say, but I don’t want him to pick Cal just because I went there. It was a good fit for me, but it may not be a good fit for him. I don’t think it’s a determining factor that I went there. We don’t even talk like that when we speak about Cal.”

While he enjoyed his time at Cal and believes it was the best decision for him, Reynard Rutherford doesn’t believe that means it’ll be the best decision for his son, so he never talked up his alma mater heading into the process.

“I wanted him to experience it organically and for himself and not me manufacturing it,” he says. “Like I said, what was best for me, may not be best for him. I just want him to go there and experience it, just like I want him to go to Notre Dame to experience. Go to ‘SC, go to Alabama, go to Oklahoma, experience it for yourself because Alabama may be great for you, but it may be bad for somebody else.

“Notre Dame may be great for him, you know what I’m saying? He’s the one who has to be there for four years. He’s going to have to go there and have an organic feeling about the place. I think that’s what’s going to determine how he leans and which way he goes.”