Since we last did one of these, there’ve been two big recruiting developments at Notre Dame. The first was Micah Shrewsberry’s men’s basketball program going scorched earth on the Big Ten, persuading Jalen Haralson to come to South Bend amidst an eight-day, four-recruit haul which pushed the Fighting Irish to the top of the Class of 2025 rankings. The second was Marcus Freeman’s football program missing out on Deuce Knight, who finally—after months of hems and haws and visits to the Plains—flipped his commitment to Auburn.
We’ve written a good deal about Notre Dame’s NIL situation before, and to be clear up front, what we write is usually speculative. We aren’t especially well-sourced around here, especially in the booster corner of the university. This is both a benefit and a hindrance. The upside is that nobody’s asking us to drink any kool-aid. The downside is that we often piece things together from rumors, circumstantial evidence, and scraps reported or hinted at by legitimate college football and basketball insiders. I will say: No one’s ever pushed back on our stated perceptions, including what sources we have.
The best way I can explain Notre Dame’s willingness to engage in NIL—and this applies to the donor ecosystem more than to the school or athletic department itself—is as a three-step system:
First, Notre Dame was going to start leveraging donor money into NIL for high-profile football players at high-profile positions.
Second, Notre Dame was going to start leveraging donor money into NIL for lower-profile football players, building out the depth which makes Alabama, Georgia, and Texas so formidable over a full season while Notre Dame, USC, and Tennessee better pray to their respective gods that Julian Love doesn’t go down in the Cotton Bowl.
Third, we’d get to supporting other sports. Namely, men’s basketball. There was the chance for an end around on this third front—a decent portion of ND’s moneyed caste would be elated to contribute to women’s hoops—but women’s basketball’s still more a one-off for NIL-active boosters than the men’s game. Women’s basketball NIL is more purely legitimate “name, image, and likeness” stuff than pay-to-play. Also, the money is smaller.
Sam Hartman marked Notre Dame’s arrival upon that first step, getting high-profile players at high-profile positions. Boosters reportedly came up with the money necessary to make Notre Dame a no-brainer for an accomplished ACC quarterback who wanted to play at Notre Dame. Riley Leonard’s instantaneous recruitment reaffirmed that Notre Dame was willing to pay for a quarterback, especially one deemed marketable and capable of program leadership. Even a month ago, though, it was unclear if we’d arrived at the second step—using resources to build a nationally competitive roster.
Brian Kelly was not a very good recruiter. His classes didn’t measure up to Charlie Weis’s classes, despite operating in a reasonably similar era under very similar rules. With one exception (2013, following the national championship season), Kelly’s classes hung out in the low to mid teens in national rankings, while Weis’s stood in the top ten. Various good arguments can be made in Kelly’s defense, but they only close the gap so far. Maybe Weis’s staff wasn’t really the sixth-best at recruiting in the country, and maybe Kelly’s was better than the thirteenth-best, but there was a gap there. Notre Dame got higher-end talent under Weis than it did under Kelly.
Marcus Freeman is believed to be a great recruiter. Signs of improvement late in the Kelly era were roundly attributed to Freeman. Freeman’s ability to connect with 18-year-old men was his calling card when he took the job amidst Kelly’s flight to Baton Rouge. Freeman continues to receive plaudits for how he’s built up Notre Dame’s recruiting apparatus, as a program.
Freeman is recruiting at a similar level to Kelly.
What? How? Why? Well, the same offseason Freeman took over, NIL restrictions gave way to rights enumerated in the U.S. Constitution. Money was always involved to some extent in football recruiting, but the degree to which it’s mattered has multiplied over the last few years. Our guess is that with those restrictions still in place, Freeman might be recruiting at Weis’s level. Instead, he’s recruiting at Kelly’s. If one plus one equals two, Notre Dame’s NIL resources have been lacking. Probably because Notre Dame’s willingness to unlock those resources has been lacking. We haven’t reached the second NIL step.
Adding fuel to this perception was Jack Swarbrick’s approach to college football’s changes. Swarbrick was a great athletic director at Notre Dame. Notre Dame owes him a lot. But his public response to a changing labor landscape was to prominently try to pump the brakes. He went on sympathetic podcasts. He led appeals to Congress. He wasn’t wrong about a lot of what he said—if college athletes are deemed full-on employees, the industry is going to suffer a lot of unnecessary pain—but his focus seemed to be less about “How do we get these athletes paid fairly for their talent and hard work” and more about “How do we stop things from changing.” Meanwhile, Notre Dame’s NIL collectives, or what passed for them, were small and quiet and amateurish in what could be seen from the public eye. I’ve received more invitations to contribute to Iowa State’s NIL efforts than to Notre Dame’s. I didn’t attend Iowa State for four years.
Things changed in the last week of September. On Monday morning, the athletic department announced the creation of RALLY, an NIL collective led by—among others—Gayla Compton (of the Compton Ice Arena family) and Jordan Cornette (of early-Brey era basketball fame), two figures most prominently tied to sports other than football. Two days later, there was Haralson committing to Shrewsberry’s program, with recent recruiting photos aggressively circulating featuring the top high school recruit in Indiana clutching faux gold bars. As the month played out, Ryder Frost and Tommy Ahneman announced their own commitments to Notre Dame, to go with Brady Koehler’s earlier in the week. Was RALLY responsible? Probably not directly. Maybe RALLY is tiny. But the timing of the RALLY announcement and Shrewsberry’s ransacking of the Rust Belt sent a message, a message which says Notre Dame’s NIL philosophy has shifted.
Recruiting rankings don’t mean as much in basketball as they mean in football. Transfers make bigger contributions now on the hardwood than they do on the gridiron, and even those rankings have less of a correlation to eventual production than football rankings do. Football is more about measurable raw traits than basketball is. Basketball talent is more complicated to scout. But it’s not a bad thing to have the top-ranked recruiting class in the country, at least for the time being. It’s definitely not bad to land Haralson, who chose Notre Dame over Indiana and Michigan State, two schools definitely sending hefty NIL offers his way.
We don’t think Notre Dame outbid IU or MSU for Haralson’s services. We don’t think Notre Dame outbids for anyone but quarterbacks. When it comes to outbidding, we’re still on NIL step one. But landing someone without outbidding others is better than landing someone through cash alone. Ideally, we wouldn’t have to outbid others for recruits. Ideally, we could match other schools’ offers, then let our superior recruiters do what they do best. From what little we’ve heard (I am admittedly biased towards this interpretation), this sounds like what happened with Haralson.
It’s outlandish to call Shrewsberry a better coach than Tom Izzo. It’s silly to say Notre Dame has more going for it as a program than Michigan State or Indiana. But it’s not unreasonable for a high schooler to prefer Shrewsberry over the others to be his coach these next one to four years. Michigan State hasn’t been Michigan State lately under Izzo, who’ll turn 70 this season. Mike Woodson is performing an ongoing Chernobyl impression at Indiana. Notre Dame doesn’t need to go into high school conference rooms throwing Texas A&M money around. Notre Dame just needs to be in the ballpark and let its strengths—Shrewsberry, Freeman, and their staffs—win out. The thing Swarbrick did so well was hire great coaches. With extremely few exceptions, Swarbrick got the right people into head coaching roles. Had the NIL transformation come later, this would have worked even better in Swarbrick’s final years. As it is, he left Notre Dame athletics pointed in a good direction. Now, with an athletic administration which seems to accept the necessity of NIL in the fight to avoid mid-majordom, those coaches Swarbrick hired can do what he hired them to do.
At least, that’s the hope.
Knight’s flip stings. It’s never fun to be rejected. Did we get outbid? The rumblings and reports seem to say no, that Knight was worried he couldn’t beat out CJ Carr and wanted to go to college somewhere more familiar, having grown up in a southern Mississippi county of 24,000 people. But did we get outbid? Given how Auburn recruiting is spiking this year, like A&M’s did in that first big NIL year, my personal guess is yes. Even then, though, it’s still not the worst thing to get outbid.
The lesson Hartman and Leonard’s respective struggles should teach Notre Dame (whether those struggles are mild or severe) is that quarterbacks are overpriced. You have to pay some price—you need good quarterback play—but if you could choose between one highly rated quarterback and four highly rated linemen, two on either side of the ball? The linemen would make more of a difference. The price makes even less sense when considering the possibility that quarterback recruiting rankings, like basketball recruiting rankings, aren’t as accurate as more straightforward measurement of speed, size, and strength. More goes into being a great quarterback than what goes into being a great linebacker. Recruiting rankings are imperfect in all sports and at all positions, but it’s harder to measure quarterbacks and basketball players than it is to measure an edge rusher.
Again, Notre Dame needs quarterbacks, and Knight’s commitment does sting. But Knight was the perfect recruit on which to gamble. A composite five-star out of the Deep South, Knight was bound to receive unrelenting SEC interest. A quarterback, Knight was the kind of recruit Notre Dame boosters were ready to pay. Sandwiched between CJ Carr and Noah Grubbs, with Steve Angeli and Kenny Minchey each nursing plenty more eligibility themselves, the 2025 quarterback slot was reasonably low-stakes. This was the time to see what Notre Dame was up against. Best case, we’d make inroads in a fertile area. Worst case, we’d lose. We lost. Now, we go flip someone else’s commit and we move forward, having learned a lot from the exercise.
I still don’t know whether we reached the second step on that NIL list. I don’t know whether Notre Dame’s ready to build the kind of depth it takes to seriously compete for a national championship. Even Michigan’s never really done it—it took seven million people dying for Michigan to get enough o-line eligibility to win a ring—and given Notre Dame’s relatively small enrollment, it’s possible we just can’t. We may need to play some moneyball. We may need to pound the gold leaf a little thinner the next time we cover the dome. Football rosters are gigantic. I don’t know how one can expect to compete with Texas when it comes to assembling talent. But we should be able to get better.
With Haralson and the rest, we do seem to have reached the third step, which obviously implies I got the steps out of order. If I did, I’m certainly not unhappy about it. Building a great basketball program is a form of moneyball too, and this is Good Things Shrewing, not Good Things Freeing. But I wonder if I didn’t, and if reaching that third step actually shows we’ve committed to the second step too. I wonder if Freeman’s 2026 class is going to finally take that step forward we’ve been waiting for. In the meantime, there’s a lot of optimism on the basketball court, and the football team’s got a great chance at a playoff home game even having lost to NIU.
**
We’ve got a lot to catch up on, and we’ll do that soon. Ideally, on Friday we will look for every possible way Notre Dame could lose to Stanford, attempting to convince the cosmos that we’ve learned our lesson and do not need to be taught again. Ideally, we will also check in on the home playoff game path at that time, and on any quarterback recruiting developments, and on the other fall sports.
In case we don’t, though, either because of labor (my wife going into it) or labor (other necessary work at The Barking Crow), here’s the first episode of Beyond the Arc, a little YouTube series Notre Dame is putting out about the men’s basketball program. I’m personally saving it in case my son arrives before opening night. If possible, I’d like to watch that together. “Train up a child in the way he should go,” they say.
