We’ve said before on this website that Charlie Weis was good at recruiting but not coaching, and that Brian Kelly was good at coaching but not recruiting, and that our hope has been that Marcus Freeman can be good at both. We were confident in the recruiting piece coming in, given Freeman’s reputation and the fervent fidelity we saw from players towards him during that tumultuous December week in 2021. We were less confident in his ability to run an effective program. We didn’t doubt that he could, but he was unproven in that category.
Returns are still coming in on the coaching side of Freeman’s report card. He didn’t often look like a good single-game coach in his first year at the helm, his team badly underperforming against Marshall, Stanford, and Cal while letting BYU and Navy (and Oklahoma State) hang around longer than desired and declining to take the risks necessary to have a puncher’s chance against Ohio State or USC. Only against UNC, Syracuse, Clemson, Boston College, and South Carolina did Notre Dame look like anything resembling a well-oiled machine, and there’s a common denominator with the first four of those which provokes the question of whether Notre Dame was good those days or if the ACC was simply worse than the consensus knew. In all the other facets of running an effective program once the talent is in the door—development, preparation, etc.—it’s even harder to judge the man so far. The jury is out, and who Freeman is as a coach is likely changing. By the time Kelly landed the Notre Dame job, he had been a head coach in college football for twenty consecutive seasons. By the time Kelly really seemed to figure things out in South Bend, he had seven additional years under his belt. Freeman is learning on the job, and this is new, but it’s also encouraging: We don’t have reason to think he’s bad at this, and he should be getting better at a rapid pace in these early years of his head coaching career.
Were we pairing this evaluation of Freeman with recruiting results matching our hopes, Notre Dame would be in a good place, looking comparably likely to (did you hear they signed Arch Manning) Texas to break through and demand anew the unqualified respect of a nation. Instead, things look more promising in Austin than in South Bend. Texas just pulled the third-ranked class in the country. Notre Dame, at one point the leader in the race, finished twelfth.
It is highly unlikely that Marcus Freeman has gotten worse as a recruiter. It just doesn’t make sense for the guy who managed to hold together the second-best class of the Kelly era to somehow recede in his abilities (that 2022 class somehow finished 7th after the chaos). The obvious issue, then, is NIL, where developing market trends threaten to leave Notre Dame in the dust. Peyton Bowen and Dante Moore ended up elsewhere for a reason.
In the recruiting rankings era, it’s always been harder to recruit to Notre Dame than it is to recruit to Alabama, Texas, Georgia, or Ohio State. The academic side of admissions shrinks Notre Dame’s possible talent pool. The school’s social opportunities fail to measure up to even those in Columbus as a calling card. It’s not this simple, but at some meaningful level, if you dropped Marcus Freeman or any other coach into Baton Rouge, you could expect his recruiting classes to climb a few spots.
With the NIL situation what it is—and to put a name on that, the situation is that it does not appear Notre Dame is procuring as strong of NIL opportunities for its athletes as other top-25 programs, as we’ve discussed in numerous other places—it’s now even harder to recruit to Notre Dame. Players who want a signing bonus are out of the question now too, limiting that talent pool even further than before. It’s not as difficult a situation as that faced by coaches at the service academies, it’s not even in that league, but it’s challenging. It’s probably not a coincidence that Notre Dame has zero five-star recruits out of its 24 commitments across the classes of 2024 and 2025 (twelve schools, including Arizona, have at least one five-star on board). What Notre Dame is doing to itself with its approach to NIL is similar to if an NFL team decided to pass on ever drafting in the first round.
Where does this leave Freeman’s task?
It leaves it in a very hard place.
As we see it, there are six possibilities that could improve Freeman’s lot on the recruiting trail. Thankfully, these are not mutually exclusive.
1. Adjust to the Norm
This appears to be happening already. If the takeaway from Bowen and Moore (and Keon Keeley, and Jayden Limar, etc.) is that Notre Dame will lose bidding wars if they erupt, a logical choice is to pivot away from recruits who might be inclined towards hosting bidding wars. The impression is that Freeman appears to be doing this, speaking often about encouraging recruits to “choose hard” and other, similar sentiments. This still leaves Notre Dame with a further shrunken talent pool, but it eliminates at least some degree of wasted energy. It’s not ridiculous to think Notre Dame could have finished with a top-ten class this spring if they’d known from the beginning that Peyton Bowen was not going to be an option. Theoretically, they should be more prepared for this with the class of 2024, and decommitments should be lower around Signing Day.
2. Adjust the Norm
This is the least likely to happen imminently, but it could change. Something people love to ignore when complaining about the new NIL world is that it is new, and that as a new thing, it is changing very quickly. The NCAA and the SEC and the United States Congress are all working on finding a way to establish national regulations of NIL, and even if they fail, the market should reach a much steadier state after a few more years of this have played out. We aren’t far from a day when boosters in College Station will be seeing the five-year returns on their NIL investments and adjusting their approach accordingly.
As the steadier state arrives, as Notre Dame sees the returns on its own investments (or lack thereof), and as a new athletic director brings his own worldview to the department, it’s possible Notre Dame could change its approach to NIL. It’s also possible Marcus Freeman could encourage this himself, and that he is encouraging this through lobbying behind the scenes. We don’t know what’s going on back there, but it’s not impossible that Notre Dame could solve its NIL problem by simply choosing to solve its NIL problem.
3. Hope for the Best
This is a defeatist line of thinking, and it’s a dangerous line of thinking if it persuades powerholders in South Bend to forgo other options, but it’s not impossible that the national regulations various entities are trying to enact will end up favoring the blue and gold, or at least shrinking the gap. This appears to be, with newsprint thrown in, Jack Swarbrick’s preferred route. Imagine Knute Rockne’s confusion were he told that Notre Dame was turning to national political leaders for help. Imagine his further confusion if told Notre Dame had such standing that it might work.
4. Transfer Resources
Sam Hartman’s commitment to the Irish was a breath of life to this conversation, and while Tommy Rees’s subsequent departure was a gut-punch on the same front, it’s still intriguing that Notre Dame was able to sign the best quarterback on the transfer market without much trouble. Can this happen every year? The guy in question has to be a grad transfer, he’s not likely to be the best quarterback in college football, but it’s not outrageous to think Notre Dame could bring in some difference-making NFL-interested grad transfer talent every single year. The transfer portal shouldn’t be an advantage for Notre Dame overall, and undergraduate transfers are not (admissions being the issue), but while grad transfers have existed for a long time, Notre Dame does have the option to focus more energy on them, and an increased cultural acceptance of transferring seems to have boosted grad transfers’ prominence.
5. Develop a Solution
If you’re recruiting mostly three and four-stars but you need them to play like five-stars, development becomes the name of the game. This is not Marcus Freeman’s calling card—Marcus Freeman’s calling card was recruiting four and five-stars, Luke Fickell’s calling card might be development—and development is something every program needs to do well no matter how talented its classes are. Also, I’m not sure it’s possible to do this to the level necessary to win the national championship? Without a ton of luck, I mean. Or perhaps some quiet scandal. We’ve seen Clemson do it, but over the last 20 years, no one else comes readily to mind. Nobody else has successfully turned good–not–great recruits into players capable of matching Georgia and Alabama and Ohio State for speed and strength.
6. Get Better at Recruiting
As always, a potential solution is to simply get better at the game. It’s nebulous enough to sound foolish, but if you turn the difficulty up on a challenge, sometimes the simplest way to win at the new difficulty is to improve your own craft. There is no Newtonian law saying you can’t bring a top-five recruiting class to South Bend in the NIL era with the present Notre Dame NIL approach. Just do it, and whatnot.
Quick(er) Hitters
How does all of this apply to men’s basketball? I have no clue. At this point, we’re blindly turning our souls over to Micah Shrewsberry and assuming it will end in glory. Did you see this Instagram post? We’re still in the pre-Fiesta Bowl portion of the Freeman Timeline™ with Shrews. No reasonable questions, please.
Back on the football trail, Notre Dame picked up a big recruit out of southern California yesterday, edging Ohio State and USC to earn a commitment from Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa, a four-star linebacker ranked 102nd nationally by the 247Sports Composite. He’s not a five-star, and the immediate question is whether the Irish can hold him, but he’s the new third-best recruit in the 2024 class, and beating Ohio State and USC off the field is a great way to beat Ohio State and USC on the field. Elsewhere in the Bear Flag Republic, Freeman & Co. flipped Logan Saldate, a three-star receiver out of Salinas, stealing the 5’11” prospect from Oregon State and backfilling the pass-catching position after Isiah Canion’s own flip to Georgia Tech. Notre Dame’s 2024 class is now ranked 7th in the country but only 12th in average recruit rating, pointing at slippage to come as schools like USC, Clemson, and Tennessee each fill out their class.
Lastly, Kiki Van Zanten, who has one year of eligibility left for Notre Dame’s women’s soccer team, didn’t see any action in Jamaica’s opener at the World Cup. She did, however, see her team pull off a shocking 0–0 draw against France in their opener early yesterday morning. Feel the rhythm. Feel the rhyme. Go Irish.
