Notre Dame Football: The Irish need to expand their recruiting staff

Recruiting isn’t the sole factor in determining the success of a college football program, but it’s integral and thus needs increased focus from Notre Dame.

As many Notre Dame football fans know, recruiting rankings of individual players can be extremely overrated. There are many 5-star recruits who don’t pan out and probably shouldn’t have ever been rated as highly as they were. A prime example is Blake Barnett, who started out as a 5-star QB for Alabama. Things didn’t work out there, so he transferred Arizona State.

After failing to catch on with the Sun Devils, Barnett ended up at the University of South Florida. There, he threw just 16 touchdowns to 13 interceptions with the Bulls, and after two, injury-shortened seasons, and his completion percentage was just 59%.

Conversely, plenty of lower-ranked players turn into key players. Notre Dame’s Ian Book is a prime example, as he was a three-star recruit coming into South Bend. Despite the mediocre recruiting buzz, Book is primed to leave Notre Dame as a three-year starter who has led the Irish to the College Football Playoff. A more extreme example would be the All-Pro NFL linebacker, Khalil Mack, who was a zero-star recruit when he committed to the University of Buffalo.

The point is, assigning star rankings to players is an inexact science. It’s difficult to judge an FBS athlete when they’re competing against largely inferior talent. Furthermore, if a player is unable to go to camps, then they have less time to be evaluated.

As a result of this inexact nature of recruiting, to be a top 25 team, you don’t need to be a top 25 recruiting program. If recruiting was the only judge of a program, no G5 team would ever sniff the rankings, and Tennessee would still be a perennial power.

Still, to compete for a National Championship it undoubtedly helps to be a top 10, preferably top 5, recruiting program. Recent National Champions LSU, Clemson, Alabama, Georgia, and Ohio State are all elite recruiting programs and should serve as a beacon for where Notre Dame needs their program to be.

To take the step from great to elite, Notre Dame needs to invest in recruiting the same way that these programs do. The Ohio State Buckeyes are a prime example, as they employ eleven full-time recruiting coordinators. Conversely, Notre Dame employs only two people who work solely on recruiting, which serves as a glaring discrepancy between the two programs.

Having a clear leg up on programs less focused on recruitment, allows those elite programs to find the “diamond in the rough” players, as well as properly evaluate the blue-chip players. They allocate more time and resources to get the players of their liking, while Notre Dame’s smaller recruiting group struggles to keep pace.

Notre Dame needs to expand its recruiting budget, and bring on more personnel whose jobs are solely to recruit. By doing this they’ll be able to evaluate players more effectively and should be able to consistently land top 10 classes, instead of settling for top 25 classes.

If they are able to succeed in doing this, Notre Dame will be able to return to National Championship form.