Notre Dame football: How COVID-19 impacts the Irish football program

It was announced today that all athletic activities at Notre Dame would be suspended until further notice, which will impact the football program.

If you follow recruiting, Notre Dame football had a huge recruiting weekend planned for the weekend of March 20 – 22. Many high priority targets were scheduled to be on campus this weekend, along with all of the current class of 2021 commits.

A few key targets that were going to be on campus for this visit include Will Shipley, Rocco Spindler, Landon Tengwall, and David Abiara, among quite a few others. However, with the announcement today that all athletic activities would be suspended indefinitely, there will certainly be an impact on the Notre Dame football program.

So what does this mean for the program? Well, with the visit is canceled altogether this could be major negative for the program and its recruiting momentum. Getting all these targets on campus all together would be great for the program.

The current commits, staff, and players being around these guys at the same time could all have a huge impact on these recruitments. Now that the visit is canceled, recruits may still attend individual campus visits, but these won’t create the same energy that a big weekend like the one scheduled would have.

One option that was floated was for the recruiting weekend to get rescheduled. The possible date for this weekend to get rescheduled to was the weekend of the Blue and Gold game, which was supposed to happen on April 18th. However, now that the Blue and Gold game has been postponed, the uncertainty of a rescheduled date leaves that in question.

With the recruiting weekend rescheduled, don’t expect all of the guys currently listed to attend to be there, as they might have other things already scheduled for the new weekend.

The postponement may end up being more positive than if they had continued with the current recruiting weekend as planned. There were a couple of negatives that could have come out of this option. The first one being that recruits/commits might not have wanted to travel for safety concerns and therefore might have canceled or rescheduled their visit.

Another negative would have been that they would not get the full campus feel as most students would not be on campus during this period. Let’s hope that whenever the recruiting weekend is rescheduled for, all the players currently listed to attend are able to do so.

Whatever way this plays out, Notre Dame will likely face negative effects from it as far as recruiting goes, but as to how it actually plays out, we will just have to wait and see. Spring practices have also been postponed until further notice, which will serve as a potential detriment to the team.

The one positive is that all other NCAA programs are going to be facing the same suspension of activities, so everyone will remain on an even playing field in regard to next season. We hope that everyone remains safe and healthy and look forward to the eventual return of Irish football.