Notre Dame Football: Fallout from the Will Shipley recruitment

Notre Dame lost out recruiting Will Shipley. This means one thing on the field but is indicative of a larger issue for the Irish overall.

By now, it’s not new news. The 5-star running back from North Carolina, Will Shipley, chose Clemson over Notre Dame. More than just losing out on a major prospect, the weight of this decision means more than just moving onto the next running back to recruit for Notre Dame.

This decision from Shipley makes sense. Clemson has been one of the two best college football programs in the past decade. He’s from North Carolina, making Clemson a geographic fit. Meanwhile, Travis Etienne enters his final season in 2020. The starting running back spot will be open for 2021 when Shipley is a freshman.

With that being said, he could have seen significant playing time as a freshman at Notre Dame. Frankly, he could have likely been the starter as a freshman. He could have done this while getting a Notre Dame education and still playing for one of the premier programs in the history of college football.

By choosing Clemson, Will Shipley inadvertently demonstrated the difference between Notre Dame and college football’s modern elites. They can recruit at a rate that Notre Dame can not.

By recruiting at a rate that Notre Dame cannot, teams like Clemson, Georgia, and Alabama will always keep the Irish an arm’s length away. When Notre Dame stepped on the field at the Cotton Bowl against Clemson they simply didn’t have the athletes to match up for 60 minutes.

This has been the largest failure of Brian Kelly’s tenure, and he knows it.

By only being a top-20 recruiting program, annually, and not a top-10 or top-5 program in recruiting, Notre Dame can develop talent as much as possible. They can work harder, and game plan better. However, they will not win on the field.

There isn’t time to cry about this, though. Notre Dame needs to pick itself up off the mat. They need to go out and land their next highest-rated running back. Now, this may not be easy, given Notre Dame’s all-in approach to Will Shipley, but it has to be done.

One name that may come up as the running back Notre Dame goes after is Prophet Brown. He’s a 4-star athlete from California, and he has every possibility of being better than Shipley. After all, scouting high school athletes is an inexact science.