Notre Dame Football: Irish notch a huge recruiting win in 2021 class

Notre Dame football notched a win on the recruiting trail by landing a high-priority cornerback out of the state of Maryland, Ryan Barnes.

Notre Dame landed one of their top prospects in 2021, cornerback Ryan Barnes out of Maryland. Barnes has been highly coveted by this staff and they’ve treated him like a 5-star player since they offered him in March.

He was of course supposed to visit campus before everything got cancelled but there have been rumors that Barnes really wanted to take a trip or supposedly took a trip on his own to do a walk-through of Notre Dame a few weekends ago just to get a feel for the University itself.

Obviously if you know, you just know with Notre Dame and that’s why getting recruits to campus is so imperative. If that is or isn’t in fact what took place with Barnes, he decided to pull the trigger regardless and commit to the Irish in June. His relationship with the staff and especially Mike Mickens as of late was big here as well.

At the moment Barnes holds 33 offers from Michigan, Clemson, Florida, Oklahoma and many others.

What will Barnes bring to the secondary in South Bend?

The 6’2, 180-pound cornerback will bring a ton of length and freaky athleticism that you just don’t see combined on a regular basis. He has to be one of the most underrated guys so far in this recruiting cycle. I’m not saying he will turn out like or better than Kyle Hamilton, but he can be compared to the Irish safety in terms on where he was ranked early in the process to where he finished up.

I could see Barnes flying up the rankings just like Hamilton did. He’s a do-it-all type of defensive back. Barnes can play press, man, run with anyone stride for stride and is extremely fluid in his movements and hips. He has nice speed for his size and excels at getting out of his breaks to go along with it. Probably the most important thing is football IQ and he seems like an extremely smart and savvy football player who just knows how to make plays. If you do watch some of his film, I know you’ll also wonder why Barnes is ranked as low as he is right now.

Cornerback coach Mike Mickens has come in and has been hitting home runs for Irish recruiting, definitely making him arguably the top recruiting guy on the staff at the moment. Adding Ryan Barnes across from Philip Riley is a huge upgrade from years past at the corner position and that duo could be extremely exciting to watch for years to comes. You also can’t forget about landing grad transfer Nick McCloud either. Just a great job by one of the newest coaches in South Bend.

2020 Class Outlook

With Ryan Barnes pledge that makes 11 commits in the class, five on offense and now six on defense. The Irish now have 3 secondary commits: Ryan Barnes, Philip Riley, and safety commit Justin Walters. I would still expect them to end up with at least five secondary commits when it’s all said and done. This might not seem like a huge get to some, especially when you just look at the rankings alone, but you can’t underestimate the importance Barnes has been to the staff and they got this one done in favor of the good guys. A lot of big programs were coming at him as of late, and the Irish closing this one is really big.