Notre Dame Football: Ranking who will be most impactful in 2020 (15-6)
By Jack Leniart
The Slap the Sign staff has ranked the Notre Dame football players on the current roster based on who we think will have the greatest impact on the upcoming season. Here are the players that are ranked 15-6 on our list.
The ranking of the top 25 most impactful players was started by Douglas Farmer when he was writing for NBC’s Inside the Irish blog. It involved a number of Notre Dame media outlets and blogs, each one submitting a ballot with their rankings. All of those ballots were then totaled to determine the final top 25.
Douglas has since moved on from Inside the Irish, but our writers at Slap the Sign wanted to continue the tradition and pay homage to him. For this year’s rankings, five of our writers submitted ballots that counted towards the final rankings.
We are not ranking the players based on their talent or skill. We are ranking them based on who we think will have the greatest impact during the 2020 season. In other words: who will help Notre Dame win games this season.
Our countdown started with the seven players who earned honorable mention on our list. We have since worked our way from 25 down to 16. If you missed our previous articles (25-21 and 20-16), here are the rankings that have been revealed thus far:
25. Kurt Hinish
24. Jonathan Doerer
23. Lawrence Keys
22. Tariq Bracy
21. C’Bo Flemister
20. Nick McCloud
19. Bennet Skowronek
18. Houston Griffith
17. Myron Tagovailoa-Amosa
16. Shaun Crawford
Now, we delve into the top 15. As an additional bonus, this article will cover ten players instead of five.
The next ten players on this year’s list includes four fifths of the offensive line, a promising defensive end who has stepped into a starting role, a pair of electric wide receivers, the next exhibit in Notre Dame’s case to claim the title “Tight End U”, the senior leader of the running back group, and the middle linebacker and field general of Clark Lea’s defense.