When the Notre Dame football team won the Albert Simien sweepstakes on Friday, the Irish broke LSU's stranglehold on its homegrown products. That grip was especially strong with 5-star athletes. The reality is that it wasn’t just LSU that often had an iron grip on the best players to come out of Louisiana. And yet, Marcus Freeman and company managed to do something no teams above the Mason-Dixon line have been able to do during the Rivals Industry Ranking era.
According to Blue and Gold’s Kyle Kelly, there have been 35 players from Louisiana during the Rivals rankings industry era who were rated 5-stars. A whopping 25 of those players landed with the LSU Tigers. That’s a steel grip on the best players in the state, eyebrow-raising, especially for a program that hasn’t always been among the best in the country.
What Notre Dame did on Friday would be plenty impressive even if the other 10 5-star products had gone all over the country. However, Simien isn’t just the first 5-star player out of Louisiana to commit to the Irish in this era. According to Kelly, he’s also the first of those 35 players to go farther north than Knoxville, Tennessee.
This research by Kyle Kelly puts how much of an upset it was for Notre Dame to land five-star OL Albert Simien out of Lake Charles, La.
— Mike Singer (@MikeTSinger) June 26, 2026
"Louisiana has produced 35 five-star prospects during the Rivals Industry Ranking era. Not only has LSU landed 25 of them, but none of the… pic.twitter.com/N8ebq1ybSu
Albert Simien commitment gives Notre Dame football historic Louisiana recruiting win
For a long time, it looked like Simien would stay the course with the trend. Many analysts believed he was headed to Texas A&M. The Aggies led the way in his recruitment for most of the spring, and then he finally started to feel a bit of wanderlust. Knowing the statistics that Kelly pointed out, it’s even more impressive that both Notre Dame and Nebraska were among his final five alongside the Aggies, LSU, and Ole Miss.
It wasn’t until earlier this week that reports started coming in indicating the 5-star offensive lineman would go to South Bend instead of College Station. He further surprised people when he pulled a switcheroo during his commitment announcement. Simien first put on a hat for the Tigers, and it looked like he was staying close to home. He then took that hat off and put on an Ole Miss cap.
It wasn’t until he put on his third hat, the Notre Dame hat, that he said this time it was real and didn’t change his apparel or mind this time. He almost certainly didn’t know just how impactful his “change” of heart on Friday was. By making that change, Albert Simien didn’t just make Notre Dame history in the modern era; he also made history for Louisiana. And of course, his commitment continues what’s been a historic recruiting run for Fighting Irish head coach Marcus Freeman the last two years.
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