Building A Champion - Part I
The years of Lou Holtz and winning a National Championship is no more than a distant memory in South Bend. Notre Dame has come close a few times since Holtz departed, and it always ended poorly for the Fighting Irish. Now head coach Brian Kelly has Notre Dame on the verge of breaking through, but he hasn't quite taken the next step.
Despite the shortcomings, recruiting isn't actually as far off as you may think.
How Champions Recruit
To see how Notre Dame compares, I looked at the rankings and players of the four classes leading up to a National Championship of every winner in the College Football Playoff era. Then I averaged the 24 classes of all the champions together to find a clean number to compare to Notre Dame's 2017-2020 classes. While there is an outlier, most of them fall in the same exact range. The average class rank on the 247 Composite features:
- Average class ranking - 6
- Average # of top 100 players in each class - 7.41
- Average # of five star players in each class - 2.91
This obviously isn't a perfect way to look at championship teams. However, it shows the talent level the previous six winners bring that leads them to a title. This shows a clear talent gap between the elite and Notre Dame. Despite this, the Fighting Irish lineup almost identical to a college football power over the last five years.
Notre Dame And Clemson
Clemson is the one outlier that actually drags down the averages of all the champions. If you remove Clemson from the equation and look at the other four champions, (Ohio State, Alabama twice, LSU) the average recruiting class rank jumps from 6.0 to 3.25. The number of top 100 players jumps from 7.41 to 8.81 and the number of five-star recruits goes from 2.91 to 3.38.
Clemson is strange when you compare their recruiting classes to the rest of the title winners. However, they line up similar to what Notre Dame currently has on the roster:
The one gap here is the number of five star players Notre Dame lands compared to Clemson. While the Tigers brought in more elite guys, Notre Dame is right there. Irish Breakdown publisher Bryan Driskell had a great breakdown of the Clemson - Notre Dame game in 2015. To sum up, Notre Dame was the more talented team on paper and put more high round draft picks in the NFL.
While that heavyweight matchup has sent the trajectories of each team in different directions, Notre Dame isn't a world away from the elites like so many believe. Notre Dame is in striking distance of a few of those elite players in the 2021 class (Will Shipley, Rocco Spindler, Dont’e Thornton) and they landed a few in the 2020 class (Michael Mayer, Jordan Johnson, Chris Tyree). Notre Dame isn't recruiting at the level of Georgia or Alabama, but Clemson has proven you don't have to. As vital as recruiting is to a team's success, it doesn't guarantee a title. Texas, Florida State and USC have proven that.
Recruiting is important, but having a program that can recruit enough talented players, and then get the most out of those players, is another way to not only compete for championships, but to win them.
While there are still significant areas of concern, Notre Dame is both recruiting and developing some areas as good as anyone. Part two takes a look at where Notre Dame has brought in elite talent and developed guys to some of the best in the country.
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