The Notre Dame football staff added to it’s 2022 offensive line haul on Saturday night when center/guard prospect Ashton Craig verbally committed to the Fighting Irish. The 6’5″/280-pounder out of Lawrenceburg, IN is the 16th player to join Notre Dame’s recruiting class of 2022 — a class which currently ranks #2 in the nation behind Ohio State.
From Ashton Craig:@CoachTMendelson, @CoachJeffQuinn, @CoachBrianKelly, @AllenTrieu, @IndianaPreps, @NDFootball,@EHansenNDI,@CoachD178,@Rivals_Singer, @TomLoy247 pic.twitter.com/le4fFBhqkp
— Ryan Knigga (@lhstigercoach) June 27, 2021
Ashton is a bit of a late bloomer relative to some of the other offensive linemen the Irish have been targeting in 2022. He played his sophomore year of high school at about 230 pounds. He bulked up a bit for his junior year, and that’s when his scholarship offers started to come in.
Ashton is one of many kids to benefit from the dead period ending at the beginning of June. He was able to visit Notre Dame unofficially and camp during Irish Invasion earlier this month. Obviously the Irish staff was impressed after evaluating him in person, and they offered Ashton a scholarship on June 22th ahead of the start of his official visit this weekend.
Recruiting Service Rankings
Rivals — 3 star (5.6 rating), NR overall, #64 OT, #12 in IN
ESPN — 3 star (79 rating), NR overall, #42 OT, #11 in IN
247Sports — 3 star (89 rating), NR overall, #36 OT, #8 in IN
247Sports Composite —Â 3 star (.8728), #579 overall, #51 OT, #11 in IN
Irish Sports Daily — 4 star (90 rating)
Cohort
Ashton chose the Irish over Power 5 offers from Michigan, Iowa, Nebraska, Northwestern, Indiana, Purdue, Duke, Florida State, Boston College, Wake Forest, Vanderbilt, Iowa State, and Baylor. Including the Irish, his offer list totaled 25 schools.
Highlights
You don’t need to get far into Ashton’s highlights to determine that he’s very athletic for an interior offensive line prospect. He’s quick off the snap with good knee bend and mobility. He also plays defensive end for his high school team, and those defensive highlights showcase some explosiveness coming off the edge. He doesn’t look massive on film, so his frame might be a concern to some. But the Notre Dame staff has seen him in person twice now, so they must be confident he has the frame to add the necessary weight while still maintaining his athleticism.
Impact
Notre Dame is bringing Ashton in primarily as a center, but he has versatility to play guard as well — possibly even right tackle. Jamie over at ISD always does a great job with his Film Don’t Lie reviews, and he thinks Ashton reminds him of current Irish center Jarrett Patterson. If he ends up being anywhere near as good of a center as Patterson at the next level, this would be a good pickup for the Irish.
This is the third offensive lineman to join Notre Dame in the 2022 recruiting class — joining guard Joey Tanona (#166 in the 247Sports Composite) and tackle Ty Chan (#204). Jeff Quinn will be looking to add one, maybe two more to the group. The top targets at this point would be tackle Aamil Wagner (#110) and guard Billy Schrauth (#159). However, neither is a sure thing for the Irish at this point with Ohio State and Wisconsin, respectively, making those two recruitments a couple of close battles. We’ll have to see how things turn out.
Welcome to the Irish family, Ashton!
Yo… this kid plays mean as hell, I’ll take a squad of dudes like that all day.
Also, definitely has solid hip flexibility, good mechanics. Digging it for sure!
This is shaping up to be a very interesting O Line class. Already have commitments from a Center/Guard, Guard/Right Tackle, and Right Tackle/Left Tackle. Although none of them are as highly rated as the O Line prospects we’ve historically gotten, pretty much everyone evaluating also thinks each of these guys has the upside where they could be getting meaningful snaps by their 2nd year on campus (especially if they enroll early). I’m a big fan of shooting for upside when you’ve just brought in a group that includes pretty much sure bets in Spindler and Fischer.
It also makes sense to shoot for upside in a transfer world, where ND has been (wisely) getting more aggressive about telling kids who will never play that they will never play. Going forward, it likely won’t be hard for ND to paper over depth issues if there are a bunch of of recruits that don’t pan out – particularly at o-line – so it completely makes sense to go for guys with high upside and see what happens after a couple years of the strength program.
That’s a good point – especially because ND should be able to do pretty well on the transfer market. They are markedly the best team with (depending on the position) the best chance of needing a guy here or there. And players from below the major conferences will be looking to move up in the world will take a hard look at ND (rather than say clemson, bama, Georgia) because there would likely be a harder road to actual playing time there.
Not really. ND’s academic standards make it unlikely that it will be a major player in the transfer market. That’s not to say they won’t pick up a player or two, like the last couple of years, but they will likely not be major players for the high end talent.
Look at the highly ranked players that transferred this year. Although we certainly could have used a WR or someone in the secondary we only signed one transfer at OL while several blue bloods got several talented transfers.
I think you both are somewhat right here. We should be able to dominate the grad transfer market; if you have a degree and no discipline issues, ND isn’t likely to reject your transfer. The undergrad transfers are potentially a different story.
At the end of the day, we got two guys who could potentially end up being the top O Line and QB transfers this offseason. That’s not bad! We also whiffed at DB and WR so far. That’s not good!
Great points, Kelly’s recent comments were right along this train of thought too. Wasn’t sure about how easy it will be to admit undergrad transfers, but they can and will continue to be aggressive about the graduate transfers when they have the need.
Good points Goldendomer and MikeyB.
I don’t mind the commitment at all. Seems like a good prospect who could be very good in 2 or 3 years. I don’t like what it signals however. It seems to me that this shows the staff is not very confident in getting the commitment of Billy Schrauth and that is a bad thing when it seemed like he was leaning hard to ND.
True, but I never got my hopes up. What’s the list of OL from Wisconsin that don’t go to Wisconsin when Wisconsin really wants them? It’s not very long. Shame if this means no Billy Schrauth, but in my mind that was always a longshot even if the early part of the process was looking good.
Well, in Billy’s case, it wasn’t just the early part of the process.
He’d basically been one foot in the door at Notre Dame since the fall, kept holding off on committing publicly, and now things are probably 50/50 after his OVs.
Fair enough, maybe I’m sleeping a bit on how close it might have been. This year has been so wild with the dead period, it is the early part of the process to me pre-OV.
Which is kind of weird. Seems like the OV would have confirmed things for a guy like Billy but now we just wait and see I guess.
It would be interesting to see a review of the kids who earned offers because of great camp performances. It seems like it’s usually local guys, maybe because they don’t face great competition otherwise. The last one I can think of is Moala, I’d say he showed he was worthy of his offer.
Kiser was someone who jumped out to me, didn’t Lea fall in love at his camp performance?