You can never have too many offensive linemen? On Sunday following the conclusion of the regular season Notre Dame flipped Wisconsin offensive guard commit Christopher Terek to add the 25th player to the 2023 recruiting class.
With the verbal just under a month until Early Signing Day, Terek becomes Notre Dame’s 5th offensive linemen of this cycle.
After much consideration, I have decided to decommit from The University of Wisconsin. Thank you to coach Bostad and the entire Wisconsin staff for the opportunity. With that being said I am blessed to announce I have committed to the University of Notre Dame! #GoIrish pic.twitter.com/TvOocnZ6Ur
— Christopher Terek (@cterek77) November 27, 2022
Terek started picking up offers in the beginning of 2022 and things really started to pick up steam in the spring when he took official visits to Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin before choosing the Badgers on June 29th. Things were pretty quiet until a month ago when Notre Dame offered–and with the coaching instability at Wisconsin–Terek decided to come to South Bend instead of stick around for the Luke Fickell era in Madison.
Recruiting Service Rankings
247Sports Composite — 3 star (.8832 rating), #517 overall, #39 IOL, #8 in IL
On3 Consensus — 3 star (88.07), #519 overall, #43 IOL, #7 in IL
The 247 Composite and On3 Consensus both combine 247, On3, Rivals, and ESPN rankings.
247Sports — 3 star (87 rating), NR overall, #58 IOL, #17 in IL
On3 — 3 star (88 rating), NR overall, #51 IOL, #9 in IL
Rivals — 4 star (5.8 rating), 220 overall, #21 OG, #5 in IL
ESPN — 3 star (77 rating), NR overall, #55 OG, #17 in IL
Friend of the Stripes Jamie Uyeyama does the recruit evaluations for ISD, and we trust his evals as much as anyone’s. So while the 247 Composite and the On3 Consensus don’t factor in ISD evals, we put a lot of weight on them ourselves.
Irish Sports Daily — 3 star (89 rating)
Cohort
In addition to the offers from the Irish, Badgers, Wolverines, Illini, and Hawkeyes, Terek carried offers from Missouri, Kentucky, Minnesota, UConn, Vanderbilt, Iowa State, Boston College, Duke, Kansas, and several other Group of 5 programs.
Highlights
Despite some of these highlights being filmed so far away like they’re on the James Webb Space Telescope the size of Terek (6-5, 310 on his 247 profile) really sticks out. This is, as they say, a big muchacho. I will stick with the tried and true reality that if the bulk of your high school highlights are run blocking you’re probably playing on the interior in college.
Terek moves to the second level very quickly. He shows surprising burst (defensive line could be in his future!) and seems to carry his weight really well, too. As per usual, there’s plenty of physicality and meanness which is a must for Notre Dame prospects. He does seem to reach a lot, though. He’s using his strength and arms to throw much smaller players to the ground–that’s not going to work in college.
The upper-body for Terek is really massive with long, muscular arms. It’ll be interesting to see what kind of weight he clocks in at early in his career once he’s on campus. He has the chance to really grow into a jumbo-sized guard and has the frame and face of a kid who looked pretty young early in his high school career but is rapidly maturing into a Power 5 level guard.
Impact
A top 10 player in the state of Illinois is nowhere near 4-star status in the year of our Lord 2022. Recruiting in the Midwest ain’t what it used to be!
I’m a little surprised Notre Dame decided to add a 5th linemen in this class, but it has seemed like a plan for quite some time to push towards 27 or 28 commits if possible and you have to think Harry Hiestand wanted a full cycle of “his guys” to replenish the depth chart.
In Harry we trust?
We will see how Terek and the rest of this class develop. The interior prospects (Terek, along with Sam Pendleton and Joe Otting) are 3 out the lowest 5 rated players in this class. Time to coach them up.
Welcome to the Irish family, Chris!
Hmmm. Is this the core HH method, coaching up? Seriously, I know we’ve discussed some aspects of this (signing highly rated kids vs kids he feels he can coach up) but I don’t recall any conclusions…
Anyway, thanks for introducing us to the young man!
/
With this years entire Oline probably gone by the end of next season, plus a probable 2-3 transfers, I’m not surprised at all that ND plans to sign 5 Oline. In fact I think ND may sign classes of 2-3 more guys than we are use to, to battle attrition through transfers. With incoming transfers being tougher for ND than most, perhaps this is necessary? IDK.
As it stands now, with mostly Grad transfers being the way ND will go right now, I don’t think we’ll ever see more than 4-5 transfers coming in and we may see more than that leaving.
Terek’s weight has been listed anywhere from 290-320 on sites. From what I understand, he dropped some bad weight going into his senior year and is closer to 290 than 320 right now.
I agree that our classes are likely to be at least 2-3 guys bigger than they have been entirely due to the increase of transfers out without a large increase in transfers in.
Agreed. Now that there is no 25 max per cycle, there’s no reason not to lean towards over-recruiting for Notre Dame and then letting the chips fall where they may with kids moving on if they don’t move up.
Realistically, Will the school look to review or revise undergrad transfer policies? In the wake of the USC game, I feel like it’s the smoking gun, and I also dont feel like ND can compete at the highest level without being somewhat competitive in the undergrad transfer market.
I’d like to think so, but we all know it’s Notre Dame we’re talking about here. So I don’t expect any kind of significant quick changes or vast turnarounds to be accepting 10+ transfers a year and a robust NIL program (paid for by….well no one ever gets to that point lol) over night as a realistic pivot.
But I’m sure they will make some changes and do better/more with the portal eventually. Maybe you get a few Joseph types per year instead of one.
Also, it seemed like not taking a QB and a WR or two was more the program just not being as aggressive to get grad transfers as they should have been. That’s an easier mistake to correct from a painful lesson learned to be more inclined to over-take instead of counting on unestablished young players and injury prone older ones.
That seems right. From Pete Sampson’s column, it seems like the program believes it needs three Joseph-type near-sure-starters per year now. I think the real number to truly compete for championships is probably five, but understanding they need three is much better than being happy with one. (Also they probably need 3-5 Chris Smiths a year on top of the multiple Josephs.)
Yea, how many e.g. did Bama, Georgia, or OSU bring in do you think?
Because whatever they did in the transfer portal, we have to at least match. But because our recruiting is not up to their level yet, it would probably need to exceed what they are doing.
Actually, looking real quick at what they did:
OSU was ranked right with us in 2022 portal.
Georgia didn’t take one and so was ranked very low.
But Bama was near the top with 5 transfers and 2 5 stars!
I think it’s likely most schools (now, after the rules have been in place for a couple of years) will take more like on average 10 transfers. With the bigger numbers be from places with new coaches.
At ND then it’s probably realistic to expect 4-6 in a year: 2-3 Joseph types and maybe 2-3 Smith types – even if it were ideal to increase that.
The difference being, though that Georgia and Alabama are starting with a bunch of five-stars, whereas ND needs to pull in the freshman superstars at Northwestern/Stanford/Ga Tech/etc. to pull themselves up closer to the UGA/Alabama level. Meaning I think to really compete with them, we probably need to lean on transfers more than they do.
And, of course, they get their pick of the litter. Alabama’s transfers are absurd (Jameson Williams, Jahmyr Gibbs, To’o To’o, etc.)
Yea, that’s what I was thinking when I said at least. We certainly cannot fall further behind in transfer portal.
But I was also thinking that Freeman may continue to close the gap with high school recruiting.
Though as it turns out it was only Bama last year that we fell further behind.
I agree that we would have to rely on it much more than they do. I just don’t see that as very plausible at the moment. It seems more realistic that we at least match what their doing and we need to continue to close the gap with high school recruiting.
I thought they were pretty aggressive on the WR front but were limited mostly to grad transfers and nothing worked out. Is that not right?
I guess it depends on how much credit for “pretty aggressive” that you want to give them. It was out there that they looked into a few WR’s and shopped around a little but based off not getting anyone I’d say they weren’t aggressive enough. I know they did something there and it wasn’t a shock that WR could be a problem, just would like to see them actually build it up a little more.
To me it seemed like were content with the group they had, knowing they weren’t going to be an 11 personnel offense anyways…But then some guys who always gets hurt ended up getting hurt and the position was screwed. I bet if Davis got hurt in spring instead of summer, they would have surely added a WR from the portal.
(Which was the philosophy I was trying to get at: for a position like WR where at best ND is adequate/already kinda thin in the best case — the shift should be to use the portal to go the extra mile.
Maybe they were trying to do just that, but what should be learned is “trying” isn’t enough. Just go get a guy where they are weak, like they did at NG after the Aiden K. injury like nd09 mentioned…They should have applied that logic at WR too after Wilkins’ spring injury.).
I guess I thought there was just slim pickings at WR given the limited parameters for getting someone in to ND. But maybe my impression is wrong.
But I agree, they need to start going the extra mile on these things and hopefully the school will make that a little easier for them.
My impression is that it may have been a little of both — slim pickings at WR (students who fit the ND transfer profile and who were interested in ND) and the staff not be overly aggressive.
However, ultimately I don’t think that the decision to not take a WR hurt as much as not taking a transfer QB. It seems like they really thought that Buchner would be the dude that they could ride all season long and that turned out to be wrong.
Part of me wonders how the season would have gone had Buchner stayed healthy — I can’t decide if the offense would have been better or worse.
Hudson Card entered the transfer portal (headline on ESPN this morning).
247 might have just been throwing stuff at the wall but they did a “potential list of fits” and Notre Dame made the list…But so too did Ok State and TCU, which makes a lot of sense for him, at least on the surface. Have to imagine ND at least sends feelers and sees what Card would think about the possibility.
Cam Hart coming back for another year! If he has a healthy season, we could have a pretty good secondary.
Really great development. CB would have been a huge question mark without Hart next year, outside of Ben Mo. I think it would be wise for Brandon Joseph to do the same and come back too, though I doubt he sees it like that.
Hopefully Justin Ademilola is next!
I guess I just assume Joseph will come back, since he wasn’t overly impressive this year. At least not what I would expect from someone leaving early for the NFL. But, who knows what he thinks.
Hart, Morrison, Joseph, Watts, with Henderson, Lewis, and Mickey in the rotation along with some other young guy who might surprise would be pretty strong.
It wouldn’t surprise me if we don’t have a single DB from the ’21 class on our roster come next fall. Although chances are at least 1-2 will stick around to graduate. We had some really dark days recruiting DBs.
All the reporters have been very confident that Joseph is out the door. But then again, they all were thinking Hart was gone too, so I guess we’ll see and minds can always change.
I think that a change would have to happen, Joseph has been acting as a one and done, but maybe he will think better of it. Probably would be wise, but at this point he might be ready to move onto the next test and stick to what he planned on doing from the start.
Yeah, but I mostly got that impression from his pre-season hype. Everyone was acting like he was an all-american level player, in which case, he gone. But then reality hit.
I haven’t heard much since pre-season about him still planning to go pro.
It’s been out there. The recent II podcast about senior day and the “who are they going to let walk” mini-‘controversy’ they all shared the belief that Joseph was going to walk as an indication he had zero plans of being back next year, even before Freeman backed off his stance a little and then was welcoming any/all seniors to walk.
Ah, gotcha. Makes sense. And it was clear before the season that’s what he wanted, so not surprising if he declared either way.
Ah, gotcha. Makes sense. And it was clear before the season that’s what he wanted, so not surprising if he declared.
One difference I’ve heard discussed is Joseph will be able to test for the league and Hart, after another Shoulder surgery, will not.
A very good point. Do find it likely that the injury could only help push Hart back to college, but Joseph has no such issue there. I do wonder for someone like Joseph, do you skip the ReliaQuest bowl or the Gator bowl? Are those still big enough to play? (Same for Jayson A.). I think we all know Mayer and Foskey are gonna bow out of that, but it’ll be interesting now for that next level down where the risk vs. reward mentality is for them personally.
So that might end that question right then and there if Joseph pulls the plug before the bowl preparations and avoids injury risk to start training.
I don’t think they gain much if anything playing in the bowl game. NFL has plenty of film and the pro days will be more beneficial. I don’t think they’ll risk injury. If LSU were to be the bowl opponent, that might change everything. 🙂
Yea that’s what I was thinking. Joseph was slightly above average – not an all-american type player we were hoping for. It could be a Kevin Austin situation where he just wants to go. But really how high is he going to be picked?
Yea hopefully his down year was due to health so that he just needs to get healthy and get back to form because he really was not that great this year.