It’s been a while since we provided a scholarship update for Fighting Irish football and as the weeks pass plenty of things keep evolving and changing in college football recruiting. Sometimes it’s hard to keep up.
Just 7 years after the December early signing period was created (and will now be moved up to the Wednesday after Thanksgiving weekend later this year) we are likely to be approving a THIRD early signing period. If the vote passes during the summer, this time next year during the 2026 recruiting cycle we’ll only be about 2 months away from the first early signing period.
And you know Notre Dame will be signing as many kids as possible in June.
***18 Stripes Scholarship Tracker CLICK HERE***
Out of Eligibility Following 2024:
QB Riley Leonard
WR Kris Mitchell
WR Jayden Harrison
WR Beaux Collins
TE Mitchell Evans
TE Davis Sherwood
OT Tosh Baker
DE Jordan Botelho
DE RJ Oben
DT Howard Cross
DT Rylie Mills
LB Jack Kiser
CB Jordan Clark
S Xavier Watts
S Rod Heard
S Devyn Ford
PK Mitch Jeter
This is a lot of players to lose, but part of that is due to Notre Dame getting lucky that star players such as Cross, Mills, Kiser, and Watts all returned to the team for 2024. That’s a tradeoff the Irish will take every year. Plus, a healthy amount of grad transfers cycling through which is a feature every year now.
Still, this is as many as 13 starters plus a kicker walking out the door. The spotlight is on recruiting to refresh the ranks, although as we’ll discuss below that is getting puzzling these days.
2025-26 Academic Classes
19 Verbal Commits
23 Sophomores
24 Juniors
17 Seniors
8 Graduates
91 Total Scholarships
Adjust your mindset, this first scholarship post of the calendar year is always a little bewildering as we are looking at projections for next football season which runs into the 2026 calendar. It’s far away, but not really.
The limit remains 85 scholarships and 5 to 10 years ago this amount of scholarships accounted for at this point in the process would feel way too high. But that was back when most of the current recruiting class was yet to pledge to Notre Dame. I went back and checked the 2017-2020 spring time recruiting posts and the average over that period was 84.5 scholarships allocated. In the 4 cycles since, the average has been 91.3 scholarships allocated in the spring time–right where we are today.
This is mostly due to recruiting moving up earlier and earlier and classes filling up faster than ever before. With a likely early early signing period coming expect this total amount of scholarships number to increase slightly in the future too.
But wait! Look at the small number of graduates who are able to come back to Notre Dame in 2025…there’s potentially a lot more room in this recruiting cycle which means the door is rightly left open to a slew of graduate transfers which continue to dominate the second half of the recruiting cycle process when we approach Christmas.
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A whole swath of players with eligibility remaining have left South Bend since our last update. They include:
RB Chris Tyree (Virginia)
WR Tobias Merriweather (California)
WR Braylon James (TCU)
WR Rico Flores (UCLA)
TE Holden Staes (Tennessee)
C Zeke Correll (NC State)
OT Michael Carmody (UCLA)
DE Nana Osafo-Mensah (TCU)
DT Aidan Keanaaina (California)
LB Nolan Ziegler (Central Michigan)
CB Clarence Lewis (TBD)
CB Ryan Barnes (UMass)
S Ramon Henderson (UCLA)
S Antonio Carter (TBD)
The latest to leave is cornerback Clarence Lewis who announced he was entering the transfer portal on Friday, March 29th in the middle of spring practice. We can probably surmise that Lewis has his degree in hand and wasn’t 100% excited about the current depth chart situation as things shuffled around following the shoulder surgery to starter Benjamin Morrison. Fair play to Lewis, it’s probably in his best interest to maximize his final year of college football somewhere else.
The program has added 14 recruits to the 2025 class since our last update:
WR Elijah Burress
WR Shaun Terry
WR Jerome Bettis, Jr.
OT Owen Strebig
OT Will Black
OT Matt Augustine
TE James Flanigan
DE Chris Burgess
DE Dominik Hulak
LB Anthony Sacca
LB Ko’o Kia
CB Cree Thomas
S Ivan Taylor
S Ethan Long
Plus, we’ve already kicked off the 2026 cycle with wide receiver Dylan Faison, too.
List of Eligible 2025 Grad Students
Tier 1
WR Jayden Thomas
OG Pat Coogan
DT Gabriel Rubio
OG Rocco Spindler
DT Jason Onye
Tier 2
WR Deion Colzie
TE Kevin Bauman
Tier 3
CB Chance Tucker
This is as light (in terms of numbers) and unimpressive (in terms of starting star power) that this graduate section has been for as long as I can remember. As things stand today, we’re looking at 1 for-sure starter in Thomas while it’s likely that Coogan continues to hold on to his job at guard, as well.
Either way, this really isn’t a group that Notre Dame is going to be relying on in 2025 and to me that means the graduate transfer market will be hit particularly hard. The Irish brought in 8 transfers this off-season and I could see that number easily surpassing double-digits for next year. I might even entertain needing 12 transfers, but as we’ve discussed in the past that means fewer freshmen recruits if you walk down that road.
Positional Needs
LOW NEED: QB, RB, WR, OL
MEDIUM NEED: TE, LB, DE, CB, S
HIGH NEED: DT
I left the needs in this section the same as our last scholarship update. Unless there are decommits the Irish look all set at quarterback and running back while still chasing one more receiver and offensive lineman even though numbers at both positions are solid for 2025 and on the roster overall.
At one point, Notre Dame looked like they would take 2 tight ends in this class. Then Nate Roberts left the class, he continues his journey to find a new school, and the Irish moved on and took James Flanigan. Another legacy recruit Marshall Pritchett never picked up an offer and recently committed to North Carolina.
I remain perplexed at the lack of attention being paid to the interior of the defensive line. There may be an approach to recruit length and add weight to bolster the interior. That has been the case with Brenan Vernon in the 2023 class and the same could be true of Bryce Young in the current freshman class. Still, there’s just 1 pure beefy interior recruit in the 2024 and 2025 classes right now.
High School Recruiting Means Less Than Ever Before, Maybe…
It will be interesting to see how Notre Dame closes out this 2025 recruiting class. Right now, they sit no. 1 in the Composite rankings but the recruiting momentum doesn’t quite match that figure.
For one, the Irish are way, way out front in total commits compared to the rest of the country. With 19 verbals, no one else across the country has more than 12 commits. Only 8 other programs are even in double digit commits right now.
Heavy hitters like Alabama, Georgia, and Texas combined don’t have as many commits as Notre Dame. They will all be surging in the coming months while the Irish look to hold on and add a few more pieces.
The blue-chip rate is also currently down quite a bit for Notre Dame sitting at 47.3% coming off last year at 56.5% and an impressive 78.2% back in the 2023 class. The program only has a pair of top 100 commits with Ivan Taylor topping things out at no. 48 overall in the Composite.
Here are the big names the Irish are still in the hunt for in the remaining months of this cycle:
WR Derek Meadows (0.9640)
OT Jack Lange (0.9400)
DE Damien Shanklin (0.9486)
DL Darren Ikinnagbon (0.9329)
LB Nathaniel Owusu-Boateng (0.9637)
LB Gavin Nix (0.9338)
LB Noah Mikhail (0.9710)
CB Mark Zackery (0.9423)
S Jadon Blair (0.9405)
S Dallas Golden (0.9547)
It’s not a super elite list (only a trio of top 100 guys) but a really promising collection that Notre Dame hopes to grab at least half from to close out 2025. Adding Meadows, Lange, Shanklin, Nix, Zackery, and Blair would give the program enough points to finish in 7th place in last year’s team rankings. Take out a couple of those targets and the Irish would probably fall out of the top 10 in 2025.
So it appears Notre Dame remains locked in a familiar place with recruiting. Good but not great. With the complicating factor of NIL, a renewed skepticism about the quality of recruiting services (On3 skeptics abound, 247 is losing talent, plus ESPN has been on a years-long slow collapse), and an aggressively growing graduate transfer and undergraduate transfer market, the results of traditional high school recruiting feel less meaningful than ever.
It’s not ideal for Notre Dame. Ideally, high school recruiting starts picking up under Marcus Freeman but that isn’t really happening to a big enough degree right now and the transfer market (247 has the Irish ranked 33rd overall for 2024 and 16th by average rating) is an even more uphill battle.
What’s the criticism of On3? ESPN has been gutter-tier for a decade plus, 247 is apparently losing staff, but I have never really bothered to have look at On3 since I find it ugly and cluttered. That and the social media monitoring thing seemed hokey.
The recruiting calendar has moved up so far that most all the sites seem to be lagging with their rankings. Especially with ND getting commits so early, their recruits rankings can vary greatly from site to site. For example Will Black is a 5 star on ON3 #1 OT and a 3star on 247 and ESPN ranked the 29th and 50th OT. I’m sure they’ll be more alike in their rankings come fall, for the 25′ class.
The lag of updating rankings on 247 (the only one I look at) is noticeable and annoying. Especially that they don’t automatically adjust it based on updating their own rankings afaict.
I think the one fair critique of the concern around this recruiting class is that it’s early in the rankings timeline. Once we get past summer camps, though, if the class still generally looks like this rankings-wise the concern will be fully justified.
If they rate ND guys high = good site
If they rate ND guys low = bad site
Half joking, but I haven’t seen a ton of criticism on On3 other than they are the new kid on the block and some people don’t love their analysts and such.
My favorite 247 message board trope is that the recruiting rankers intentionally rate ND players low. This is because, um, reasons.
Lol why? I know the Alabama bump but they’ve actually won major things this century, so I’ll excuse it.
It’s a very stupid, very widely held view on that board. The idea that rankers would want to rate low recruits for a fanbase that has one of the biggest audiences on 247 makes zero sense.
Well that’s just good sense
That late stage BK recruiting, ouch.
Definitely, in a time of hyper talent stratification, not what you wanted to see.
Still, consider the Tyrone recruiting classes and how they impacted charlie weis’ later years… I don’t think they could field a 2 deep on Oline for the blue gold game!
At the same time, I distinctly remember a clip of Notre Dame pre-game warm up during the Weis era and there were six or seven QBs dropping back at once.
5 wide QBs? Truly a dynamic offense
I remain perplexed at the over-reliance on recruiting rankings, blue-chip ratio and transfers to gauge long-term success of the football program, especially this early. Stars are artificial constructs, subjective and, in this era of transfers, increasingly irrelevant to future success.
As an exercise, change to the five star rankings to four star categories and recalculate the “blue chip” ratio. Additionally, rank recruits by cohort offers.
Many recruits get offers by the staff in the hope that some will end up fulfilling all the admission criteria to succeed academically. We’re not a football factory to minimize the academics that all students must meet.
Many recruits offered have no interest in leaving to a school more than a driving distance away. Is it realistic to compare their ratio to ours?
As for transfers, first subtract grad transfers. Undergraduate transfers, see opportunities for football success elsewhere as they see their prospects of starting multiple years fade, especially with recruiting successes in incoming classes at their positions. Take into account teams’ churn and evaluate those higher “blue chip” recruiting classes over multiple years.
Of those undergraduate transfers, who do we miss that lowers our chances of football success? Diggs, Styles, Merriweather, Staes, Flores, Zeigler, Buchner, Riley, James, Tanona? Most are players on the offensive side. Diggs was the only one not rated a blue-chip by services and has now moved on to Ole Miss. He remains close to home.
I shall be interested in the hand-wringing as the new expansion teams enter the Big Two and chances for conference championship for them or existing conference members decrease despite a potential high blue-chip ratio.
As a note for the new era of transfers, Kadyn Proctor’s transfer to Iowa in January and back to Alabama two months later is worth contemplating and asking it NIL played a part. Shedeur Sanders’s ability to get his new truck is eye-opening.
Does Riley Leonard stikl have a red shirt still available? Not that he would use it, but given his injury issues it could factor. I have not seen it mentioned anywhere, but it looks to me that it is a possibility.
He’s used up three seasons. So he’d have to play four games or less this year. I don’t know if there’s any other criteria that would get in the way.