mwinely said:
This is the 1st year I have been following recruiting closely. For those of you who are regulars at this game - how does this year compare to last? It is nice to see a few more big recruits preparing to announce. Is the pace of the announcements similar to last year? When does it really start to pick up? Final question - am I wrong in thinking the caliber of guys we are leading for seem to be better than last year's class in general - even though that class was a killer.
Last year:
April - 5 commitments
May - 2
June - 1
July - 1
August - 3
September - 5
October - 1
November - 4
December - 4
January - 2
It'll be difficult to compare this year's recruiting class with last year's entirely because of the coaching situation. There were a number of guys who were willing to commit to Charlie Weis before he had even coached a game (James Aldridge, Prince, and Kallen Wade come to mind), but the vast majority of the more solid prospects waited to see how things worked out on Saturday.
This year's pace has been slower, I think because there isn't as much a sense of emergency as there was last year, because of our successful recruiting class, and so we're more selective as to which prospects we'll look into. We now have 4 commitments, 3 of whom are highly touted recruits and the fourth is border-line (Nagel). Last year, our first major commitment came in Aldridge in May but for our second we had to wait until August (McNeil and Jones). I think what we saw was a situation where the creme of the crop recruits had already been being recruited by the major programs since their junior year and so they had strong relationships with those programs, knew a lot about them, and had a good idea as to where they were headed. With ND though, we had a new staff, we had practically 0 contact with any major prospect when Weis was named to the job (Willingham never recruited Juniors...he was lazy, it's safe to say), and no one had any idea whether we would be successful. In short, Notre Dame was an after-thought to these guys, and we had 0 chance of landing them.
So the main difference between this year and last year is that this year we'll have a lot more highly ranked recruits giving us serious consideration---mostly because of our success and Weis' work ethic and its manifestitation in contact with recruits
early on in the process. Because of that our major prospects won't fear committing early as we've already seen in Clausen, Ragone, Neal (he'll be a border-line 4/5 star, no kidding, he's that good) and
will see in Trattou and Kumara, and will probably see in Benn, Martin, Barksdale, Michael Williams and Marc Tyler. The guys that will be making their decision about whether to commit to ND late on in the process will do so only because of competition from other programs, rather than doubt about our future, as well as just kids being kids and wanting to keep the attention as long as they can. I think these guys will be Ryan Miller, Marvin Austin, Lee Ziemba, and Greg Little.
More important than any difference between this recruiting year and last's is the main similarity: the work-ethic, you don't need to track Weis' flights to know its still there. Only this time, it'll pay more dividends.
