No recruiting operation has launched more think pieces than Notre Dame.
Should the Irish lower their acceptance standards? Can they recruit enough top-100 players? Why doesn’t Notre Dame do better in Catholic schools? Will Marcus Freeman be the recruiting upgrade from Brian Kelly that the program banked on when promoting him? There’s a lot of meat on the bone with Notre Dame.
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As for the actual classes, the Irish have not signed a top-five class in the past decade and landed just three five-star prospects during that run from 2014-23: Michael Mayer, Jaylen Sneed and Tommy Kraemer. Can a team win a national title with recruiting classes that have an average ranking of No. 12 over the past decade? That’s something Freeman is trying to change.
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Best recruit, pre-internet rankings: Ron Powlus, QB
The national player of the year coming out of Berwick, Pa., Powlus was a legend at Notre Dame before he actually enrolled. The student newspaper referred to Powlus as “The Messiah” and Beano Cook made the infamous prediction that Powlus would win multiple Heisman Trophies while winning multiple national championships. Basically, expectations for Powlus’ career were set somewhere between absurd and fantastical before he took a snap.
Powlus was in position to start as a freshman on the uber-talented 1993 team but broke his collar bone in training camp and redshirted. He ended up starting 42 games for the Irish over the next four years, throwing for 7,602 yards and 52 touchdowns, but he was saddled with the end of the Lou Holtz era and the start of Bob Davie’s tenure, a time with the overall talent in South Bend had dropped off.
Powlus returned to his alma mater as a quarterbacks coach under Charlie Weis, then again under Brian Kelly in an administrative role
Best recruit, modern era: Jimmy Clausen, QB
The only No. 1 overall prospect Notre Dame landed in the Rivals era, Clausen was tagged as the “LeBron James of high school football” by former quarterback guru Steve Clarkson before his freshman year. With two older brothers who played quarterback in the SEC and Notre Dame desperate for a replacement for Brady Quinn in the early days of Charlie Weis, the hype for Clausen was off the charts before he committed at the College Football Hall of Fame, back when it was in South Bend.
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Clausen’s career was never going to live up to the hype that accompanied it, not that the quarterback could do anything about it. He played hurt much of his three seasons and was saddled with both absurd expectations and a unreliable defense. While he became a punching bag of sorts, including that mysterious black eye suffered after his final home game, the further Clausen got from Notre Dame, the more his career was appreciated. He finished with 8,148 yards and 60 touchdown passes. His junior season’s 161.4 passer rating was a school record.
Clausen departed Notre Dame after his junior year, was picked in the second round of the NFL Draft and never got a real shot, starting 14 games over seven seasons with three teams.
Jimmy Clausen was the nation’s No. 1 recruit in the Class of 2007. (Gregory Shamus / Getty Images)Most influential recruit: Manti Te’o, LB
Notre Dame has never won a more dramatic recruitment where the player not only lived up the hype, but also exceeded it. Te’o committed to Notre Dame on national signing day in 2009 at a time when USC was a national power and NFL linebacker factory. He took his official visit during a winter storm. The head coach recruiting him was on the hottest of seats. There just wasn’t enough on paper for feel like Te’o would end up transplanting himself from Hawaii to northern Indiana. And yet he did, creating one of those moments every Notre Dame fan remembers.
As for the career, Te’o helped Notre Dame football bridge the gap from Weis to Kelly. Then he dragged the program to the national championship game with one of the all-time great seasons for any college linebacker — 113 tackles, seven INTs — including a runner-up finish for the Heisman Trophy. In the past 25 years, there is no player more impactful at Notre Dame than Te’o.
When Te’o returned to campus last season for the Cal game, he received the kind of standing ovation reserved for legendary coaches. It moved him to tears.
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Biggest bust: Mike McNair, RB
McNair was a first-team All-American out of powerhouse Mater Dei in California and rushed for 2,671 yards and 33 touchdowns as a senior. Was he a tailback or a fullback? It didn’t matter. He was one of the jewels of Notre Dame’s 1998 recruiting class that included 11 top-100 prospects. Turns out, it did matter about his position because Notre Dame’s coaching staff couldn’t quite settle on one spot for the colossus of a running back.
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McNair finished his Notre Dame career with 11 carries for 40 yards, battling injuries and the kind of offensive confusion that ultimately led to Davie’s firing after the 2001 season.
Best developmental story: Tyler Eifert, TE
Notre Dame almost passed on the three-star tight end from Fort Wayne because it already had a commitment from Jake Golic. And that’s after Notre Dame knew everything it already needed about Eifert after recruiting his Bishop Dwenger teammate John Goodman a year earlier. The summer before his senior year, it appeared Eifert was bound for Purdue, where his father played basketball for Gene Keady. Instead, he decided to camp at Notre Dame, working out for an offer. He got one.
Even in a tight end room that pumped out NFL talent, Eifert was the only first-round pick the Irish produced during its run of 15 drafted tight ends since 2001. He won the Mackey Award. He held virtually every tight end receiving record until Michael Mayer overtook him. Mayer, of course, was a five-star prospect. Eifert was the No. 10 player in Indiana and No. 25 tight end in the country. He went on to have an eight-year NFL career and make one Pro Bowl.
The one who got away: Randy Moss, WR
Arguably the greatest wide receiver in the history of the sport was once a Notre Dame signee from West Virginia. Then a high school fight and arrest ended his Irish career before he ever enrolled, leading Moss to Florida State, then to Marshall and eventually into the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Lou Holtz once called Moss “the best football player I’ve seen in my life” and Bobby Bowden compared Moss to Deion Sanders, only more athletic.
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What would Notre Dame have looked like with Moss in the 1995 recruiting class? At the time, recruiting analyst Tom Lemming said that 24-man haul — national defensive player of the year Kory Minor was also part of it — was better than the mythical 1990 recruiting class that included Hall of Famers Jerome Bettis and Bryant Young. Surely, the career of Powlus would have been different throwing to Moss and perhaps a generation receiver extends the tenure of Holtz in South Bend, reshaping everything that came after Notre Dame’s last national championship coach.
The “what-if” potential with Moss is so great that calling him “the one who got away” undersells what he could have meant to Notre Dame.
Editor’s note: This is part of a series of stories looking back at recruiting superlatives for select Power 5 programs. The stories can be found here.
(Top photo of Ron Powlus: : Jonathan Daniel / Allsport / Getty Images)
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