Three things I’m wondering as Notre Dame football enters key recruiting stretch
With a nation-leading 22 verbal commits in its 2025 recruiting class, the Notre Dame football staff has answered most questions surrounding this cycle. Still, a few linger as the Fighting Irish embark on a key stretch.
Notre Dame will experience an uptick in prospect interest as the campus hosts several notable recruiting events in the coming weeks. It begins Sunday with the program’s Irish Invasion, an unpublicized high school football camp featuring the nation’s top underclassmen prep players. Then, it will continue when it welcomes a slew of 2025 class official visitors the following two weekends.
As we ride the crest of the upcoming Notre Dame football recruiting wave, Blue & Gold delves into three pivotal questions that remain in the 2025 cycle.
Can Notre Dame close on its top targets?
Notre Dame football’s 2025 class target list is pretty slim at this point. It’s wide receivers Derek Meadows, Talyn Taylor, Dylan Robinson and Tanook Hines, offensive lineman Josh Petty, linebackers Nathaniel Owusu-Boateng, Madden Faraimo, Noah Mikhail and Gavin Nix and defensive backs JaDon Blair and Jahmir Joseph.
All are four-star recruits — and in Petty’s case, a five-star — ranked within the top 335 overall players in the 2025 On3 Industry Ranking. Meadows, Taylor, Owusu-Boateng, Faraimo and Mikhail are top 100 recruits.
Meadows, Taylor, Robinson, Hines, Owusu-Boateng, Faraimo, Blair and Joseph all have June official visits scheduled to South Bend. Naturally, the Irish are in each of their top groups and finalists. That is all fine and dandy now. However, Notre Dame must close on these prospects if it wants to complete the class and finish strongly.
When will the 2025 class wrap up?
In Marcus Freeman’s first two recruiting cycles as head coach, the Irish secured their final verbal commits on Dec. 1 (KK Smith) and Sept. 19 (Guerby Lambert) before the classes’ respective signing days. This year, it is shaping up to be even earlier.
Blair will come off the board on July 5, and most of the other targets want to have their recruitments in the rearview mirror before the start of their senior seasons. Those usually start to kick off around the third week of August.
If things go as planned in June, the 2025 class could be complete by the start of Notre Dame’s season (Aug. 31). That would allow the staff to focus on keeping the pledges locked in while also (fully) turning the page toward the 2026 class.
Under director of player personnel Chad Bowden, Notre Dame has been known to be aggressive behind the scenes in pushing for flips, too. How aggressive Bowden becomes in that department could depend on the outcomes of the recruitments of the remaining targets visiting in June.
Where will the 2025 class finish in the rankings?
Right now, the Irish have the No. 5 class in the 2025 Industry Ranking Football Team Recruiting Rankings with a score of 93.258. Information on how that score is calculated can be found here.
If Notre Dame were to land Blair and Meadows — two recruits it heavily leads for according to the On3 Recruiting Prediction Machine (RPM) — and one of Hines/Robinson and Faraimo/Owusu-Boateng (similar ratings), the Irish would finish the 2025 class with a score of 91.57.
I calculated that score based on last year’s average number of commits used in the rankings score (18) and an average of Hines/Robinson’s (89.36) and Faraimo/Owusu-Boateng’s (93.41) ratings since they were so similar.
A score of 91.57 would give Notre Dame the No. 14 class in the 2023 cycle, No. 12 in 2024 and slot No. 11 with where things currently stand in 2025.
Of course, many factors will affect the 2025 team rankings from now until they are finalized (rankings updates, changes in commit lists, etc.) in February, and my 91.57 score was a rough estimate, but that is how Notre Dame’s 2025 class is currently tracking.
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