Notre Dame’s 2021 Recruiting Class: A Program Effort
With 27 commits, Notre Dame has the No. 9 recruiting class in the 2021 cycle, per Rivals Team Rankings. If this holds, it will be just the third time in the Brian Kelly era that the Irish will have a top-10 class.
More importantly, Notre Dame addressed all its needs from a position and talent standpoint, while also admitting student-athletes who match the profile that’s expected of a player at a school with rigorous academics.
“This is still about fitting the culture here at Notre Dame, this University, this culture, this football program,” Kelly said on National Signing Day.
A significant portion of the credit for this class goes to the Notre Dame coaching staff, but there are also many people working behind the scenes to identify talent, promote the Notre Dame program to prospects and introduce the world to each 2021 signee via social media.
Bill Rees
Bill Rees, the director of scouting at Notre Dame, has been more accessible to the public this season. Every week, he’s made an appearance on the Brian Kelly radio show to discuss what a Fighting Irish player does well or breaks down an upcoming opponent.
But Rees is also an integral part of the recruiting operation, breaking down countless hours of high school game footage to help Notre Dame identify which high school prospects the coaching staff should target.
“What Bill gives us is a very patient and discerning set of eyes,” said Brian Polian, Notre Dame’s special teams coordinator. “There are recruits that you can look at 50 plays off of a highlight [tape] and you can look at numbers and say, “This guy’s clearly an A-list player. There's no doubt.
“But player development here and our ability to take the Drew Tranquills and the Chase Claypools of the world and develop them and help them become frontline players, those guys are incredibly important to our success. Those are the guys that Bill Rees has the ability to dive deep on.”
For those players, Rees will review multiple games and provide the coaching staff with detailed analysis.
“There are times that Bill will put together what we call a point of attack tape, which is not a highlight film,” Polian said. “It's the good, the bad and the ugly. In those, his input, those notes, those POA films, they go a long way in helping us make decisions with guys that may not be obvious off of a 50-play highlight tape or off of a combine performance.”
This type of information is vital when it comes to Notre Dame’s ability to narrow down its recruiting board from a talent standpoint.
Once the players are identified, the coaching staff and the rest of the recruiting department can decide if a player fits the university from an academic and personality standpoint.
“Anybody can look at Kyle Hamilton's tape and say that guy is an elite, Power Five player, or will be an elite, Power Five player,” Polian said. “It's Drew White. It's Marist Liufau. It's those guys that were maybe not household names. They're developing into frontline starters and we have to make educated decisions there and Bill helps us collect that information.”
Matt Taylor, Sydney Sims, Others
A featured aspect of Notre Dame's signing day festivities were the personalized videos the program put together for each of its signees, even those who committed to the Irish late in the process.
Every video is a little more than a minute long and provides Notre Dame fans a look at a day in the life of each recruit.
To produce 26 videos (2021 running back commit Logan Diggs has yet to sign) of this quality and detail must have been a major undertaking, from communicating and inciting buy-in from busy commits to editing the videos in an entertaining fashion.
In addition to the day-in-the-life videos, each signee had an individual video interview with their future position coach and their own graphic.
Of course, there are several other people involved behind the scenes with the recruiting process, from contacting and communicating with prospects to assisting with virtual tours during the COVID-19 Pandemic.
“[I want to thank the] recruiting office, Aaryn Kearney and his staff, [coordinator of on-campus recruiting] Jas Smith, [art director of football] Matt Taylor,” Kelly said. “Matt has been instrumental in all of the graphics. I thought today’s graphics, I think we set a new bar in terms of featuring our student-athletes who signed with us. The in-depth videos that got a chance to be personalized of those who signed with us, I don’t know of anybody who did a better job than our people who put that together.
"[Associate athletics communications director] Sydney Sims. Just an outstanding job. [Program assistant] Reilly Fangman. [Director of player personnel] Dave Peloquin, as you know, is integral to this process.”
Blake Fisher, 2021 Commit Group Chat
When news broke a few days before signing day that defensive coordinator Clark Lea had accepted the head coaching job at Vanderbilt, most of the Notre Dame recruits remained locked in. But Jonesborough (Tenn.) David Crockett linebacker Prince Kollie, a Rivals250 player, was shocked and, for a short period of time, his future at Notre Dame felt uncertain.
Several members of the Notre Dame coaching staff contacted Kollie, including Polian, Kelly and senior analyst Nick Lezynski, and helped the High School Butkus Award winner stick with the Irish, but his fellow commits also played a big role.
“It's worth mentioning Blake Fisher, the Mayor, running the chat between all the commits,” Polian said. “For example, the job that they did when Prince Kollie was a little bit thrown for a loop there by coach Lea's departure to Vanderbilt. The way they were, the way they revolved around him for a couple of days and helped calm him down and be there for him and provide support as he was working through a change there.”
For those of you who follow Irish recruiting, Fisher’s involvement doesn’t come as a surprise. A Rivals five-star offensive tackle, he committed to Notre Dame well over a year ago and, ever since, has been the vocal leader of the 2021 recruiting class.
He’s also been an avid recruiter himself, targeting other prospects and reaching out to them personally. To be clear, such assertiveness on the recruiting trail comes with some direction from the coaching staff.
“There's no doubt you have to guide them,” Polian said. “First of all, we can't direct them to talk to anybody. That’s not within the rules. We can't say to them, ‘Hey, we need you to reach out to this guy or to this guy,’ but there are times, and it's not just Blake—there is that guy in every class—and he'll message you, 'Hey coach, just talked to this guy and he'd be really interested and I think he'd be awesome.’
“Meanwhile, we've seen that guy's transcript. There is a little bit of, ‘Hey, slow down. We appreciate you.'"
But does that mean the coaching staff would prefer its commits be less involved with the recruiting process?
Of course not.
"That is much better than having a class of 24 or 25 and there's no ringleader," Polian said. "I've had multiple guys tell us, we've had multiple guys tell us, once they kind of got in later in the process, maybe a guy that committed in the fall, maybe a guy that committed six to eight weeks ago, they talked about how welcoming that commit group was, via that text chain that they had, and how welcoming they were.
"That was an asset in recruiting. There's no doubt.”
Family Members Of The Coaching Staff
Last but not least, the family members of the Notre Dame coaching staff played a larger than usual role in the recruiting process, which often took place inside their own home.
“There were a lot of people that played a role in what we feel is a really good class, a class that we're very proud of," Polian said. "My wife made me promise that I would say thank you to her publicly because she heard the excellent presentation about 80 times from March through the summer here from our kitchen table."
In many cases, they were even on camera while a coach delivered their digital recruiting pitch.
“Everybody's families had to adjust," Polian said. "We'd be giving virtual visits and a dog would run through in the background or a child would come running up. Coach Lea did a lot of these meetings with baby Jack sleeping on his chest.
“In that sense, it took adjustments from everybody.”
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