When Notre Dame football played its lone regular season night game in Notre Dame Stadium on Nov. 9 against Florida State, the Irish hosted seven 2025 targets on visits that weekend.
At that time, Notre Dame was seriously interested in each of those recruits with the hope that multiple would end up in the Irish class. In less than a month’s time, only three of those names still mattered to Notre Dame heading into this week’s early signing period: three-star running back Nolan James Jr., who flipped his commitment from Boston College to Notre Dame shortly after the visit, four-star linebacker Madden Faraimo, who gave the Irish a surprise signing on Wednesday, and four-star defensive lineman Jalen Wiggins, who opted to stick with his commitment to Florida and sign with the Gators.
It's natural to wonder why things didn’t work out with the other four 2025 targets who attended the 52-3 victory over Florida State. Five-star linebacker Nathaniel Owusu-Boateng signed with Michigan. Four-star wide receiver Derek Meadows, who was committed to LSU at the time, flipped to Alabama on Wednesday. Four-star wide receiver Antwaun Parham stuck with his commitment to Tulane. And four-star tight end Andrew Olesh, a Michigan commit, will reportedly choose between the Wolverines, Penn State and Oregon on Friday.
SUBSCRIBE TO INSIDE ND SPORTS TO STAY IN THE KNOW ON NOTRE DAME ATHLETICS
Related Content
► Signing Day at Notre Dame won't ever be the same — and that's a good thing
► Next wave: Meet Notre Dame's 2025 class on early National Signing Day
► Notre Dame coach Marcus Freeman's Signing Day press conference transcript
► Four-star LB Madden Faraimo signs with Notre Dame over USC
► Dreams to reality: Notre Dame perfect fit for new signee Dallas Golden
For one reason or another, Notre Dame moved away from those recruitments in recent weeks. Though it wasn’t able to flip Wiggins, Notre Dame’s insistence to keep pushing for Faraimo — despite him making an official visit to USC this past weekend and a growing concern he would stay in his home state of California — paid off in a big way.
Faraimo, who Rivals ranks as the No. 4 outside linebacker and No. 53 overall in the 2025 class, is a needle-mover worthy of being celebrated. The big recruiting win gave the Irish some extra buzz nationally on the first day of the early signing period.
If Faraimo, a product of San Juan Capistrano’s JSerra Catholic, committed to Notre Dame weeks ago, Notre Dame’s signing day might have felt stale externally. But that’s now how Notre Dame football general manager Chad Bowden views it.
“It's so funny in recruiting, everyone cares so much about what happens at the end, they forget about what we have before that,” Bowden said. “We have an unbelievable class. I love this class. It's got incredible depth. It's solid at every position. But we celebrate every win in recruiting, and we evaluate every loss.”
Rivals ranked Notre Dame’s 2025 class as the 12th-best in the country as of Wednesday night. The 2,433 points in the Rivals team rankings formula received by this class are slightly less than the previous three classes signed under head coach Marcus Freeman and Bowden. Still, four of the five highest point totals for Notre Dame since 2013 have come under Freeman.
Landing a couple more of those Florida State visitors could have kept Notre Dame inside the top 10. But Bowden’s confident the Irish made the right decisions with who to continue to pursue.
“There are certain people that we pushed, some we didn't,” Bowden said. “When you recruit a kid for so long you figure out towards the end who's really worth it, who values this place and wants to be here, and those are the guys we push, and those are the guys that we got.”
Given the success of Notre Dame’s freshman and sophomore classes, the Irish staff should be pretty confident in its ability evaluate independent of what recruiting analysts have projected. Some of the top-ranked players in those classes have already shown to be hits, such as sophomore running back Jeremiyah Love and freshman linebacker Kyngstonn Viliamu-Asa. And others have already proven to be underrated, like freshman left tackle Anthonie Knapp and freshman cornerback Leonard Moore.
“I'm very direct with our coaches and our recruiting staff to — No. 1 — we've still got to find the right fit and trust our evaluations,” Freeman said. “I don't know if you would have looked at last year's class and said that Anthonie Knapp and Leonard Moore were the top-rated guys. Kyngstonn was one of the top-rated guys. But those guys are contributing mightily for us right now. But that was an evaluation, and our coaches saw them live and in person and trusted their evaluation.
“Yes, there's some truth to the recruiting rankings, but I think more important is that we still have to trust our evaluation and our eyes in terms of bringing in the right guys to this program. Obviously, you've heard me say this before. We can't recruit everybody. We've got to recruit the guys that fit this place, but we want to get the best players in the country that do.”
Understandably so, Freeman and Bowden were more interested in discussing Wednesday who signed with the Irish rather than who didn’t. So much so that when Freeman was asked if some 2025 wide receivers made up their minds before the Irish passing game developed on the field this fall, he just started talking about the speed of the trio Notre Dame signed: three-star recruits Elijah Burress, Antavious “Scrap” Richardson and Jerome Bettis Jr.
“We're looking for speed but also really good football players,” Freeman said. “That's what we feel like we got with this class in wide outs, and again, we're extremely happy about it, and we'll continue to recruit wide outs at a high level.
"[Wide receivers] coach [Mike] Brown and [offensive coordinator Mike] Denbrock have done a great job of showing how we use the wide receivers and how you're really able to reach your full potential here and reach your goals.”
Of the 16 recruits Notre Dame signed with star ratings of at least four, 11 of them were recruited to play defense for the Irish. Faraimo was the final piece on that side of the ball.
“I think he is a huge piece of what we're looking for defensively,” Freeman said of Faraimo. “We wanted to get three linebackers. We had two (Anthony Sacca and Ko’o Kia) for a long time. He's the third linebacker that adds a huge piece to what we were looking for defensively.”
Notre Dame’s already laid the groundwork for its 2026 class and currently has four verbal commitments from recruits. But there’s still time to adjust for the coming year based on lessons learned in the 2025 cycle.
“Every year we look at enhancing what our recruiting process is always,” Bowden said. “I think signing day changing, I think not going on the road in December, I think maybe some of the things that we did during the season is something that we can look at. But there's so many different things that we're going to look at to enhance, and we do that every single year with every cycle.
“We have an end-of-the-year meeting that I meet with coach Freeman, go over what we feel like we've done well, where we missed. He obviously gives us his feedback, and we get together and come up with the best plan for 2026.”
---------------------------------------------------------------
• Talk with Notre Dame fans on The Insider Lounge.
• Subscribe to the Inside ND Sports podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, Podbean or Pocket Casts.
• Subscribe to the Inside ND Sports channel on YouTube.
• Follow us on Twitter: @insideNDsports, @EHansenND and @TJamesND.
• Like us on Facebook: Inside ND Sports
• Follow us on Instagram: @insideNDsports
