What You Need To Know About Notre Dame's Standing In The Rivals Rankings
The Notre Dame Fighting Irish entered National Signing Day on Wednesday as the No. 16 team in the Rivals team recruiting rankings.
By landing a commitment from Bakersfield (Calif.) Liberty cornerback Ramon Henderson, who Rivals ranks as a 5.6 three-star prospect, Notre Dame moved to the No. 15 spot in the team rankings.
This pushed Notre Dame ahead of North Carolina and it is right on the heels at Penn State at No. 13.
Not only will there be more additions to classes around the country today and tomorrow to end the early signing period, the February Signing Day will see recruits sign with schools as well, potentially even Notre Dame.
Notre Dame has 18 signees in the 2020 class, which does not include Ohio State graduate transfer safety Isaiah Pryor. The Irish are one of 16 programs with a Rivals five-star recruit (Jordan Johnson) and are one of 19 colleges with nine or more Rivals four-star prospects.
Among schools in the Midwest, Notre Dame has the third highest ranked class, behind Ohio State (No. 2, 26 recruits) and Michigan (No. 11, 24 total recruits).
Context Is Everything
The Notre Dame fan who doesn't follow recruiting probably looks at Notre Dame's ranking of No. 15 nationally and thinks that this class just isn't pushing the Irish in a place to compete for a national championship.
That still remains to be seen, but basing that opinion off a team recruiting ranking lacks context.
Rivals has point values for each level of a recruit ranking (5.2 two-star all the way up to 6.1 five-star). Rivals adds up the point value for every recruit in the class, and then ranks every class in the nation based on its total point value.
For example, the aforementioned Ramon Henderson is a 5.6 three-star prospect, and a 5.6 recruit ranking gives Notre Dame 75 points.
Running back Chris Tyree is ranked as a 6.0 four-star prospect which gives Notre Dame 135 points, and for being in the range of 41-45 in the Rivals100 national recruiting rankings, Tyree adds 47 more points. That's a grand total of 182 points given to Notre Dame's 2020 class just for Tyree.
And for the explanation straight from the horse's mouth, click here.
The point in bringing this all up is because in the Rivals rankings, it only takes into account a school's top 20 recruits. This is to prevent a school that signs 27 recruits to have a clear advantage over the school that has only 22 in its class. In taking the top 20 signees, it creates a level playing field.
Taking less than 20 signees isn't rare but it's not common either. Notre Dame hasn't signed a class under 20 recruits since 2012.
If Notre Dame added just two more recruits at 5.5 three-star recruit ranking to get to 20 players in the class, then Notre Dame would jump all the way to No. 9 in the nation, and and then the talking points from fans completely shifts about Brian Kelly's 2020 class.
But Notre Dame doesn't want to just take a couple more recruits for the sake of taking a couple of more recruits and boosting its Rivals team rankings that at the end of the day doesn't mean much.
Also take this into consideration: if Notre Dame had 22 members in this class, then 5.4 two-star Alex Peitsch (who ranks as the No. 1 long snapper in the nation per Kohl's, for the record) wouldn't count towards the rankings as he wouldn't be one of ND's top 20 recruits. But for Notre Dame currently, his ranking does count in the Rivals team rankings.
What does it all mean? At the end of the day, not a whole lot. Notre Dame is No. 10 in average star ranking per recruit (3.56) in the nation. That gives a better indication of the class since Notre Dame has less than 20 signees, but still, there is still probably context to consider there too.
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