Recruit your ass off to find talented players who want to be at ND and then coach them properly.
Put them in positions to succeed as in do not take the weak arm 3* QB and put the whole game on his shoulders when he is clearly not capable of being successful.
Or fix the current 4* QB's fundamentals so he's not stepping sideways, dropping his arm angle and keeping his chin on his chest. (he has been here for 3 years)
These are just 2 of hundreds of examples where the staff at ND has failed miserably in develpoing the talent on campus.
It's all about scheme for kelly he really doesnt care about anything else.
Cliffy
When a guy returns for his final year of eligibility, he is considered a "6 star recruit"!
As I've said numerous times, ND's recruits are almost always overrated by the services, and this group is no exception. Most have performed below their so-called ratings. None of the guys you listed on offense as four star players has shown that level of production. Is Wimbush a four star QB? Is Mack a four-star TE? Not even close.
On defense, only Tranquill, Coney and Love are playing to the level of their ranking. The rest are either underachievers or were overrated from the beginning.
I did an exhaustive analysis of this a few years back. Each star yields roughly 12% chance of getting drafted IIRC.
As you correctly point out, some schools over perform relative to their average star ratings and some underperform. So while star ratings are in fact useless for a particular player, they have some relevance at the program level and strong relevance overall.
In short: ND is underperforming in recruiting relative to top-level programs. It is relevant to the amount of talent we're starting with. And the fact that our recruits look overrated has more to do with our inability to develop players than it does a flaw in the rating system.
I guess I would buy it if you saw rampant star raising once a kid committed to ND or a ND was a clear leader or finalist for a kid. But is that really the case?
Take Wimbush. He was considered a 4 star recruit long before ND got his commitment. He was a high 4 star well before he even committed to PSU.
Could he be a bust? Sure. It happens, even at places like Bama and FSU and USC. Or, if we are seeing a lot of highly recruited kids struggle here, is this a coaching issue?
I have never bought the theory that ND just happens to be unlucky and land the highest percentage of soft or overranked kids that had offers from other major programs.
Recruiting issues is likely the largest reason why we aren't in the playoffs every year. Coaching issues are why this roster averages around 8 wins a season.
I do believe a higher percentage of our recruits are overrated, but the soft culture within the program that has developed throughout this century is a contributing factor. Coaching is certainly part of the problem but not the only ingredient.
ND would have selection bias toward players making a 40 year decision, kids with a lot of options outside football like ND and vice-versa.
Also, the ND culture may also place football at a lower relative priority.
However, Stanford would in theory would be even more subject to the above, but Harbaugh changed that and Shaw has continued it.
Somehow, they get a bunch of guys named Cody, Zach, Evan, Graham, Colby, etc to play with their hair on fire and beat ND's ass.
Recruiting ratings are more an evaluation of potential at the college level than absolute predictors. ND has enabled a culture that allows players to get by even if they lack the drive to maximize their football abilities. How many kids will work hard if they don’t care about the NFL or fear losing their scholarship? The answer at ND has been “too many”. In their defense, part of this may be due to the fact that a greater percentage of ND kids place a higher priority on getting a degree. Recruiting services don’t factor in these intangibles, and they should not try to do so. That’s up to the coaches who recruit them and take the time to get to know them.
Edit: let me add that my subject line regarding institutional leadership is meant to say that it matters in terms of a successful football program. There is a reason that the Jets and Browns are consistently bad while the Patriots and Steelers are good.
About half of the playoff spots the last four years have been taken by teams with average Rivals recruiting rankings worse than ND's over the relevant span. We have plenty of talent to have made 2 or 3 playoff appearances if we had the same coaching quality as at OU or Clemson.
Those two are likely to create a negative feedback loop.
It would be highly improbably that ND's recruits are generally overrated because of ND's offer, and other programs with bigger brand names right now (Alabama or Ohio State) are not overrated because of their offers. Both programs generally outperform their recruiting rankings.
It would be even more improbable that ND always lands the highest ranking players who aren't actually that good, and everyone else who offers those players doesn't have those players commit to their programs AND the guys who do commit actually are as good as their rankings.
Wimbush had Alabama and Ohio State offers. Mack (nee Jones) had USC, Auburn, Georgia offers.
In no world are ND's recruits "almost always overrated by the services." Like any program, the rankings are inexact and sometimes less heralded players outperform the more heralded ones. But by and large the best players that develop the best tend to be the higher ranked ones.
And ND is developing NFL talent at about the same pace as their recruiting rankings would suggest. What they aren't doing, however, is winning at that same pace with that talent. And at certain positions there have been consistent developmental failures linked to Kelly's control of quarterbacks and BVG's linebacker and safety play.
Mack had Scott Booker coaching him, maybe the biggest lightweight on Kelly's staff. In the past three years, ND had the worst TE development production it has had in over a decade. No one has looked like a pro since Koyack left. But Koyack and Eifert weren't overrated because of their ND offers. And Koyack was a little higher rated than Smythe and Mack with a little better list of offers. But ND also didn't have 5-star Rudolph during that stretch or Koyack. And the guys who outperformed that group was a wildly underrated Eifert, a wildly underrated Carlson. Even Niklas was ranked lower than Mack/Smyth with a worse offer list. Like Carlson and Eifert, Niklas wasn't overrated by the services.
Just like under Faust, ND isn't failing to develop successful players because their recruits are overrated. It's failing to develop players where there is poor coaching. And its recruiting ratings versus production (as measured by NFL grades and drafts) do not show any general disparity between how the services rank ND's recruits versus any other program.
and, in particular, the correlation between our recruiting rankings (typically between 8 and 11) and our NFL draft production (between 8 and 11 over the course of the Kelly era) is almost exactly the same. The R-squared between programs with top tier recruiting and programs with top tier NFL draft and on field production has to be very high.
The fact that we can’t compete with OU and Clemson (who are also in our range in both stats) on the field is a culture and coaching problem, not a talent problem. And they also have kids transfer, lose kids for whatever reasons, etc.
A great recruiter like Urban Meyer would be able to consistently pull in top 4 - 5 classes every year at ND, but we’ll never repeat what Alabama just did.
Furthermore, the ND fans aren’t powerful enough in the market for this stuff to move rankings on individual players and haven’t been for at least a decade. OSU, Michigan, LSU, Alabama, SC, Texas, UGA fans and so forth are all just as voracious consumers of that recruiting stuff as ND fans are.
The bottom line is ND nearly always underperforms relative to its recruiting rankings, and good programs do not. The most likely explanations are institutional softness and poor coaching, not over-ranking by recruiting services (which would gain little by pumping up ND's classes).
As mentioned by others, the academic/self-selection angle/excuse is largely debunked by Stanford's extended period of success, and making matters worse, our recruiting performance has slowly but surely deteriorated since the Weis days.
We have become a shittier version of Stanford with a far more delusional fan base under the stewardship of our megalomaniacal and mercenary leadership.
That’s not so accurate. Our top recruit, Barnett, gave us the bird for Alabama. It’s not like Alabama was going to sign Wimbush instead of or in addition to Barnett. Almost certainly, they, like ND, evaluated Barnett more highly than Wimbush.
I do not recall what QB Ohio State was recruiting or where Wimbush stood on their pecking order.
I don’t think “offer lists”are as probation as they once were, because I think schools extend more and emptier “offers” and I think kids also exaggerate with the proliferation of recruiting service harassment.
who, you may recall, first committed to PSU.
His recruitment was well covered by Ohio State beat writers at the time (see the link at bottom), as was his flip to Notre Dame in the fall of 2014.
Their interest wasn't unreasonable. He'd be a good fit in Urban Meyer's system.
It was obvious to me that Wimbush was not the best choice for ND quarterback, after watching last year's spring game. Book is a better choice. Perhaps Wimbush's development is on Kelly. He is a great athlete who would make an excellent running back, wide receiver, or H back. I hope he stays!
It is Kelly's job to use the talent he has wisely.
If ND's recruits underachieve on a higher-than-average basis, I think it's more likely that ND's failing to develop their players than that the recruiting industry as a whole is overrating players that end up signing with ND.
It seems to me that ND's talent is fairly in line with their recruiting rankings - top ten-ish, but a cut below elite.
and not a 3 star.
Is to conflate four and five star recruits thereby putting glossy Alabama red lipstick on the purplish pig of Kelly’s recruiting.
I've noted that if you believe the recruiting rankings that Kelly is excellent at turning chicken salad into chicken s***. Is that a new development?
ND’s star rating for signees is trending downward under Kelly (see the linked story below). In Kelly’s first four years (w/ Weis’ recruits) Kelly averaged 9.25 wins per year. The last four years with his own, lower rated recruits he’s averaging 8 wins per year. He and his staff need to do better.
ND is hovering just above the 55% cut off, at 57%. What is disturbing is that the percentage keeps trending down under Kelly. Used to be in the 60s. No excuse for that.
Great coaches have gotten far more out of far less.
Been waiting for that for some time.
At which point 2019 becomes a no excuses year.
Unless, of course, his next star QB regresses.
Then, it's 2020 ... for sure, NO EXCUSES!
1. Lost two All-American linemen
2. New DC
3. New O-Line Coach
4. Travel-heavy schedule
5. Lost Heisman candidate RB
6. Depth issues at RB
7. QB Controversy
It's gonna be The Season of Many Excuses, which means any data taken this early in the Kelly regime, only nine years, after all, should be taken with a grain of salt.
I think he's gotten decent talent...but not elite talent. Certainly not as good as talent as Weis got...and maybe Davie. Kelly is bringing in solid talent and doing nothing good/bad with it. We are stuck in the 8-4 purgatory for two main reasons: ND isn't attracting elite talent, and the talent that does enter ND isn't utilized correctly (e.g. big OLine with RB's running a pussy slow developing offensive scheme as its bread & butter)
Then we will go 8-4 amid a hail of excuses as people say we still don't have enough data to come to a conclusion about Kelly.
"is a four-, five-year proposition, to get all the pieces in place,"
So surely Kelly 2.0 needs another 3-4 years
So was this year just the primer? If it was there will be at least two more coats of finish needed. Then it may be time to repaint.
period. We don't know what those metrics are but that's not important. He wants us to be civil in our discourse and trust in his brilliance. Please order your tickets to the Blue Gold game and stop by the bookstore. A new swag catalog will be forthcoming.
team in the locker room after a loss and apologizing for letting them down.
“That creates a real bond between a team and a coach,” swarbrick said."
And we wonder why we can't win overall.
does now back when Gerry was pacing the sidelines. Weren't most of Gerry's Kids from a number-one-ranked class?
"When Gerry Faust entered his third season in 1983, he was on the cusp of a breakthrough.
• He had assembled three No. 1- or 2-ranked recruiting classes from 1981-83.
According to the 24/7 Composite, which includes the team rankings from every major recruitnik site, Alabama is on a recruiting roll I don't think ND or anyone has come close to matching since ranking recruits became a thing.
Now, they might lose their crown this year and only finish 2nd or 3rd, but they are on quite the recruiting roll. It's probably the second most impressive thing Saban has done.
2000 - Tennessee
2001 - FSU
2002 - Texas
2003 - Florida
2004 - FSU
2005 - USC
2006 - USC
2007 - Florida
2008 - Miami
2009 - LSU
2010 - Florida
2011 - Alabama
2012 - Alabama
2013 - Alabama
2014 - Alabama
2015 - Alabama
2016 - Alabama
2017 - Alabama
I said second most impressive thing, because I read (and haven't verified) that since Saban took the LSU job in 2000, every single recruiting class he has signed has won at least one national championship. So when he walks into a recruit's home this weekend, he can effectively tell the kid and parents that every single year since the recruit has been alive, the players that sign with him have walked away with at least one national championship ring. Pretty hard to trump that.
won national championships (with four of the first five winning multiple titles; the jury's still out on the last two), but only 3 of the preceding 11 classes from other schools have managed even one championship -- Texas class of 2002 (2005), and Florida classes of 2003 (2006) and 2007 (2008). Only 2 other classes even played in championship games -- Southern Cal class of 2005 (2005) and LSU class of 2009 (2011).
The thought that Saban once wanted to coach at ND, and that ND had at least 2 potential opportunities to hire him (after the 1999 and 2004 seasons), makes me want to commit harakiri, or at least Harry Caray.
To explain: ND should've fired Boob after the disastrous 0-4 finish to the terrible 5-7 season in 1999. That was the year Saban jumped from MSU to LSU. And December 2004, when ND hired Weis to replace Willingham, was the same month in which the Dolphins lured Saban away from LSU. From all appearances, ND made zero effort on either occasion. F.
Here is a hint: the ratio you are referring to relates to the entire 85 man roster. You only cited the percentage of the "starting 24" who are 4 and 5 star players.
What percentage of our entire roster are 4 or 5 stars? Do we have any 5 stars?
2015/2017 redux
Will you ever refrain from puffery?
when done with said puffery, pass that shit my way...
Not the starting 24. It’s not uncommon for starters to be 4 stars, but to have depth to plug in for injuries when player A gets hurt or doesn’t pan out is the difference.
https://www.sbnation.com/a/cfb-preview-2017/blue-chip-ratio
Uhhh, "Cook?"
spot.
To compete for a championship, and actually win one, we will need some major difference makers and I don't see any on the roster. Yes, coaching has a lot to do with it, and we lack in that department as well, but some 5 star players are needed to make a difference.
I don't disagree with your premise.
You need one or the other (preferably both).
I don't agree with that at all.
None proven
Solid starter is 3*. Thats most of our team.
Coney, Tilery, Tranquil, both Haye's, Bonner, Love.
All guys who can make plays. I think the Defense is going to be really good.
playoff this year. Alabama, Clemson and Georgia are setting the standard currently and they use 5 star players.
Watson was a big one. Could be wrong.
class
They had 1 or 2 five star players in each year from 2013 through 2016
I am not taking the time to match whether these kids started at OSU or not, but Urban recruits 5 star players most years.
2013 – OSU - Rivals 2 five star players.
https://n.rivals.com/team_rankings/2013/all-teams/football
ND had 4 five star players – Eddie Vanderdoes, Greg Bryant, Jaylon Smith, and Max Redfield (How sad is that list?)
2012 – OSU - Rivals 2 five star players.
https://n.rivals.com/team_rankings/2017/all-teams/football
2011 – OSU - Rivals 1 five star player but ranked below ND who had 2 five star players (Tuit & Ishak Williams plus Aaron Lynch and Nick Martin – only 3 stars
https://n.rivals.com/team_rankings/2011/all-teams/football
2010 – Rivals Zero five star player and ranked far below ND - 25 vs 14
https://n.rivals.com/team_rankings/2010/all-teams/football
Miller (QB) was #29, 5* (though out for season with injury)
Spence (DL) was #5, 5*
Washington (DL) was #19, 5*
Bosa (DL) was #37, 4*
Bennett (DL) was #49, 4*
McMillan (LB) was #22, 5*
Grant (LB) was #23, 5*
Bell (S) was #26, 5*
The reason we don't get 5 star players is simple. We don't pay them or their parents enough
Four more players unloaded under the Regime.
Five star players have been told for a long time that they are special, the best of the best. They have been told that they are NFL bound before they get to college and so that becomes their priority. With that in mind my hunch is that some are just not that interested in the academic side of college and don't want it to interfere with the pursuit of glory on the gridiron. The second reason, and probably more important one, is that the top guys get a lot of advice from people in the know, and they all know that Kelly is not a top flight coach. He is not going to achieve what they want for themselves or their team. These players want the best coaching they can get, and they can't get it with Kelly. They also want to play for a coach that NFL people can rely on to coach them well and to be honest about the player's abilities. Once we replace Kelly with an elite level coach the 5 star players will return to ND.