Perhaps "ALL ND coaches in all sports should be required to take the" Niele Ivey "ND recruitology 101 course" until they get 90 percent of their recruits from the top 30 players in the nation. :)

Doing better in the portal, but Freeman (and assistants as it is more than the just the head coach) is recruiting the heck out of bigs and skill positions.

Umm... Ivey was the primary recruiter for MM's teams and she was therefore very responsible in bringing Turner and later transfer Shepard (for which we were #2 behind home state NE. first time around) to our championship and runner up teams. Oh and that Canadian who turned out pretty good, Ace, was also recruited by her.

Not too shabby threesome.

Q

it's hard to argue against the thought that we have had, "forever," a numbers shortage of quality bigs.

Cherry picking three (including a transfer) over the past 10 years doesn't put a dent in the "numbers" argument.

Are you really comparing recruiting women's basketball at Notre Dame to football? I don't even know where to start on this and hope you were kidding. In football, you have to get 15 kids or more every year that are elite against a pool of 30-40 schools that can make a case that they are or can be elite programs with all the requisite resources. Basketball requires about 2-3 elite players each year. Not to mention, there are probably about 15-20 programs at most that would be on par with ND and that used to be about 5-8 until the past few years. That's just scratching the service - I could go into many other factors. I have no idea if Freeman can coach (nor do I know yet if Ivey can), but based on results thus far, Freeman is setting the standard on recruiting in comparison to past history. I would argue Ivey has maintained what McGraw was able to do in terms of recruiting. And this isn't a knock on Ivey - just suggesting that I'll take my chances right now with Freeman as it relates to recruiting.

So in terms of recruiting leading to National Championships where does Ivey compare to ND football?

Trying to compare Football recruiting to Women's/Men's basketball recruiting is an exercise in futility. The class sizes and teams are so different that it's almost impossible to correlate the programs. Comparing Men's basketball to Women's basketball recruiting would be a lot more accurate.

As an example:

For those that say that they believe that NI is a superior recruiter than Marcus, they will point out the many top players that have played for NDWBB throughout the years, including many stars that are playing at the next level. Also, the great players on the current roster that will soon be in the WNBA if they choose to do that after graduation. When adding in the portal recruiting, NI has done a good job and excels in recruiting.
If you are in Marcus Freeman's corner, you can debate the recruiting rules. Sure NI recruited some awesome talent over the years but, that was as an assistant to Muffet. It's easier to recruit top tier talent for a Hall of Fame coach when that coach has laid the groundwork and has yearly National Championship expectations each season. Recruiting, when YOU are the face of a rebuilding team isn't that easy. Besides, even as a Defensive Coordinator, Marcus did as good as a job as he did with bringing in better recruits even with the disadvantages of having Brian Kelly as his head coach. If you want to judge recruiting by what has happened as Head Coaches, Marcus believers will say that he has more than doubled the better recruits than his predecessor as opposed to NI which has only signed 4 players (including Emma) in 3 years.

I don't think that it is fair to say either way because of the circumstances and needs of each program. I am just thankful that we can have such debates because that means that we have 2 coaches that look to excel at recruiting. Whether this translates to Championships or not remains to be seen. All I know is that there are hundreds of other schools that would love to have this debate.

To my great regret I actually *did* read your response. I guess I thought it would be more humorous,…but you did say "service" for "surface", so that was funny!