The Deuce Knight recruiting drama finally came to an end on Wednesday night when Knight officially decommitted from Notre Dame and flipped his commitment to Auburn – a move that had been expected for months. With Knight’s decommitment, Notre Dame can finally move on publicly in their pursuit of another signal caller for this year’s recruiting cycle. However, the Irish aren’t starting from scratch; they began contingency planning long ago.
According to Irish Sports Daily’s Matt Freeman, Notre Dame began planning for this inevitability over the summer.
Some will argue that Notre Dame should have moved on publicly a while ago. Hi, it’s me, I’m some people. That said, there were some benefits to the facade of Knight being “committed” to Notre Dame while visiting Auburn weekend after weekend since the summer. Notre Dame was able to work behind the scenes, as Freeman reported, without much attention to who they were contacting, much like they did two years ago when they flipped Kenny Minchey in the wake of the Dante Moore recruiting fiasco.
When Notre Dame flipped Minchey, the news came out of nowhere, even though the Irish staff had been working on it for months. Nothing leaked during their flip attempts until days before Minchey officially committed to Notre Dame.
That is essentially the same territory the Irish find themselves in again this year now that the Knight ship has officially sailed. The Irish will look to flip a signal caller currently committed elsewhere. Who that will be, no one knows yet. Only a few people outside of the Gug probably have any idea who is on the Notre Dame recruiting board at the moment.
Situations like these are unfortunately unavoidable in today’s college football when you target elite players at every position instead of settling for easy recruiting wins like the previous staff at Notre Dame. That doesn’t mean the staff should stop pursuing them, but at the same time, hopefully, they learn from their mistakes here.
While it’s admirable, and even preferable if you’re a fan who wants to see Notre Dame end its championship drought, that this staff aims high and aggressively pursues targets that previous staffs would have been afraid to pursue, they also need to be a bit more honest with themselves at times. Luring an elite quarterback from the heart of SEC country without any ties to the University or even the north will always be challenging, to say the least. That doesn’t mean the staff should ignore such prospects in the future, but they need to be honest with themselves when going all in like they did.
In two of the three recruiting cycles that Marcus Freeman has overseen as head coach, the Irish have gone all in on 5-star quarterbacks, which eventually spurred them to what appeared to be the “obvious” choice all along—Dante Moore with UCLA and now Deuce Knight with Auburn.
Luckily for Notre Dame, they pushed all their chips in for CJ Carr, who we all know stuck with his commitment, and then flashed skills that suggest he could be a multi-year starter for the Irish in the spring. At least for now, it also appears that class of 2026 quarterback commit Noah Grubbs is firm in his commitment. Grubbs tweeted out a pretty strong statement following Knight’s decommit.
Moving forward, Notre Dame needs its quarterback commit in every class to be their firmest commitment, much like Carr was. It usually doesn’t end well when you’re spending all your time re-recruiting your quarterback instead of them helping you lock in the rest of the class. Carr was on Notre Dame’s campus constantly after his commitment almost every time other high-profile recruits were in town. In today’s college football landscape, locking in as much of your NIL resources as an elite quarterback requires also means you have to be even more sure that the one you push all your chips in for will stick.
Time will tell how this all plays out for Notre Dame. Perhaps the Irish will pull another rabbit out of their hat like they did with Minchey two years ago. Having Carr on campus and Grubbs waiting in the wings for the class of 2026 takes a little pressure off the staff compared to two years ago, but you still can’t waste a recruiting cycle at the most critical position on the field.
This latest quarterback recruiting snafu also drives home why it is so vital that Notre Dame fix the on-field product so quarterbacks and receivers aren’t as open to listening to other programs once they are committed. Not that Auburn has any elite offense. Auburn is in even worse shape than Notre Dame, and it’s not out of the question that their head coach will be fired this year. Still, Notre Dame isn’t putting an offense on the field right now that elite quarterbacks are drawn to. Even in their pursuit of Knight and with wide receiver Derek Meadows over the summer, Notre Dame used Mike Denbrock’s offenses at LSU and Cincinnati as selling points. The offense Notre Dame has fielded this year has been good enough to start 4-1 with wins over a pair of top-25 teams, but the offense is far from the kind of high-octane offenses that have become commonplace in college football.
Hopefully for Notre Dame’s sake, CJ Carr or Kenny Minchey is the elite quarterback that has been so elusive for this program for years, and the offense takes a huge leap next year. There will be some improvements this year still, but with where the offense is starting, it would be naive to think that any sort of massive leap is still possible this year. Until Notre Dame starts fielding offenses that quarterbacks are lining up to play in, though, situations like this won’t be uncommon for Notre Dame.
We know what you mean by the “heart of SEC country” but now that is actually the entire lower 48!