logo
Notre Dame football's wildly successful week had social media buzzing

Notre Dame football's wildly successful week had social media buzzing

USA Today23-06-2025
Notre Dame football is on another one of its recruiting heaters, as they added three more commitments to its 2026 class in offensive tackle Grayson McKeogh, cornerback Khary Adams and safety Joey O'Brien.
The group now sits at nineteen verbals, and ranks as the No. 3 overall class in the 247Sports Team Composite behind just USC and Texas A&M, both opponents for the Irish this coming fall.
Both Notre Dame and the Aggies have the same amount of committed players, while the Trojans have eleven more. It seems like this Irish class has much more staying power, as they'll look for the first top-5 finish since 2013.
There was plenty of positive results for Notre Dame this weekend, and lets take a look at some of the top social media reactions to the Irish capturing the headlines.
A very impressive class
Marcus Freeman is laying a foundation for success for the Irish, and it looks like it could end up being a prolonged window of great football. It's not just recruiting, but the product on the field, however, the elite additions from the high school ranks don't hurt.
Notre Dame has made Penn State's miserable
It hasn't just been the semifinal win in the College Football Playoff that these two teams have battled, Notre Dame took running backs coach Ja'Juan Seider and each of the three commits had the Nittany Lions as a finalist. It's a regional game, and right now, there aren't many teams in the Midwest or East coast that have the recruiting pull that Notre Dame does.
It sure feels good to be on the other Seid(er)
Image if Seider hadn't made the move, but that clearly isn't the case. While none of the three commits are going to be in his room, you have to believe that his contacts in the East paid dividends. Many of us are excited about what he can do as a coach, but he's already shown that he is one of the top recruiters on staff.
Not done?
With room for more, one of the most recent commits gives all of us hope that this run isn't over. The Irish still have more than a few top prospects that are still considering them, and you can't discount the potential to flip a few committed players. This could be viewed as one of the top Notre Dame classes in a very long time.
DMM
The slogan for Notre Dame's defensive backs coach says all we need to know. He landed two of the top secondary prospects in the class, and should have another elite unit on the field this fall. It doesn't look like the Irish will have any issues defending the pass as long as Mickens is coaching the unit.
Historical?
It's one thing to have a culmination of top prospects committed, it's entirely another to see mulitple of them commit on the same day. While we did know that there was potential for Adams and O'Brien to be a packaged deal, it doesn't always work out that way. It did in this case, and Notre Dame won't complain about it one bit.
The architect
Everything that transpired this weekend has to start at the top with Freeman, as his vision for the program has come true in just three short years. Many believed that you couldn't be an elite football team with the academic standards that Notre Dame has, but the head coach has proven that theory to be false.
Malik Zaire knows who's behind this effort
While Freeman and Mickens have already been highlighted for having their hands all over the recruiting success Notre Dame has had, former quarterback Zaire can see it too. It's pretty obvious that these two work very well together, as the Irish continue to add top-end talent to its already impressive secondary.
No thanks
Nobody wants to see Freeman leaving South Bend to the NFL, but when teams are hoping that is the case, it's a very good thing. It doesn't seem like he wants to move away from the program anytime soon, as his vision is finally coming to fruition. Freeman is building a monster, and I'm sure he wants to be around when it can't be stopped.
Notre Dame is cooking
It seems like these runs have become commonplace in the Freeman era, and Notre Dame is on another one at the moment. The Irish have elevated its recruiting efforts, and it's really starting to show after the deep run into the CFP. I don't think this is a coincidence, I think it's going to be the norm going forward.
Orange background

Try Our AI Features

Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:

Comments

No comments yet...

Related Articles

Florida star QB DJ Lagway's injury raises concern about College Football Playoff run
Florida star QB DJ Lagway's injury raises concern about College Football Playoff run

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

Florida star QB DJ Lagway's injury raises concern about College Football Playoff run

It doesn't matter how it happened, only that it did. And that the long- and short-term future for one of college football's top young players is now in question. Florida quarterback DJ Lagway is quickly becoming Mr. Glass. Shoulder, hamstring and core injuries in his first year in Gainesville, and now a calf injury in fall camp. 'I'm not an injury-prone guy,' Lagway said last month during SEC media days. Then a left calf strain arrived before the start of fall camp, and now the inevitable is here: when and how could the glass crack again? Lagway missed time or didn't participate full-go throughout the entire offseason, multiple injuries not only stalling his development - but also leaving the Gators' 2025 resurgence in question. In one short year, Lagway's injury timeline has moved from unlucky to unnerving. Whether it's increased level of competition, intensity of training or just plain bad luck, four injuries (two relatively serious) before the start of Lagway's second season is cause for concern. More problematic: it's not a long or difficult a jump from calf strain to a much bigger problem. Especially since we've seen it of late among the greatest athletes in sports. Aaron Rodgers and Tyrese Halliburton dealt with calf strains in the last two years, and both strains preceded season-ending Achilles injuries. Kevin Durant's Achilles injury in 2019 started with a calf strain, too. But before we go down that rabbit hole and scuttle the season for a rising star quarterback and a team with College Football Playoff hopes, before we make too much of Lagway wearing a compression wrap on his left calf in practice, maybe he's not Mr. Glass at all. Maybe he just got dinged more times than most. 'The whole injury thing, for the most part, is relatively new for me,' Lagway said last month, and he hasn't spoke to media since. 'I feel better than I ever have right now.' It was last month when Lagway admitted to USA TODAY Sports that the throwing shoulder injury didn't occur during his breakout freshman season as most believed, but that it was something he dealt with the entire season. A season in which he won every game he started and finished. His 6-1 record overall as a starter included a lone loss to Georgia, where he left late in the second quarter with a hamstring injury — with the Gators leading 10-3. Other than that, Lagway's freshman season (even with modest numbers) was high-level production in the nation's most difficult conference. He has had soreness in the shoulder since high school, and has typically used rehabilitation instead of surgery to overcome pain and stiffness. The shoulder injury (and the core injury) forced him to miss throwing in spring practice. Then the calf injury showed up before fall camp, and despite the soreness, Lagway has been throwing and looks sharper than ever. The only question now: will the calf hold up? 'The guy's been working hard all summer,' Florida coach Billy Napier said earlier this week. 'Certainly, hopefully, he'll be able to do more and more as we go day-to-day.' That's not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it's also all Napier and Florida have to hold. Because with Lagway, Florida is a legitimate threat to reach the College Football Playoff. Without him – and with sixth-year nomad Harrison Bailey or former walk-on Aidan Warner playing quarterback – the Gators may have problems reaching bowl eligibility. Earlier this week, former Alabama coach Nick Saban – speaking during his Nick's Kid's Foundation event – said five teams could win the SEC this season. One of those teams was Florida. ARCH MADNESS: Rumors with Nick Saban and Cleveland Browns are plain dumb TOUGH ROADS: College football toughest schedules based on preseason poll Even with the uncertainty of Lagway's health, or the nation's toughest schedule. Which, frankly, Napier and the team are getting tired of talking about. Spot the ball, they all say now. Doesn't matter that the schedule includes games away from Gainesville against Georgia, LSU, Miami, Texas A&M and Mississippi, and home games against Texas and Tennessee, Florida played the same schedule last year. And by the end of the regular season (and with a healthy Lagway), the Gators were playing as well as anyone in the SEC. There's a lot to like about this Florida team, one that Napier has patiently and organically built through high school recruiting instead of relying on the crapshoot that is the transfer portal. An experienced and deep offensive line, some of the SEC's best young skill players and a defense that developed last year with Lagway. In the six games Lagway started and completed, the Florida defense gave up an average of 13.1 points per game. In the other seven games, the Gators gave up an average of 31.5. 'He makes everyone better,' Napier said. 'That's what rare players do.' If they can stay on the field. Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Florida faces DJ Lagway injury concern ahead of playoff run

Preseason US LBM Coaches Poll overlooks quarterback inexperience at top of rankings
Preseason US LBM Coaches Poll overlooks quarterback inexperience at top of rankings

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

Preseason US LBM Coaches Poll overlooks quarterback inexperience at top of rankings

They say it over and over. The game is all about the quarterback. Those who have experience at the most important position on the field, college football coaches insist, win big games. Unless, apparently, you're a blue blood program. So while you stare at the first US LBM Coaches Poll of the 2025 college football season, don't ignore the glaring reality staring back. Five of the top eight teams have first-time starters at the most important position on the field. 'The quarterback is critical to everything you do,' Texas coach Steve Sarkisian said. 'There's no getting around it.' It is here where we introduced Texas, Ohio State, Georgia, Notre Dame, and Alabama. All among the top 10 in the Coaches Poll, and all preseason favorites to reach the College Football Playoff — and possibly much more. All with first-time, full-time starters. If you think the CFP selection committee has problems ranking teams, the 67 coaches shouldn't get pass on criticism, either. There's a whole lot of funky in the first Coaches Poll, beginning at the top with teams ranked on reputation. Not their critical quarterback component. The quarterbacks at those five blue bloods – teams with a combined 119-23 record over the last two seasons – have combined to throw 262 career passes. Arch Manning of Texas has never started an SEC road game, and his only SEC start came last season against tomato can Mississippi State. Gunner Stockton of Georgia has never started an SEC game. CJ Carr of Notre Dame, Julian Sayin of Ohio State and Ty Simpson of Alabama have never started a game. Think about this: college football coaches have essentially told you they believe in a group of quarterbacks who, on average, have 50 career throws each. Maybe this isn't the layup everyone thinks it is. Maybe we're on the verge of a wild ride through the 2025 season, where the unknown unfolds into the unthinkable. Especially considering there's much more to this quarterback story than just first-time, full-time starters. Texas is preseason No.1 for the first time in school history, more hype baggage (and expectations) for Manning to carry before the first snap of the season. After back-to-back national titles in 2021-22, Georgia missed the CFP in 2023 and last year sustained an ugly loss in the quarterfinals — and suddenly looks vulnerable. Ohio State is completely rebuilt on both sides of the ball (only nine starters return), and all Sayin has to do is defend a national title. And beat Michigan for the first time since 2019. Simpson begins his fourth season at Alabama, a program that owned the four-team CFP under former coach Nick Saban — but couldn't make the first 12-team field in 2024. Simpson is merely carrying that weight, OK? ARCH MADNESS: Manning rumor madness with Nick Saban and Cleveland Browns GOOD FIGHT: Deion Sanders is stepping up in biggest battle of career Then there's Carr, a talented redshirt freshman who was given the keys to a championship-level team after Irish coach Marcus Freeman declined to add an experienced quarterback from the transfer portal — and go all-in with the unknown. 'I feel like the experience from last year is invaluable,' Stockton said. That 'experience' consisted of the second half of the SEC championship game victory over Texas, and the CFP quarterfinal loss to Notre Dame. Manning's experience is a home game against the worst team in the SEC, and a home game against lightweight Louisiana-Monroe. Simpson's most extended time on the field was two years ago in a tight win over South Florida, when he replaced starter Tyler Buchner and was essentially the best of two bad options. Carr and Sayin will take their first legitimate college football snaps in the season opener, both in monster non-conference games. Notre Dame plays at Miami, and Ohio State plays host to Texas. 'You want command of the offense," said Ohio State coach Ryan Day, who insists Sayin is still competing with junior Lincoln Kienholz – who has also never started a game – for the starting job. 'When you stand in there as a quarterback, you want everyone to believe in you. You want them to follow your command.' That's all it takes? This will be a cakewalk. Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB. This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: College football preseason poll full of quarterback ineperience

Texas leads preseason college football poll. How Steve Sarkisian got Longhorns back
Texas leads preseason college football poll. How Steve Sarkisian got Longhorns back

Yahoo

timean hour ago

  • Yahoo

Texas leads preseason college football poll. How Steve Sarkisian got Longhorns back

This is uncharted territory for the Texas Longhorns. Twenty years after the program's last national championship, the Longhorns will begin the 2025 college football season ranked No. 1 in the US LBM Coaches Poll, earning 28 of 67 first-place votes thanks in large part to a potentially unmatched collection of talent paced by third-year sophomore quarterback Arch Manning. This is a first: Texas had never been ranked No. 1 in the preseason in the history of the Coaches Poll, which debuted in the 1950 season. 'This is a new year, new faces, new team, and obviously expectations are high for our program,' coach Steve Sarkisian said at SEC media days. 'I'm not naive to that. I don't put my head in the sand, and expectations are very high.' The preseason ranking can be seen as the latest source of validation for the program constructed by Sarkisian, now entering his fifth season. Helped by an NIL-driven landscape of personnel management that has been a boon for many deep-pocketed programs, Texas looks on paper to be nearly flawless. Given their ability even in the deep SEC to simply out-talent most teams on the upcoming schedule, the Longhorns' quest to go wire-to-wire atop the Coaches Poll could come down to how they manage intense hype that has coalesced around one all-or-nothing goal: to deliver a national championship. 'I do think we have a very hungry football team, one that is talented,' Sarkisian said. 'I think this is a championship roster. Now we've got to play like a championship team, but I do think it's a championship roster.' How Texas got to No. 1 Before climbing to the top of the preseason poll, Texas had to experience the lowest point in modern program history. The team Sarkisian inherited for the 2021 season was fresh off four bowl wins in as many years, a program first since winning five in a row from 2004-08. But the Longhorns had struggled in former coach Tom Herman's final two years, failing to build on a 10-win 2018 season capped by a Sugar Bowl defeat of Georgia. Texas opened the Sarkisian era with a non-conference win against Louisiana-Lafayette and then won two in a row to start Big 12 play, rising to No. 23 nationally heading into the Red River Rivalry against Oklahoma. That 55-48 loss was the first of six in a row, the program's longest such streak since 1956, and included a miserable 57-56 overtime defeat to Kansas – the Jayhawks' lone conference win and one of just two wins overall on the season. Steady progress ensued beginning in 2022, an eight-win finish highlighted by a 49-0 rout of the Sooners and five losses by a combined 25 points. The 2023 Longhorns won the Big 12 in the program's final year of membership before losing 37-31 to Washington in the College Football Playoff national semifinals at the Sugar Bowl. Last year's team nearly took the SEC by storm, losing only twice to Georgia – the second in overtime of the conference championship game – and then beating Clemson and Arizona State in the expanded 12-team playoff before losing a close game to eventual national champion Ohio State in the Cotton Bowl. 'I mean, it was a tough loss, but that was the last season,' said junior linebacker Anthony Hill. 'We have a whole new team. We want to go out there and be 1-0 next year. That's all we'll focus on is just being 1-0, and we'll handle everything else when the time comes.' The program has undergone a clear shift in mentality, embracing the 'all gas, no brakes' mindset instilled by Sarkisian and his staff. But the primary factor behind this recent resurgence is simpler: Texas has procured an eye-popping talent level through traditional recruiting and the transfer portal, buoyed by a willingness to spend millions to compile the best roster money can buy. Arch Manning leads loaded Texas roster Though it's impossible to pinpoint the exact total spent on talent acquisition, the 2025 Texas roster is expected to cost between $35 and $40 million, the Houston Chronicle reported in the spring. The crown jewel of this roster is Manning, who enters his first year as the starter after throwing for 939 yards and accounting for a combined 13 touchdowns in the backup role to Quinn Ewers as a redshirt freshman. Manning is part of four consecutive signing classes ranked among the top five nationally by the major recruiting services. The No. 1-ranked class inked in this winter included four five-star and 14 four-star recruits, with eight signees ranked among 247Sports' top 85 prospects overall. Another 11 players joined the program through the transfer portal, with as many as five projected to start. 'We have a bunch of good players and follow his lead,' Manning said of Sarkisian. 'This is a big-time conference. It's tough each week. But I think we've done a pretty good job. I'm hoping to carry that forward.' To some degree, every program in the Power Four is trying to lean on NIL and the portal to build a deeper roster that layers traditional recruiting and player development with more established players acquired as transfers. The Longhorns' NIL offerings have joined the program's inherent advantages - members of an elite conference, one of the nation's strongest brands, competitive in the championship race - to turn Texas back into a trendy destination for the top prospects out of high school or the portal. 'We're trying to build a roster that is one that can withstand the test of time,' said Sarkisian. 'We never wanted to come here and be a one-year-wonder team and then the next year be not very good. So we're trying to be sustainable for a long period of time. I think that that's what good programs do.' No player embodies the program's enviable collection of NFL-ready talent more than Manning, who chose Texas because of his close relationship with Sarkisian and the chance to carve out his own reputation away from the shadows cast by his family's quarterback legacy. Like few before him - maybe his uncle, Peyton, and former Heisman Trophy-winning quarterbacks such as Tim Tebow - Manning will be watched, monitored and scrutinized at a level unmatched by any other active player in the Bowl Subdivision, his every performance held against the obscenely high standard set by his name, location and obvious physical gifts. 'I take football pretty seriously,' Manning said. 'Other than that, just a regular guy.' Handling hype and expectations A steady stream of factors have combined to make this the most highly anticipated season of Texas football in decades - a statement in itself given the annual hype around the program - and raised the boom-or-bust stakes to the point where anything less than an SEC crown and multiple playoff wins could be seen as a disappointment. One is the Longhorns' back-to-back playoff berths, with both years ending with the offense having opportunities in the red zone and in range of delivering an appearance in the championship game. (Fixing ongoing red-zone issues is a 'huge emphasis of ours' this offseason, Sarkisian said.) The second is the wealth of depth and experience on the roster. While not necessarily represented in previous starting experience at Texas, which brings back only nine starters from last season, the run of top-ranked signing and portal classes in a row have created a conveyer-belt type of depth-chart substitution where rising stars such as sophomore edge rusher Colin Simmons (nine sacks in 2024) are poised to transition from key reserve roles into the starting lineup. And the third is Manning. If he plays well and the Longhorns win the SEC, Manning will be fodder for talk-show debate centered on the possibility that he enters the NFL draft after one season as the starter; if Texas struggles, the redshirt sophomore could easily become the scapegoat. There's no question the Longhorns are deserving of the hype. But what will decide this season is how Texas manages these intense expectations against a schedule that opens with a rematch at No. 2 Ohio State, features road trips to Florida and Georgia, includes the annual neutral-site matchup with Oklahoma and ends with the first matchup against Texas A&M at DKR-Texas Memorial Stadium since 2010. 'But I also say we're the University of Texas, and the standard is the standard here, and that's competing for championships year in and year out,' said Sarkisian. 'It didn't matter when we were in the previous conference. It didn't matter now that we're in the SEC. It is what it is.' This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Texas, Arch Manning are No. 1. How Steve Sarkisian rebuild Longhorns

DOWNLOAD THE APP

Get Started Now: Download the App

Ready to dive into a world of global content with local flavor? Download Daily8 app today from your preferred app store and start exploring.
app-storeplay-store