Twitter Tuesday: Notre Dame, recruiting evolution, U.S.'s World Cup absence
ASK FARRELL: Who had the best Rivals100 Five-Star Challenge performance ever?
Twitter Tuesday is back again this week, as Southeast recruiting analyst Woody Wommack is answering your questions.
It’s always so hard for me to calculate where a team might end up in the final team rankings because there are so many moving parts, not to mention a math equation I don’t exactly have a great handle on. But I can tell you that Notre Dame is currently at No. 7 in the team rankings and with 15 commits has a great start to the 2019 class. Assuming Notre Dame signs 22-25 players, the Fighting Irish could end up with 12-15 players ranked as four-stars or higher. If that’s the case, I fully expect them to be well within the top 15 nationally and within striking distance of the final top 10.
There’s no doubt recruiting rankings across the board are more accurate than they were when things started, and that’s not just because I’m now involved in the rankings process. In just the six years I’ve been ranking players, the amount of times we are able to see a player in a given cycle has increased quite a bit, and I can only imagine what it used to be like back in the days of requesting VHS tapes from high school coaches just to get a glimpse at top talent.
Now almost every varsity game a player participates in during his high school career is available online, as is camp and all-star game footage. It’s also easier to identify players early in the process, giving us several years to follow a prospect on their recruiting journey and keep an eye on their development.
Now I’m not saying that we get them all right – we write plenty about how we don’t – but the amount of information we have on prospects continues to increase and hopefully our success rate of projecting prospects will continue to increase with it.
This is actually a tough question from my old high school pal, Travis, because you have to put the United States Men’s National Team into a football context. It’s not exactly like they are a dominant squad, and they’ve never won a World Cup, so finding a football equivalent isn’t easy. However, just qualifying for the tournament really isn’t that difficult, despite what the CONCACAF homers will tell you.
For the sake of this question, we will compare it to becoming bowl eligible and the team I would equate the USMNT to is Wisconsin. The Badgers are currently have a 16-year bowl streak, and one that most college football fans would expect to continue for years to come. Much like the USMNT, the Badgers have had their flashes and despite some conference championships (the equivalent of a Gold Cup in soccer), they’ve never won a national championship (World Cup).
For Wisconsin to have such a bad season that they fail to qualify for a bowl game is the closest I could find to the USMNT not making the World Cup and Badgers fans would agree with me that would be a big blow to the progress the team has made over the past 15 years.