Call me crazy, but I don’t think it’s much a factor.

A couple of things to keep in mind here.

The first is that quite a few of these top athletes are also good students. If we’re talking strictly about basketball, than your top 10-20 recruits are already probably off the board because they’re either going to go an alternate route or they plan on being on and done, which means academics don’t matter because they can skate by for a year doing nothing. Add to that the fact that once you get past the sure fire NBA guys, more and more of these kids want to know that there’s something after college because they’ve seen what happens to guys who don’t prepare. They want a solid backup plan because they don’t necessarily have the same built in support system that their more well off classmates will have. There’s no VP job waiting for them when they graduate.

The second is that nobody seriously looks at Notre Dame without coaches telling them up front that not going to class is an option at Notre Dame the way that it is at schools like Alabama, LSU, or Ohio State. These kids know from their freshman or sophomore years of high school that they’ll need the grades to attend Notre Dame.

Coach Shrews will get the kinds of kids he needs. I’m confident of that. He’s ridiculously well regarded within the NBA, and you can bet your bottom dollar that kids know that and know that he can get them there as effectively as Kentucky or UConn and they’ll have the Notre Dame Family behind them when they graduate. That’s no small thing with todays recruits.

Notre Dame has always been, and will always be, “not for everyone”. But i personally believe that the number of kids that it’s for has never been higher. And there’ll be more and more of those kids as the NFL and NBA continue to squeeze the “middle class” of players out of the game. Killing your body for 50k in the UFL or playing in the G League is going to look less and less appealing as time goes on.