The Notre Dame wide receiver recruiting blunders continue, and it’s getting dangerously close to having a much deeper conversation
Most Notre Dame fans don’t want to relive wide receiver recruiting in the 2025 class. Last offseason, the Fighting Irish staff was met with miss after miss. It was only a span of a couple of weeks when the team missed out on Dylan Robinson, Tanook Hines, and Derek Meadows.
The vibes were so bad around wide receiver recruiting that Mike Brown and the offensive staff had to completely recreate the target board heading into the 2024 season, a place you never want to be. They eventually recovered enough to land Antavious Richardson, but ended with a below-average haul and a terrible overall process.
Most Notre Dame fans were still willing to have some patience. Former wide receiver coach Chansi Stuckey left the 2025 board in a bad spot, so it certainly was uphill climbing for Coach Brown. We can’t discount that.
Those excuses, however, are now behind us. The 2026 recruiting class was a clean slate, and an opportunity to prove the doubters wrong. The stink from the previous position coach was in the past, you’re coming off of a 14-win season, and all the momentum in the world.
Unfortunately for Coach Brown, the misses are already beginning to mount. On Sunday, 2026 Potomac (Md.) The Bullis School wide receiver Connor Salmin chose Clemson over the Irish, a 10.4 100-meter runner whose speed is needed desperately. It’s a similar story to Florida pass catcher Naeem Burroughs who also committed to the Tigers a couple of days prior. California star Trent Mosley is also trending to USC.
Each of them has been high on the Notre Dame board up until now. That could end up being three early misses.
This could end up becoming a moot point if the Irish are able to close on top-100 Texas wideout Kaydon Finley and speedster Brayden Robinson, but the track record over the last two years gives you very little optimism that Brown will be able to do so. The point of the troubling feeling is that the board is already getting much smaller, and the margin for error is doing the same.
At a school like Notre Dame, you can’t just be a good coach (the jury is still out on Brown). The recruiting must also be a part of the resume. So far, Brown has a lot more question marks than answers. That’s especially true after losing a player like Salmin, a 4.19 GPA student who had Notre Dame as his leader for some time.
This isn’t a call to action, or anything cryptic about wanting a termination. Instead, this is an openness to a very real conversation. Wide receiver recruiting just isn’t good enough right now, and something has to change. Let’s hope that Coach Brown can figure it out.
If the 2026 class has a similar ending as 2025, and the wide receiver development isn’t monumentally better this upcoming season, then some hard questions might need to start being asked. There is time to remedy these issues, but the process and results seem to be very similar so far as they were last cycle. Here’s hoping for a strong finish for the 2026 recruiting class out wide, and retiring this conversation.
