I.B Nation, welcome back to another episode of the Irish Breakdown podcast brought to by our friends over at Fandul.

Happy Wednesday, everybody. Sorry, my days of the week are starting to get blended together since this is not a game week for Notre Dame, but happy Wednesday.

Also, happy national signing day. This is a big one, big week for Notre Dame, big day for Notre Dame.

And this was an extremely, extremely successful day for the Fighting Irish.

I mean, they had 27 commits and all 27 of them signed.

And we were all talking before the show, and it was pretty much a drama-free day,

which in the world of recruiting is a pretty good day when everything is

all set and done.

But fellas, this is a heck of a class coming in in 2026.

Like I said, 27 commits.

There are, what, 16 on offense, 11 on defense.

This is a really, really good class, gentlemen.

It's an elite class.

I mean, I would argue this is Marcus Freeman's best class.

That's not easy to say because he's landed some outstanding classes,

hence Notre Dame being, what is it, 21 and 3 the last two years,

made up almost exclusively of guys that he's recruited.

But, I mean, look, it has all the marks of an elite class, right? What do you need to have an elite class? You need depth.

Check. You need to meet all your recruiting needs at every position. Check. You need to have depth

of talent. So not just landing 27 players, which is the number,

Notre Dame sign. It gets confusing on like 27 players in the 26th class. But, you know, so it's,

it's, that's fine. You can have 27 players. But if you got 10 studs and then 17 mediocre players,

...