Kevin Sinclair here at Irish Illustrated on our tracking the trail podcast, our recruiting pod,

Eric Thomas, and I have been running for a little while now.

And Eric, you and I've had some time to dig into Notre Dame commits during their season.

Of course, there's some who have yet to start their season, specifically the guys sort of in the New England area and in Connecticut

who don't start until, you know, some of them the second week of September. But we've had a good

look at a bunch. And we're going to dig into some of that, some of the varsity action and

takeaways we've had so far and some

things coming up to do with Notre Dame's commits in the 2025 and 2026 classes.

But first, Eric, we were talking about it, I think, on the weekend.

And then again, before the podcast today, something I wrote about in my midweek recruiting

rundown, which we published at Irish Illustrated

yesterday, kind of seeing the Marcus Freeman era recruiting we've all been talking about for

years now, really starting to see the fruits of that labor, right? When we watched Notre Dame

go down to college station and play Texas A&M in the week leading up to

then after we'd seen the depth chart I looked through and there was more freshman true sophomores

like underclassmen first or second year players in starting roles than we'd seen in the last

decade I believe it was. Eric, we watched,

let's start with the defense. We go out there. We know what Ben Morris and Xavier Watts has.

And then we saw a Don Schuller and Christian Gray played great football. Those guys were in high school

not long ago. They were a true freshman last year. They're just coming into their true sophomore year. What do you think about

Marcus Freeman's recruiting the way he sort of upped it on the defensive side of the ball in

comparison to what we saw in relation to what we saw on Saturday? Yeah, I mean, one of the big points

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