Welcome to Irish Illustrated's tracking the trail.

I'm Drew Mentock, joined by Irish Illustrated's senior recruiting analyst Eric Thomas.

We'll get to subscriber questions later in the show, but of course we're going to discuss

Notre Dame's most recent pickup, Jackson Vaughn.

He's the 18th commit in the

27 class picking Notre Dame over Auburn, LSU, South Carolina, and of course Miami, the Irish

seem to be beating the hurricanes a lot lately, but he's the number 105 player in the class

according to 24-7 sports and one of the top edge rushers in the country. Eric, he's a guy we both saw Irish invasion last year. So Noreen spent on him for a while. He reclassified. I should clarify that about a month or two ago from the class of 2028. So he's a little bit younger. But I I know Nordium was involved a lot in that process.

How did they kind of get this done and get one of the top Edrusters in the country in this

class?

Yeah, it started with early prioritization.

And obviously Notre Dame has a lot of investment in New Jersey anyway.

So I think that through a lot of the different channels and, you know, connections they had there,

they heard Jackson's name pretty early.

You always hear like, oh, this kid's coming up.

And when they got him on campus last summer for Irish invasion, I think it was really a validation

of a lot of that stuff that they heard from coaches who had worked around him, you know,

and limited experience at that point.

He was just coming off his freshman season.

So from there, it was really about continued to stay in contact.

Al Washington really led that charge throughout most of the season.

They hosted Jackson Vaughn several times.

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