Marcus Freeman Won the Portal. Then He Started On 2027.

It is mid-May, the moment in the college football calendar when most recruiting departments take a breath. Spring portal commitments are mostly settled. The previous February’s high school class has moved onto campus. The next high school class will not sign anything binding until December at the earliest. There is, in theory, time to rest.

Notre Dame, this May, is not resting. Marcus Freeman’s program has been operating at two recruiting fronts simultaneously, and the production at both is unusual enough to be worth a closer look. This is what doing both well, at the same time, actually looks like.

Front One: The 2026 High School Class That Already Arrived

The 2026 high school class signed by Notre Dame in February finished second in America in the 247Sports Composite. Twenty-nine players signed letters of intent. Four were five-star recruits — tied for the most in the country with any program in the cycle. Nineteen more were four-star recruits. Only four three-stars were in the class, and even those three-stars tended to fill specific roster needs at long snapper, kicker, and other specialist positions where the star system is least informative.

This is, by any metric, a generational haul for a program that has not won a national title since 1988 and that, until the past three years, was widely understood to be capped at “ten-win season, lose the bowl, recruit one star a year.” Notre Dame finished second to Georgia. They beat Alabama. They beat Ohio State. They beat Texas. The four-five-star count alone is what programs with three times Notre Dame’s NIL infrastructure spend their offseasons trying to match.

Front Two: The Spring Portal They Treated Like a Second Recruiting Class

Most programs treat the spring transfer portal window as triage — a place to plug holes the high school class did not fill. Notre Dame, in April and early May, treated it like a second recruiting cycle. The Irish added four top-100 transfers, more than every program in the country other than Texas and a handful of SEC schools. The headline additions were heavy:

• Tionne Gray, defensive tackle from Oregon, listed at 336 pounds. A run-stuffer in the interior who arrives in a year Notre Dame loses its starting nose guard.
• Francis Brewu, defensive lineman from Pittsburgh. A rotational piece on a defensive front that needed exactly one more.
• Quincy Porter, receiver, a long-term portal acquisition who profiles as a contested-catch outside option — the kind of body Notre Dame’s passing game has not had reliably since Michael Floyd.
• One additional top-100 addition that closed the four. Position group: defensive front depth.

The defensive line emphasis is a tell. Notre Dame’s 2025 defense led the country in defensive front advanced metrics for stretches of the season. The portal additions are not depth charts — they are reinforcement, applied to a unit that already worked. Compounding strength is a recruiting strategy most programs cannot afford to choose; Notre Dame is choosing it.

Front Three: The 2027 Class That Is Already Better

Here is the line that tells you what is happening in South Bend right now. As of late May 2026, Notre Dame has secured 17 commitments for the 2027 class. Per On3’s class-score metric, those 17 commitments collectively grade at 93.20 — which is higher than the score for the group of 29 that Notre Dame just signed and that finished second in America.

The math behind this is simple. The average quality of the 17 commitments so far is higher than the average quality of the 2026 class. Notre Dame has not started filling out the back end of the 2027 class yet — the specialists, the projects, the late-cycle holdouts — so the score reflects a top-heavy roster of elite prospects who committed early. As the class grows toward its eventual 25-or-so signees, the score will drift, the way every program’s class score drifts as it expands. The point is where the class starts.

The current ranking, fifth in the country, is itself slightly misleading. Programs above Notre Dame in the 2027 composite have more commitments — the rankings count quantity in the early-cycle calculation — not necessarily better commitments. The blue-chip ratio of 83 percent, the five top-100 prospects, and the 93.20 score all point in one direction: when this class fills out, it will be one of the three best in America, and quite plausibly the best.

Why This Is Hard to Pull Off, and Why It Is Rarer Than It Sounds

The structural reason that programs trade off high school recruiting for portal recruiting is staff bandwidth. A college football staff has a finite number of recruiting visits, finite NIL collective budget, and finite phone hours per month. Programs that go heavy on the portal in any given year typically pull back on high school recruiting effort — SMU under Rhett Lashlee in 2024 is the canonical recent example. Programs that go heavy on high school recruiting often field portal classes that look like remainder bins. Notre Dame, in the 2025-2026 cycle, has done what is supposed to be impossible: full effort at the high school class that just signed, full effort at the portal that just closed, and full effort at the 2027 class that is being built right now.

Two ingredients make this possible. The first is staff stability. The same recruiting infrastructure has been in place since Freeman’s first full year, and the relationships with high school coaches and seven-on-seven directors are old enough now to compound. The second is the alumni-and-NIL infrastructure that has come together at Notre Dame more recently than at peer programs but has matured fast. Notre Dame is not outspending SEC competition on NIL. They are spending differently — concentrating in trenches and skill-position blue chips, leaving the high-volume specialty positions to programs that are willing to bid against each other for a kicker.

The Caveat: Recruiting Rankings Are Not Wins

One honest note before the close. Recruiting class rank is correlated with on-field success, but the correlation is far from one-to-one. Georgia signed the #1 class six years in a row beginning in 2017 and won two national titles, which is impressive; it also means that even sustained recruiting dominance did not always produce a championship in any given year. Alabama signed top-three classes ten years running and won six national titles in that span. The conversion rate from “great class” to “won the title” is closer to 25–30 percent for the best programs, even in their best stretches. Notre Dame’s recruiting trajectory does not guarantee a national title in 2026. What it guarantees is that the team Notre Dame puts on the field this fall will not be short on talent at any position group, and the team Notre Dame puts on the field in 2027 will be even less so.

The Irish lost the 2025 College Football Playoff Final to Ohio State. The 2026 recruiting cycle, which followed that loss, has produced the best high school class in Notre Dame history, the best spring portal haul, and the strongest early start on a 2027 class on record. There is, by any sensible reading, no recruiting hangover. There is only a program operating at full capacity at three fronts at once. That is what it looks like to be killing it.