Notre Dame passes Oregon in Rivals Industry Team Recruiting Rankings

Notre Dame hasn’t added a new commitment since Aug. 9, when Sarasota (Fla.) Cardinal Mooney four-star defensive lineman Elijah Golden picked the Fighting Irish over Alabama and Oklahoma. But five and a half weeks later, the Irish moved up in the 2026 Rivals Industry Team Recruiting Rankings on Monday. How?

Rivals updated its rankings on Monday, and although Rivals only makes up 33% of the Industry Ranking, the individual recruit updates were positive enough to slide the Irish past Oregon.

Notre Dame and Oregon had 27 and 17 commitments, respectively, after Golden’s pledge, and those numbers remain the same today. Oregon had a class score of 92.654 on Aug. 9, and Notre Dame’s was 92.598.

As of Tuesday morning, Notre Dame has the No. 3 class in the country with a score of 92.666, while Oregon sits at No. 4 with a 92.600. It’s not a big lead for the Irish, but a lead nonetheless.

USC and Georgia hold the top two spots in the Industry Team Ranking, in that order. Texas rounds out the top five.

 Wyndmoor (Pa.) La Salle College offensive tackle Grayson McKeogh got the bump to five-star status.

Edge rusher Rodney Dunham Jr. (No. 10 overall), safety Joey O’Brien (No. 24), tight end Ian Premer (No. 26) and edge rusher Ebenezer Ewetade (No. 29) join McKeogh among the top 32. Since Rivals has only officially assigned five-star status to the top 16 prospects at this point, Dunham is the lone Notre Dame commit already recognized as such.

Several other Irish commits saw positive moves up in the rankings. Kyle Kelly had more details in his article on Monday.

If Notre Dame’s current No. 3 class ranking holds at the end of the cycle, it would mark the program’s best recruiting class on paper in the internet era. Rivals Industry Team Rankings go back to 2004.

Notre Dame has signed the No. 4 class in the country three times previously, but nothing higher than that — again, per the Rivals Industry Team Ranking.

Notre Dame has two five-star recruits, 18 four-star players and seven three-star commits in the 2026 class. The blue-chip ratio for the class sits at a strong 74 percent.

This cycle marks Marcus Freeman’s fourth full recruiting class as Notre Dame’s head coach. In 2023, the Irish signed the No. 10 class, and Notre Dame had the No. 11 group in America back in the 2024 cycle. For the 2025 class, the slight downward trend continued as Notre Dame signed the No. 12 group.

For what it’s worth, Freeman was the defensive coordinator for the 2022 cycle and then head coach for the last few weeks before signing day. The Irish signed the No. 6 class that year.

Below is a look at the top 10 schools according to the 2026 Industry Team Recruiting Rankings, as of Tuesday morning.

Understanding Rivals’ team rankings system

The Rivals Industry Team Recruiting Ranking utilizes all three major recruiting media companies: Rivals 247Sports and ESPN.

It uses a score average of the player rankings, which solves the problem of varying class sizes during the recruiting cycle. It compiles the highest-rated commits for each team up to a total based on a rolling average of current total commitments among Power Five schools.

The current average number of commits in the 2026 class used in the rankings score is 17. This means that of Notre Dame’s 27 commitments, only the 17 highest-ranked players are used for the rankings score.

To further explain: Notre Dame’s 27 commits have an average recruit rating of 91.02, but that is not the score used in the team ranking. From the group of 17, the Irish’s score is 92.666 — the number used for the class ranking, as seen in the image above.

With this model, there are no bonus points for having more commitments than other teams, and only small deductions occur when a team has fewer commitments than the rolling average. Unlike distribution (bell) curves, this model doesn’t disproportionately weight a team’s top three or four highest-rated commits and is a more accurate representation of an entire class.