Former Notre Dame recruiting headache looking for a new home after just one College Football season
Star quarterback Deuce Knight opted for the transfer portal, which isn’t a surprise at all for the Notre Dame fan base.
The name Deuce Knight will live in infamy with Notre Dame football fandom for a long, long time. Once committed to the Fighting Irish for over a year, the 6-4, 217-pound signal caller eventually opted to decommit last October. After some flirting with other programs, including Ole Miss and Alabama, the Mississippi native eventually selected Auburn.
It wasn’t the fact that Knight decommitted from Notre Dame. His process was just littered with deception for months.
Billed as a five-star player coming out in the 2025 recruiting class, Auburn fans only saw flashes of him as a true freshman this fall, but those flashes were exciting. While it was just FCS Mercer, Knight played brilliantly in his only start. He completed 15 of 20 passes for 239 yards and two touchdowns. Knight also rushed for 162 yards and four scores on only nine carries as a runner.
That type of showing, although brief, had Tigers fans ecstatic for what the future could hold, especially working with new head coach Alex Golesh. Unfortunately for the fan base, that is the only start that they will see from Knight.
The freshman quarterback is reportedly entering the transfer portal, which officially opens on Jan. 2. There is expected to be a long list of suitors for Knight when it does.
The process was frustrating for Notre Dame fans, but luckily, they recovered at the end of the 2025 class. They eventually flipped quarterback Blake Hebert from Clemson, a player the Irish staff liked a ton earlier in that cycle.
It is uncertain whether Hebert ends up being a prominent fixture of the Notre Dame quarterback room in the future, but at least he will be in the room in 2027. Everyone who followed Knight’s recruitment over the last couple of years shouldn’t be at all surprised by this latest move.
Deuce Knight’s recruiting background
Knight finished the 2025 recruiting class as a five-star player on the 247 Sports Composite ranking. That ranking had him pegged as the No. 28 overall player, the No. 5 quarterback, and the No. 1 player from the state of Mississippi. That came off a senior year where Knight threw for 2,067 yards and 25 touchdowns, along with another 450 yards and 12 scores on the ground, despite missing some time due to injury.
There was a long list of impressive suitors who pursued Knight heavily. Some of those top programs included the Fighting Irish, Auburn, Alabama, Georgia, Miami, Oregon, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Texas A&M, TCU, Indiana, Louisville, South Carolina, Colorado, Vanderbilt, Washington, and Virginia Tech, among others.