CJ Carr, and a couple of Notre Dame projected breakouts kick off top Fighting Irish players heading into the 2025 college football season
Notre Dame football heads into an extremely important 2025 college football season. Head coach Marcus Freeman was able to lead the Fighting Irish to 14 wins in 2024, as well as a national championship game appearance. The trajectory of the program is in a great place, and expectations continue to rise. The Irish roster is […]
Notre Dame football heads into an extremely important 2025 college football season. Head coach Marcus Freeman was able to lead the Fighting Irish to 14 wins in 2024, as well as a national championship game appearance. The trajectory of the program is in a great place, and expectations continue to rise.
The Irish roster is loaded from top to bottom, which is another testament to what Coach Freeman and his staff has created. As we look forward to the 2025 season, let’s try to rank the 20 best Notre Dame players to know this fall. The countdown starts with 20-16, which brings some intrigue, and heavy debate,
20. DT Gabriel Rubio
The Fighting Irish are set to have one of their deeper defensive tackle rotations in a long time. Between the group, Rubio feels like the easiest role to project. Nobody fully understands just how much Jared Dawson, Donovan Hinish, and Jason Onye will play, but all will play quite a bit. Rubio had a strong ending to the 2024 season, and he will be an extremely important due to his massive size (6-5, 319 pounds) and brute strength.
19. TE Eli Raridon
On paper, Raridon looks like just a solid contributor to a tight end room. He enters the 2025 college football season with just 16 receptions for 141 yards and three touchdowns. The former top-100 recruit has been impacted tremendously by ACL injuries during his time in South Bend. Now fully healthy, everyone is expecting the 6-7, 251-pound athelete to finally showcase his massive ceiling. With such little production, however, many need to see the production before fully believing.
18. The quarterbacks
Figuring out where to put the quarterbacks on this list is very difficult. Until the battle is decided, it’s unfair to just list one over the other. Whether it is CJ Carr or Kenny Minchey in the end, their individual talents are enough to earn a spot on this list. With just three career pass attempts in between them, having them much higher would be hard to justified. You can bet that either Carr or Minchey will finish much higher on this list when we look back at it the end of the 2025 season.
17. OT Anthonie Knapp
There may not to be a more heavily debated player on this Notre Dame team than Knapp. While is still do have major questions about whether Knapp would be a better overall player on the interior of the offensive line, there’s no debating that Knapp is a talented football player. The Freshman All-American is incredibly powerful at 6-4 and 294 pounds, while also possessing good movement skills.
16. EDGE Bryce Young
Notre Dame just hasn’t had a ton of defensive ends that have looked like Young over the years. At 6-7 and 265 pounds, he is a massive pass rusher with unreal movement skills for his size. If not for the presence of guys like Boubacar Traore, Jordan Botelho, and Joshua Burnham, Young would be a lot higher on this list. He is the perfect candidate as a breakout star after posting just 23 total tackles, three tackles for loss, and 1.5 sacks as a true freshman.
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