Is Notre Dame Football About to Lose a Commitment to Oklahoma?

Notre Dame’s recruiting efforts have rebounded nicely over the last few weeks after a rough start to the new world of recruiting in the age of the coronavirus, but it looks like those efforts might take a hit soon.  Late last night, three new “Crystal Ball” projections for current commitment David Abiara were placed on 247Sports for Abiara to flip to Oklahoma.

Source: 247Sports Crystal Ball for David Abiara

Additionally, three other experts at 247Sports who had previously predicted Abiara to Notre Dame before his commitment, have switched their predictions to Oklahoma for a total of six new Cyrstal Ball predictions in the last 12 hours.

Now, “Crystal Ball” predictions from 247Sports are far from anything official, but seeing three new predictions for Oklahoma is beyond concerning – especially since one is from Notre Dame Insider Tom Loy who is generally very optimistic for Notre Dame with his predictions. There was also some chatter on Twitter last night about Abiara flipping to Oklahoma.

As of Friday morning though, nothing official has been announced by Abiara himself regarding any change in commitment and he still has a pinned Tweet about his commitment to Notre Dame on his timeline.

Should Abiara flip, it would be a big blow to Notre Dame’s defensive line recruiting that looked like it was all completed when Jason Onye joined Abiara and Gabriel Rubio in committing to Notre Dame earlier this month. Oyne was the third commitment Notre Dame gained during the COVID-19 lockdown along with Pat Coogan and Abiara.

Abiara is a composite 4-star recruit even though most services individually rank him as a 3-star prospect.  He was one of Notre Dame defensive line coach Mike Elston’s top priorities since the beginning of the year as well.

Again, nothing is official just yet and Notre Dame still has a chance to ride the storm here and try to keep Abiara in the fold.  It looks like that might be a lot more challenging than they had expected following his commitment in March.  At the time, his commitment gave Notre Dame some great momentum following the decommitment of Deion Colzie.

With what has happened to recruiting this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, fans should expect there to be a lot more movement than normal.  Notre Dame, like many of other universities, has changed its approach and has allowed kids to commit without ever visiting – something they would never have done under normal circumstances.  That is happening all over the country as well.  Combine that with staffs all having not much else to do right now but recruit, and it is going to be open season on all school’s commitments this year.

We’ll see how this plays out, but if it doesn’t end well for Notre Dame, let’s all try to refrain from freaking out or throwing blame at the Notre Dame staff.  Remember, the staff originally got Abiara to commit without visiting earlier this spring – something they were given a lot of credit for at the time.