Signing Day is near

With less than 48 hours until Signing Day, there’s little more any coaching staff can do. With a recruiting dead period upon us, coaches will return to campus around the country and wait for the fax machine. Sure, there’ll be last minute phone calls and texts, but the majority of work has been completed. It’s now down to a waiting game.

For the Notre Dame coaching staff, Wednesday will be the celebration of a recruiting class that’s the best of the modern recruiting era. With a group high on star power as well as positional needs, Brian Kelly and his coaching staff continue to show the ability to find players that fit the mold they have created. They also show in this recruiting class the ability to be flexible, bringing elite athletes onto campus with multi-positional versatility. That’s easy when you find and identify a blue-chip, five-star talent like Jaylon Smith. But it’s also on display with below-the-radar defensive back Rashad Kinlaw, a high school quarterback that’s battled injuries the last two seasons.

Over the next three days, the focus will be almost entirely on the 2013 recruiting class. We’ll be live-blogging from campus starting at 6 a.m. on Wednesday, keeping you up-to-date in real time on the recruiting class as the faxes come in. We’ll also be joining the official UND.com broadcast to discuss the impact of this recruiting class. So if you’re looking forward to seeing a sleep-deprived writer three time zones away from his home base, you are in luck.

Last year, Notre Dame was on the wrong side of a few Signing Day surprises, drawing the short end of the stick on two blue-chip prospects that had Irish fans flinching for fear that the sky was falling. But even without Deontay Greenberry and Brian Poole, things seemed to work out okay for the team in 2012. (Some context, Poole — a five-star cornerback, made three tackles for Florida this season. Greenberry caught three touchdowns for Houston.) Wednesday, they’ll be in the running to spring their own surprises, with a small handful of recruits still considering the Irish, including big fish like Eddie Vanderdoes, Ty Isaac, and Kylie Fitts.

Wednesday will feel like Christmas morning for a lot of die hard college football fans out there. But here’s a friendly reminder that’ll likely go ignored in the heat of the moment: Just because you’ve known about some of the presents beneath the tree for ten months, it doesn’t make them any less valuable than the surprises that may roll in that morning.

So buckle up for a fun few days. If only because it’s the triumphant return of the fax machine, forcing its way out of irrelevancy for a few short hours each February.