Notre Dame's future offensive line will have a heavy Michigan flavor

Gregory Patrick

When four-star offensive lineman Gregory Patrick committed to Notre Dame on Sunday over Michigan State, where he’s a double legacy, and Michigan, fellow Irish pledge Ben Nichols retweeted his commitment graphic and said: “The best in MI go to South Bend.”

Nichols likes to have some light-hearted humor with the recruiting process but the success from Notre Dame with offensive linemen from Michigan this cycle has been striking.

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The top-three offensive linemen from the state – Patrick, Nichols and Sullivan Garvin – have all pledged to the Irish. Only Patrick had an offer from the Wolverines.

“I like to be fun with it,” Nichols said of his retweet. “Everybody takes this super serious but I like to have some fun. At the same time, you really look at it, the three best offensive linemen in Michigan are going to Notre Dame. And we’re getting players from all over the country.”

Patrick is the most interesting of the three because the Portage (Mich.) Northern standout’s father played for the Spartans and Michigan was heavily involved in recruiting him as well.

Of the three, he had the toughest choice.

“It was a really tough decision,” Patrick said. “Despite what Twitter thinks, Michigan was recruiting me pretty heavily. Michigan was recruiting me really heavily so it was a difficult decision between Michigan, Michigan State and Notre Dame but you can only choose one. I moved my commitment up a little bit earlier than I expected because I came off a visit not this past Friday but the week before and I knew it was the place I wanted to be. I knew the feeling and I knew the time was right. There was no need to wait. I just made it official.

“It really came down to the type of people and the culture there. I felt they were really selective with who they recruit. You have to be a good student, a good person, obviously a great football player. Being around the guys in their locker room and the O-linemen they have, it made it pretty evident pretty quickly to my family and I that I align with those guys, we have similar goals and ambitions.”

When Nichols, from Davison, Mich., about an hour away from Ann Arbor, started to get serious about football in middle school, Michigan was the dream school for him. He was so close and the Wolverines had such incredible history and tradition but his recruitment there never picked up.

The four-star offensive lineman took a couple game-day visits to Ann Arbor but an offer never came and Notre Dame was showing an incredible amount of interest. Plus, it’s Notre Dame. Wisconsin was the hardest program for Nichols to turn down.

“I talked to (Michigan) a few times. I’ve been there for two game-day visits just because I live so close but we never really got into the deep stuff of recruiting,” he said.

“(Notre Dame) came in really early. I got on campus first of all, met the coaches there, loved them, loved the campus and then after that they told me about their program and the history and I fell in love with the place.

“There is no real certain word, it’s just special. I’ve visited probably 50 different schools and if you asked other people they’d say the same thing, there’s just a different vibe about them. You can tell the coaches aren’t bluffing about what they’re saying. You have the history to go off. Their history is second to none. If more recruits would try to get on campus and reach out they’d see the same thing. The coaches make that place amazing.”

“There’s just a different vibe about them. You can tell the coaches aren’t bluffing about what they’re saying.”

Garvin went to Michigan’s camp and won the positional MVP award but the Wolverines never offered.

Indiana and Kansas were the other front-runners for Garvin but the Irish were always way, way ahead in his recruitment and so his decision was pretty easy.

“(Michigan offensive line) Coach (Greg) Newsome was always a great guy,” Garvin said. “Even after I committed, he congratulated me and wished me the best. It was every now and then coach Newsome would reach out with a text, never an offer.

“After I camped there and won MVP, we talked in the O-line room. He thought I was a good player and he said they were going to recruit me and then an offer never came. He would still reach out.

“Notre Dame was at the top of the list by far and then there was a big gap on where I wanted to go. … When you think about Notre Dame, you think about O-Line U. It’s a great place to be all-around. The networking you can get there, the alumni base. Even if football doesn’t pan out for how I want it to, I’ll still have a life after football because of Notre Dame. They set you up for success.”

Those three and the highest-ranked offensive line commitment for Notre Dame, four-star Tyler Merrill from Mechanicsburg (Pa.) Cumberland Valley who picked the Irish over Penn State, all talk on Snapchat and Instagram regularly.

“Just having those guys was a pretty big part of it,” Patrick said. “Just knowing I’ll be playing with those guys in the future. You can talk about culture and what it means to your program and how you want it to look but the people are what make it.”

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