I never said Chase posted anything about Brunelle, did I? However, Get Nasty and 88ND didn't get all warm and fuzzy about it. But the next time 88ND says something positive about Notre Dame it will be his first in a while.
Chase feels we should only sign high four-stars and five stars. Of course that's the goal but that's not realistic in today's world.
Why does every single person have to get warm and fuzzy about every single recruit?
GetNasty also said in that same thread that he thought Brunelle would be a really good special teamer... I didn't see him post anything negative about the guy. He just wasn't as sky high about him as some others were. Isn't it a completely valid opinion for someone to evaluate a player's film differently than others?
Chaseball does not think ND should land only 4 and 5 star players. As often as I disagree with him on the ratio of elite players that ND needs to compete for titles, he's never once said that ND shouldn't recruit 3 star players. Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson, Georgia and every other elite team recruits 3 star players every single year. No team to my knowledge in the modern era of recruiting has ever landed a 20+ man class rated 4 stars or higher across the board. It just doesn't happen.
What Chase has argued and continues to argue, is that the talent gap between ND and the elite teams needs to be closed for ND to be in annual, or near annual title contention and that to do so, ND needs to significantly increase the ratio of 5 star and top 100, 4 star recruits that they land. I believe in our last discussion on the topic he said that he thinks ND needs to land in the 6-7+ range of top 100 recruits, with a couple of them being high level 5 stars, varied among positions, from class to class... The average class at ND is around 22-23 players. He's talking about the upper range of the class. The top 6-7 guys. On average there are going to be another 15+ guys recruiting in each cycle. There are are going to be plenty of 3 star players among those guys, mixed in with, hopefully, 6-7 more guys in the 101-250 range of high mid tier to lower mid tier of 4 star range. That's just reality and he's nowhere near blind to that fact.
Again, him and I have points of disagreement about the volume of elite guys ND needs and the reasonable expectations of ND to land those guys, but in all my years of debating with him, I've never heard him say that ND should only take 5 star and 4 star guys, the same way I've never heard anyone (correct me with reference if I am wrong) say that Jay Brunelle is a "waste of a scholarship".