Notre Dame TE Kyle Rudolph has an agent and will leave in the NFL draft. Hope the Irish can grab Stanford commit Troy Niklas in all the confusion of Harbaugh leaving. Kelly is recruiting him as a DE, but he also played TE at Servite HS and he would make a great insurance policy for Koyack...
Well this season was certainly good practice at getting along without him. Eifert was a more than adequate fill in. Hope Kyle recovers enough to show something at the combine.
I liked Eifert much better than Rudolph. Faster, quicker, better blocker, much more versatile. That offense started to gel when he started playing.
Well good luck to him, I don't think he ever had a full season of good health with ND. As a Freshman he had to play before he was physically ready, and as a soph he showed flashes of brilliance but also injured again. This year, never was healthy from the start. So if I am a NFL team I'm thinking he is a risk and I would not draft him in the 1st round, not to mention for what ever the reason TE in the NFL seems to be a position where guys can come out of no where and be excellent. We have some of those in Houston, Joel Driesen and Owen Daniel were hardly household names but they've been excellent NFL TE's. We have enough TE's on the roster to do what we need, Ragone will come back most likely for a 5th year, Eiffert as has been mentioned really showed us that he can be an excellent college TE and we have Alex Welch who was on the scout team this year but who was highly rated coming out of HS. Then of course one of the Golic boys is also a TE and we have one of the top TE's coming in 2011 in Ben Koyack. I think we'll be fine. That's college for you, you are always losing players and new guys have to step up.
I agree with JO'Co on the Nkiklas kid and I think we might have a shot at him once Diamond Jim moves on to the NFL. Also Amir Carlisle is another Stanford kid who I think we can flip.