Finally, some good news for Notre Dame men’s hoops — Stanford transfer guard Cormac Ryan has committed to the Irish!
After a full season of disappointments and growing pains and tough-to-swallow bad basketball, Mike Brey and the Notre Dame Fighting Irish men’s hoops program finally got some good news on Friday evening.
Source: Stanford transfer Cormac Ryan has committed to Notre Dame.
— Jon Rothstein (@JonRothstein) June 29, 2019
Cormac Ryan is a 6’5” shooting guard from New York who just played his freshman season for the Stanford Cardinal before putting his name in the Transfer Portal. Ryan averaged 28.5 minutes per game for the Cardinal as a true freshman, putting up 8.7 points, 3.5 rebounds, and 1.9 assists per game on a 15-16 Stanford team. He shot 33% from the field and 32% from 3, but is known to be a very good shooter and like Nate Laszewski, is only expected to see his percentage increase now that he’s got a feel for the speed of the college game.
Ryan was a 4-star recruit in the 2018 class, ranked 65th in the country by ESPN.com and 68th in the country in 247sports.com’s composite rankings. Notre Dame was among a group of strong programs that attempted to woo him as a high schooler, as Ryan settled on Stanford over the Irish, the Florida Gators, Michigan Wolverines, Villanova Wildcats, St. John’s Red Storm, and a handful of other teams who offered the sharpshooter while he was at Milton Academy.
Ryan is expected to sit out the 2019-2020 season and then have 3 years remaining starting in 2020-2021, putting his return smack dab in the middle of what should be some very good teams featuring the 2018 class as upperclassmen, assuming they continue to develop over the next two years.
Stanford transfer Cormac Ryan told @Stadium he will transfer to Notre Dame. Will sit and have 3 years left. Really nice pickup for Mike Brey and the Irish.
— Jeff Goodman (@GoodmanHoops) June 29, 2019
Shooting was one area the 2018-2019 team really struggled, and so adding someone like Ryan — who can really catch fire from deep (5-for-8 in a game against UCLA, 6-for-11 in a game vs. USC, 5-for-6 in a game against Seattle, etc.) — to a strong group of young players with plenty of eligibility left but already a good amount of experience (Laszewski, Prentiss Hubb, Dane Goodwin, Juwan Durham, Robby Carmody) should really pay off for Brey in a couple years.
Of course, the Irish still need to right the ship next season and not waste the senior years of John Mooney and TJ Gibbs and the 5th year of Rex Pflueger, but in an off-season full of nothing but bad news (D.J. Harvey’s transfer, multiple recruiting targets committing elsewhere), this is great to see for Brey and his Irish. Here’s to hoping we look back on this transfer as fondly as we do now with Ryan Humphrey, Dan Miller, Ben Hansbrough, Scott Martin, etc.
