Notre Dame Football Recruiting: Gunner Kiel Saga Fraught with Pressure and Hype

Let's do a quick thought experiment.

Imagine for a moment that you're a high school kid, 17 or 18 years old.

But not just any high school kid—a blue-chip college football recruit. A quarterback, even.

You've got scholarship offers from nearly every big-time program in the country—including Alabama, LSU, Notre Dame, USC and Michigan—and pressure to choose coming at you from all corners: friends, family, mentors and, of course, the coaches who want you to play for them.

And even when you do choose, many of those same forces will continue to hound you, planting seeds of doubt in your mind and leaving you to wonder if the decision you made was the best one.

This scenario probably describes, at least to some extent, what Gunner Kiel went through before settling on Notre Dame, not to mention what scores more recruits are faced with every single year.

A celebrated prospect from a football family in a small town within rural Indiana, Kiel originally committed to Indiana University, where his brother played up until recently. Then, for whatever reason, he changed his mind and told Les Miles he'd end up at LSU.

Now, after another surprising flip, Kiel is enrolled at Notre Dame, where he'll play for Brian Kelly's Fighting Irish.

I don't know the deepest, darkest, most intricate details of what Kiel went through, though he said this in an official statement:

"

"This recruitment process was a roller-coaster ride at times, but I know I have made the right decision for my family and me. There were three critical elements I was looking for in my future school: the quality of education I would receive, the distance from home and the comfort level I would have with the players and coaches in the football program.

"Notre Dame was the perfect fit for me because it hit all three areas."

 

"

Additionally, Kiel and his family were eminently comfortable and familiar with Brian Kelly, who recruited Gunner's older brothers, Drew and Dustin, during his days at Cincinnati.

But that's beside the point.

Like so many before him and so many yet to come—high school football player or otherwise—Kiel was likely nervous and uncertain when faced with the biggest decision of his young life. He may have rushed into his choice once or twice, but he was fortunate to have enough time to consider his many options in great detail before finally settling on the best fit for him.

Yet, the kid was subsequently ridiculed and lambasted as some sort of fragile-minded, incompetent, flip-flopping flake who should just "make up his mind."

That's not to say that we should necessarily feel sorry for Kiel, or that we should pity the fact that everyone and their mother wanted to give him a free education and world-class vocational training to prepare him for a potentially lucrative NFL career in exchange for playing the game that he presumably loves.

Rather, it's important to remember that Kiel's not just human—he's a teenager.

Anything worth doing is worth doing right, and if it took Kiel three tries to find the right fit, then so be it.

Follow Josh Martin on Twitter.