Pierce Clarkson has made seismic impact on Louisville recruiting

The 2021 season ended with a thud for Louisville and head coach Scott Satterfield as the Cardinals dropped consecutive games to Kentucky and Air Force to end the season. Hot seat rumors then swirled around the head coach before interim athletic director Josh Heird confirmed the former App State lifer would be back at Louisville for year four with a financial commitment from the university to improve the football recruiting operation.

Things officially seemed to change for the better just one month after that loss to a service academy in the First Responder Bowl on the campus of SMU. Four-star quarterback Pierce Clarkson committed to the Cardinals on Jan. 28, and it’s been nothing but good times on Floyd Street this offseason.

Pierce Clarkson is the No. 204 prospect in the 2023 class, according to the On3 Consensus, a complete and equally weighted industry-generated average that utilizes all four major recruiting media companies. The four-star prospect out of Bellflower (Calif.) St. John Bosco gives the ACC program a future cornerstone piece at quarterback, but his biggest value might just be what he brings as a recruiter for Louisville.

Clarkson’s dad, Steve, is a renowned private quarterback coach based in the Southern California area. A former quarterback in the Canadian Football League, Clarkson runs Dreammaker where he claims to have “started the trend” of young QB training and development. Over time, some famous west coast quarterbacks — Matt Leinart, Matt Barkley, Tate Martell — have been clients of Clarkson. The popular coach was featured heavily in Bruce Feldman’s book The QB: The Making of Modern Quarterbacks along with George Whitfield and Trent Dilfer as folks in the high school QB space that are helping prepare players for the next level.

Clarkson also has a connection with Adidas and ESPN’s Pete Thamel reported that the camps that Clarkson organizes are sponsored by Adidas. Therefore, the recruiting space is not unfamiliar to Pierce Clarkson. The blue-chip quarterback is helping Louisville — an Adidas sponsored school — build a high-level recruiting class.

Louisville has received a pair of top-200 commitments from Southern California with DeAndre Moore Jr. and Aaron Williams joining the class recently. Moore is the No. 62 overall prospect in the On3 consensus and would be Louisville’s highest-ranked signee since Brian Brohm. Top-500 prospect Jahlil McClain also is from Southern California and is teammates with Clarkson at St. John Bosco. Three-star tight end Jamari Johnson is another member of the California collection as Louisville currently has gotten 50 percent of its 10-man class from the west coast.

There has also been some success in Georgia. Louisville has commitments from top-500 recruits Jayden Davis and Adonijah Green. The young quarterback is not just making connections back home.

“Pierce Clarkson got it all started with me and Louisville,” four-star recruit Madden Sanker told On3’s Chad Simmons. “He hit me up two months before he committed and told me where he was going and I didn’t even know him. Since then, we have been talking, and he is definitely the leader of their class. He is getting guys from Georgia all the way out to California to pick Louisville.”

Sanker is the No. 115 prospect in the 2023 class out of Douglasville (Ga.) South Paulding and has an official visit scheduled with Louisville along with stops at Arkansas, Michigan State, Miami, and North Carolina over the summer with an announcement tentatively scheduled for August. Louisville is now starting to see that pitch leak into Texas.

Rueben Owens is the No. 28 prospect in the 2023 class and falls just shy of current five-star range per the On3 Consensus. The six-foot, 200-pound tailback out of El Campo (Texas) High is down the four schools: Louisville, Texas, Texas A&M, and TCU. Owens will be another important official visitor for the Cardinals over the summer while saving official visits with Texas and Texas A&M for the football season.

Also in June, Owens will be making the trip to Las Vegas to participate in the inaugural OT7 League. The all-star 7-on-7 league is set to be a major showcase of prep talent and has the financial backing of Overtime and NFL quarterback Cam Newton. Owens will be teaming up with LA Premium where he will be teammates with Pierce Clarkson. Overtime also has a basketball league — Overtime Elite — that gives high school basketball players an alternative to college hoops before entering the NBA Draft.

We are still in the early stages of the 2023 recruiting cycle, but Louisville is trending to record its best finish in school history. The Cardinals currently have an average star rating of 90.45, and that would have tied Texas for the 10th best class last year. Pierce Clarkson has changed things immediately for Scott Satterfield’s recruiting operation.

Now the question will turn to if Louisville can keep all of these talented prospects in the fold. Both California and Georgia are high school recruiting hotbeds that many in college football rely on to replenish their roster yearly. Some big schools are going to come after some of these players committed to Louisville. However, Clarkson is making major power moves for the ACC program.