NEW NORMAL? What UGA’s Recent Recruiting Run May Mean for the Immediate and Longterm Futures of Kirby Smart’s Program

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A NEW NORMAL? What UGA’s Recent Recruiting Run May Mean for the Immediate and Longterm Futures of Kirby Smart’s Program

I don’t know if I can recall a recruiting heater like the one we have seen over the last 10 days…

• 4* LB Shadarius Toodle
• 4* EDGE Khamari Brooks
• 3* EDGE Corey Howard
• 4* RB Jae Lamar
• 4* WR Craig Dandridge
• 4* S Chace Calicut
• 4* DL James Johnson
• 4* DL PJ Dean
• 4* DL Preston Carey

The Bulldogs now have 26 commits. If this were the pre-NIL/House Settlement era, that would essentially make Georgia’s class full before we hit the 4th of July. 

The class currently ranks 2nd nationally. With summer 7-on-7 tournaments happening right now, and senior seasons ahead for all of these players, many of these current commits should see bumps in their rankings over the coming months. 

As we sit, 13 of UGA’s 26 commits (50%) are ranked as a Top 100 player in the class by at least one recruiting service. The Bulldogs also have a commitment from DT Seven Cloud, who is the #1 ranked JUCO player in the class. Georgia has the #1 QB and #1 DT in the On3 rankings. 

Georgia also has commitments from 10 players who are ranked as one of the top five players at their position by at least one recruiting service. 

• QB Jared Curtis (#1 On3/#3 247/#2 ESPN/#4 Rivals)
• DL James Johnson (#1 On3/#4 Rivals)
• DL PJ Dean (#4 On3/#5 Rivals)
• CB Justice Fitzpatrick (#4 On3/#4 ESPN/#3 Rivals)
• OT Ekene Ogboko (#3 247)
• S Jordan Smith (#5 On3)
• S Zech Fort (#5 ESPN/#5 Rivals)
• DB Chace Calicut (#4 Rivals)
• RB Jae Lamar (#4 Rivals)
• LB Shadarius Toodle (#3 ESPN/#5 Rivals)
• TE Lincoln Keyes (#5 Rivals)

What is of the greatest interest to me is what to make of this sudden influx of talent… 

In the immediate sense, Georgia has done enough this week to make it feel very likely that Kirby Smart will secure his 10th straight class with a Top 3 national ranking… 

Starting with Smart’s full recruiting cycle (2017 class), the Bulldogs haven’t left the Top 3 of the national recruiting rankings. That is a stunning achievement. Saban did similar things over his 17 seasons at Alabama. Besides him, no single coach in the sport’s modern recruiting era (2000-present) can equal the decade of classes that Kirby is now on the verge of capping off. 

Ohio State’s program stays in a similar neighborhood year after year, but Ryan Day didn’t get his start until the 2020 class and the Buckeyes have actually been 4th or 5th in the national recruiting rankings in each of the last four cycles.

With major five-star caliber targets like RB Derrek Cooper, LB Tyler Atkinson, TE Kaiden Prothro and DL PJ Dean still on the board, along with plenty of other high-caliber players, Georgia is primed to vault itself into rarified air. 

The Bulldogs are reloading and raising the bar at key positions, and they might be building the cornerstones that will be needed to achieve another epic run like the one it went on in 2021-2023 (not that the 2024 SEC Championship should be written off. Most programs would celebrate it loudly)

Is Georgia Poised to Benefit from the House Settlement?

In terms of macro trends, this past week may be the beginning signs of order being restored…

Despite the chaos that has been brought about by an unregulated NIL market, Georgia has managed to maintain that run of Top 3 classes. They’ve done it despite the fact that they’ve become the big kid on college football’s playground. When you land a punch on the most visible thing in sight, everyone notices. Georgia’s recent recruiting classes could have been even better than they were, but programs like Texas, Miami, Missouri and others have chosen to make outsized NIL commitments to sway high-profile recruitments that Georgia has been part of. 

Are other programs often overpaying for a player to keep him from landing in Athens? Yes, but a good chunk of those dollars might as well be put under marketing expenditures when the ledger is balanced. By landing a big name that Georgia wanted, a program can grab plenty of earned media and pacify boosters and fans that yearn for relevance on a national scale. It’s not an altogether bad investment. Especially for any regime who might feel its seats getting warm. 

All of this has been further complicated by the fact that the transfer portal opens twice a year. Last spring’s big recruiting win can become this winter’s attrition in no time. 

In the end, no matter who is on your roster, and whether they arrived there straight out of high-school or via the portal, you still have to win football games. Throughout recent years, there have been countless times where I’ve spoken to a source in Athens about a hotly contested summer recruitment and gotten an identical answer— “We hope that decision goes into the fall.” The implication is not so much of an implication as a fact. Georgia wins football games. Lots, and lots of football games. There is no easier recruiting pitch than positive results. 

Most programs in college football sell cotton candy on the recruiting trail. It’s a fluffy and wispy thing that’s bright and sweet and served on a paper thin cone. That cotton candy is a vision, and it’s usually more theoretical than real. Some of them are more based in realistic outcomes than others, but none or few of them have anything close to the substance of Georgia’s recent history of results. 

Yes, UGA recruits its collective ass off. But there also may be nobody in the sport who you’d trust to develop and utilize a roster like Kirby Smart. The proof is in the championship and draft pick filled pudding that gets served up from Labor Day to May every year, and recruits notice it. 

The Georgia pitch throughout the NIL era has remained consistent. It approximates to something like, “Come to Athens, practice against future pros everyday, get developed into an NFL Draft pick, compete for national titles every year, shine on game tape because opponents have to respect everyone around you as much as they do you, and stay fresh throughout the season while rotating with other future pros who also play your position. You’ll make a nice amount of money early in your career that will ensure you’re never without basic needs and that you can afford a couple luxuries, but you’ll get paid very well once you become a starter and you’ll make generational wealth when we get you drafted and you get that fat signing bonus. There are other former blue-chip recruits who came into the program above you, and they’ve taken coaching and done the right things for the last couple of years while proving that they can produce in the toughest football conference in America. They’ve earned the right to be the highest paid players in their position room, but one day you’ll be them and you’ll appreciate that hierarchy.“

Obviously some of those selling points are highlighted or lessened depending on the position of the player in question, but you get the picture. 

All of the above sounds pretty great to most of the elite recruits that Georgia targets, but here is the thing… cotton candy with a side of a whole lot of guaranteed money and a promise of starting early can start to sound appealing.

Enter the recent House Settlement, which was given final approval by US District Court Judge Claudia Wilken late on the evening of June 6th. The settlement paved the way for college athletics programs to share revenue with their athletes for the first time, starting with a cap of $20.5 million per a school in the 2025-2026 academic year.

The settlement also came with a kicker, as universities agreed to an NIL Clearinghouse run by the accounting firm Deloitte. That caveat spelled the end of booster funded NIL without legitimate purposes, but all athletes can still be hired to legitimate marketing deals so long as the amounts they are paid meet fair market value for their current public profile, social media reach, and other benchmarks.

The settlement and the clearinghouse went into effect immediately, and deals are already being vetted for legitimacy. Most programs plan to share about 75% of that with their football programs, including Georgia. That figure basically constitutes a new yearly salary cap for a football program’s NIL. In Georgia’s case, the Bulldogs will put $2.5 million towards funding scholarships in all sports, and the football program will get 75% of the $18 million left over ($13.5 million).

Anything past that amount that a school’s athletes are making has to come from legitimate deals that are paying an athlete for the use of their name, image and likeness. With the national scope of Georgia’s program, plenty of its most visible players will also earn a number of legitimate NIL opportunities that don’t count against the cap. 

In the days and weeks before that settlement went into effect, two of UGA’s top 2026 targets announced their college choices. One of them was 5* OT Jackson Cantwell, who picked Miami in a mid-May decision that sources said came down to guaranteed year one money and the Hurricanes’ willingness to pay Cantwell in the neighborhood of $2 million annually. Another was 5* TE Mark Bowman, who chose USC and a NIL package that could net him $8 to $10 million over his college career. Both were paid large amounts of that money up front in order to avoid the vetting of the clearinghouse and keep the players from eating up so much cap space that USC and Miami can’t afford to build a good roster around Bowman and Cantwell.

These are the types of scenarios that have led to Georgia losing some of the highest profile recruitments it has been involved with recently. Class of 2025 5* DT Justus Terry was once seen as a UGA lock. He’d started visiting the school in eighth grade and built a five-year relationship with Kirby Smart and DL coach Tray Scott, but all of that became moot when Texas swooped in during October of his senior year. The Longhorns got him to Austin for a visit for the first time when UGA came to town on October 19th, and then broke their internal pay scale by reportedly offering him more guaranteed money for the 2025 season than some of the more tenured players who were expected to play significant snaps for them this fall. 

It’s fully possible that Texas quickly reordered its payroll by seniority, and it should be mentioned that Georgia has also made substantial NIL offers in recent years for players like 5* S KJ Bolden, 5* CB Ellis Robinson IV, 5* DT Elijah Griffin, and plenty others, but in the world of the House Settlement the economics become much different. Before now, a NIL collective could call up a prominent booster and ask for an extra seven figures to win a recruitment and keep the rest of a position room happy. Today, teams have to find a way to work under the revenue sharing cap. 

Lets say, hypothetically, that USC wanted to pay Mark Bowman $2.5 million a year for 2025 right now. The Trojans have already announced they will allot 75% of their cap to football. Let’s say they will take a straight 75% off the top instead of funding scholarships across all sports. That would leave $15.3 million to Lincoln Riley’s roster. In that case, Bowman would be getting 16.2% of the team’s salary cap in his first year on campus. 

Can you really run a competitive football program while paying 16.2% of your team’s available money to an unproven freshman tight-end? Probably not. That percentage may even be steep for a prime Brock Bowers. 

If Bowman’s recruitment came to a head a month later would the Trojans have been able to offer him an amount large enough to get him to Los Angeles? It’s an unknowable question, but it would certainly be a different set of numbers and circumstances. 

Georgia’s recent recruiting heater has come against some of the same programs who have been in the habit of paying recruits that marketing bonus we talked about above.

The Bulldogs beat Texas when they scooped up 4* DB Chace Calicut out of Houston on Friday. They got 4* DL James Johnson straight out of Miami on Saturday, beating in-state schools Miami and Florida for his services. The Canes were also one of the finalists of 4* RB Jae Lamar, who picked Georgia on Wednesday.

Calicut told Jed May of UGASports that he was leaving “a couple thousands off the table, hundred thousands, I’d say.” That shouldn’t be a surprise when one considers what Georgia has stocked in its DB room. It has three corners on its roster currently who could be first-round picks, and two former five-star safeties in KJ Bolden and Zion Branch. The Bulldogs recruit DB’s as well as anyone, and Smart develops them as well as anyone. Calicut knew this, and said as much to May. “Everybody knows if you go to Georgia and play for Kirby Smart at DB and you excel there, you’re definitely going to the league first-rounder.”

Calicut knows the couple hundred thousand that he left on the table will be peanuts compared to the NFL money that Georgia can help him make. Most recruits who get to the end of their process with UGA as a finalist know this on some level, but what if the difference in guaranteed money is in the high six-figures? What if it’s over seven figures? 

Those types of dollar discrepancies are something Georgia has faced at times in high-profile recruitments over the last few cycles, and many of them decided that being rich now would be better than being wealthy later. None of them should be knocked for taking the opportunity to change their lives when they had the chance, but those types of discrepancies are something that should become exceedingly rarer as the House Settlement era moves forward.

With the way Georgia recruits, and the way Georgia retains its best players, they have to spread their money around to a lot of really talented individuals. Most of them, if not all, could get more elsewhere, but Kirby Smart has earned a developmental discount and the kids who sign with UGA want to compete for national titles. 

With the revenue sharing cap now in effect, the discrepancy between Georgia’s best offer and the best offer of other programs who are finalists in a high-profile recruitment should be lower than before in most cases. If we were still in the pre-House Settlement environment, would Texas have called in reinforcements and made Calicut an offer so large that he couldn’t refuse it? We’ll never know for sure, but it’s possible. 

The thing worth monitoring is whether or not recruitments like the ones UGA won with Chace Calicut and James Johnson this week could be the start of a new trend. 

The House Settlement era that we now find ourselves in shouldn’t spell the total end of scenarios where a Georgia target gets offered too much money to say no to. Take for example Missouri, whose 2025 class included 4* QB Matt Zollers. He was a player that Georgia very much wanted before he picked Missouri. The Tigers have been ascendant in recent years under Eli Drinkwitz, but the simple economics state that they have fewer high-profile players that they have to spread their money around to. The Tigers had a class that ranked 16th nationally in 2025, but it only included seven 4* recruits. A program like Mizzou is still using its NIL resources to win the recruitments involving players it wants who aren’t blue-chips, but it may be easier for it to go all-in on a 5* player.

Teams like Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State and Texas are going to have to spread the butter a bit thinner to make it reach the edges of the toast, but that’s not an altogether bad thing for UGA. Most of the kids it prioritizes in a given cycle are also considering other high-profile programs who are national contenders, but Kirby Smart has a better resume and a better track record to sell.

As for the portal piece of the pie, it will be fascinating to see how the House Settlement influences it. Georgia has been one of the programs at the forefront of including buyouts in the contracts of some of the most high-profile players it recruits. When one considers the amounts required to land a five-star these days, it would be bad business for schools not to have some recourse if that player decides to up and leave after a year or two. 

What’s fascinating is that schools who sign portal players will have to count the buyout amounts as part of the money spent under the revenue share cap. Elite players rarely hit the portal, but when they do they don’t expect to take a pay cut. Programs who live off of transfers may now end up paying $1 million to that player’s former school and $1.2 million to the player to be at their school. That’s a whole lotta funds that just got eaten up to fill a hole on a roster.

The consequence of this could be that we see an even greater emphasis back on high-school recruiting. If that is anything close to the case, you have to like where Kirby Smart’s program stands in the pecking order.

On the whole, it’s still hard to say what the longterm impact of the House Settlement will be on Georgia and the sport as a whole. If this week is any sign of a “new normal” of sorts, then the Bulldogs seem likely to enjoy the views of college football’s new landscape.