This Sentell’s Intel rep on Georgia football recruiting offers a broader perspective on the 2026 Georgia football signing class.

Covering Georgia football recruiting classes is always a journey. There’s lot of peaks. Few valleys. The flips. The surges.

There just hasn’t been the same drama over the last two or three years.

The most important months for each new recruiting cycle now start in January with Junior Day visits. Those events, sparked by gameday trips from the previous fall, plant the seed for official visits in April, May and June.

These days, almost all of the nation’s top 300 recruits are committed by August.

Georgia’s 2026 class didn’t come together the way that anyone expected. If we put together a projected class for the 2026 cycle for Georgia back in March, it would have included:

The Dawgs also lost a pair of commits in 4-star California WR Vance Spafford and 4-star Georgia CB Jontavius Wyman to Miami. Georgia also chased, but fell short in the financial race necessary to sign 5-star RB Savion Hiter, too.

Despite not signing a host of those big names in a down year, the red and black still managed this feat:

Georgia signed the No. 5 class in the nation and No. 2 in the SEC

The Bulldogs signed the highest-rated class in the SEC outside of Alabama. If not for the well-documented flip of Curtis to Vanderbilt, it would have still been the nation’s No. 3 class behind USC and Alabama

The average signing class for Kirby Smart’s tenure in Athens has been No. 2.5 overall, going back to his first class (signed off basically two months) in 2016. UGA had the No. 6 class in the nation at the time.

It marked the first time the Bulldogs also finished outside the nation’s top three classes since the COVID-challenged 2021 cycle. The class managed a 292.63 score on the 247Sports Team Composite. That’s the lowest score for Georgia since a 281.31 for Smart’s 2016 class. It marks only the second time a Smart class has been below the 300.0 threshold.

With all those big misses, it was still the nation’s No. 5 class. That’s a first-world recruiting class problem.

4-star OT prospect Ekene Ogboko enjoyed his official visit to Georgia from June 6-8, 2025. He's the younger brother of Georgia redshirt freshman DL Nnami Ogboko and seen as one of the nation's top 75 overall prospects for the Class of 2026. (Courtesy photo) (Courtesy photo/Dawgnation)

Where are all the 5-stars?

North Carolina OT Ekene Ogboko is the only 247Sports Composite consensus 5-star. Bowdon High TE Kaiden Prothro is the only composite 5-star for the Rivals Industry Ranking.

Both services only list one UGA 5-star signee for this cycle.

That’s the lowest number of 247Sports Composite 5-star signees for any of Smart’s classes.

This was also the first cycle of Kirby Smart’s tenure in which the program didn’t sign a consensus 5-star defensive prospect. (Virginia DL Valdin Sone was also a 5-star for the isolated 247Sports ranking.)

However, the Ogboko signing was a breakthrough. Offensive line coach Stacy Searels signed the first 5-star OT for the program since Amarius Mims in 2021. The Dawgs had signed a composite 5-star OT in four out of five classes from 2017-2021, but hadn’t landed one since Mims.

The feat shows how hard it is to load up on elite tackles. The NIL and revenue share era is here. The Bulldogs withdrew from bidding wars with other programs on multiple fronts for elite talent. It is not fiscally possible to outbid USC on one front for a TE and do the same against Texas for an in-state LB.

Cantwell, the out-of-state OT UGA had been recruiting for years, went with the high bid in Miami. That 5-star RB the Dawgs chased this cycle (Savion Hiter) eventually chose between Michigan and Tennessee. Those teams had the highest bids.

Vanderbilt’s perfect storm season opened up the door to flip the hometown golden arm. If Curtis lived anywhere else, or if the Commodores had one of their regular 6-6 or 7-5 seasons, he’d still be coming to Georgia.

USC (35 signees) had the No. 1 class in the nation. It only signed one 5-star. Alabama, Oregon and Notre Dame had the second, third and fourth-highest rated classes. Those programs each signed a quartet of 5-star recruits in their classes, but Alabama and Oregon only signed 21 and 22 recruits, respectively.

If a program relies heavily on big names, it will have to sacrifice the overall depth of its signing classes.

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The Dawgs signed just one of the Top 10 players in Georgia

Prothro was the only Top 10 prospect from the state of Georgia that the Dawgs signed. Alabama signed three of the state’s elite. Texas A&M countered with two.

For a program that leans so heavily on homegrown talent, that’s a data point.

It is also an overrated stat.

Georgia signed five of the state’s Top 10 in 2025. The Dawgs only signed two in the 2023 and 2024 classes. The back-to-back SEC championships prove the program can overcome rivals raiding some of the state’s top recruits and still win big.

The 2022 cycle saw the Dawgs grab four of the state’s Top 10 recruits. The 2021 cycle was heavily influenced by COVID-19, as no recruits could take visits after March 2020. The Dawgs signed six of the state’s top 10 that year.

However, Georgia only signed two of the state’s Top 10 in both 2019 and 2020. This was not an out-of-the-blue cycle that shows the Dawgs have lost some heat off their fastball in in-state recruiting.

It’s just an overrated stat.

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Sudden change: Fast and furious activity highlights two weeks of the cycle

Georgia picked up a commitment from 4-star legacy DL Anthony “AJ” Lonon on August 2. That concluded a flurry of commits in June (19 verbals) and July (five verbals) for the summer.

The Dawgs also secured at least one commitment every day across a seven-day span in June. Then they rested. That’s a new program-best streak under Smart.

The program then waited one day before landing commitments from two more 2026 recruits and a 2027 recruit on June 30. The one asterisk to the feat is that three of them eventually left the class: 3-star Corey Howard, 4-star LB Shadarius Toodle, and 4-star DL James Johnson.

The Lonon commit was the last for a while. The Dawgs didn’t grab another until they flipped Penn State LB commit Elijah Littlejohn on November 23. That’s almost four months.

The first four days of December were another firestorm. The Dawgs saw four members of the class decommit (Curtis, 3-star S Kealan Jones, Marchese and 3-star junior college OL Jarmaine Mitchell) and restocked the board with three new commitments on the first day of the early signing period.

DBs are the strength of the class

Georgia’s recruiting classes over the Smart years have always been chock-full of 5-stars, All-Americans, and Top 100 signees. There are still plenty of those, but the most valuable parts of this class are the hidden gems.

Those are the talented but unsung players who develop nicely in Athens. The Javon Bullards, the Kamari Lassiters, the Chris Smiths. The Dawgs got several of those.

This year’s DB class stands as the overall strength of the class. It needed to be. The highest-rated DB signee in the 2025 cycle was 4-star Todd Robinson at No. 207 overall.

The Dawgs offset that with this class by signing two cornerbacks ranked among the nation’s top 100 recruits in 4-star Justice Fitzpatrick and Caden Harris. Houston County’s Jordan Smith is another top 100 overall recruit who projects as a combo safety. Smith could have helped UGA this fall.

Those are the types of elite recruits that UGA seems to sign at least every other cycle. The Dawgs loaded up with four Top 100 DBs in the 2024 cycle, two more in 2023 and another four in the 2022 class.

The best thing about the 2026 group is the depth beyond those elite guys.

Remember these names:

Those three Dawgs were all ranked as safeties, but they could play all over the back end. Those three all bring to mind those same parallels with the likes of Bullard, Lassiter and Smith.

For those to be the fourth, fifth and sixth-highest rated DBs in a class, that’s an outstanding haul even by Smart’s standards in Athens.

There’s also still the chance that the Dawgs wind up signing 4-star commitment Chace Calicut, too. He’s still got some serious legal hurdles to clear, but there’s still a real window of opportunity there. Calicut, who was recruited as a 6-foot-3 cornerback, has since grown an inch taller.

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SENTELL’S INTEL

(Check on the recent reads on Georgia football recruiting)