This Sentell’s Intel rep on Georgia football recruiting has the latest with 5-star QB Jared Curtis. He ranks as the nation’s No. 1 QB and No. 2 overall prospect for 2026 on the 247Sports Composite. The On3 Industry Ranking has him as the No. 1 QB and No. 6 overall.
Go back two days. The word was that 5-star QB Jared Curtis was going to take one more visit to check out the Georgia football program.
It meant he’d be back at G-Day this weekend.
Yet this week is also his prom. Curtis, who is set to decide on May 5 between Georgia and Oregon, will graduate in December. He’ll be a Dawg or a Duck in college come January.
That means this prom is basically his senior prom. It is a good reality check here that he’s still an 18-year-old kid with corsages, dance moves, laughing with his boys, and pictures that will last forever on his mind.
He grew up with a treasured horse named “Bomb,” which has to be just the perfect name for a future star QB. That’s normal.
What is not normal is that he’s also earned the right to see some very serious income headed his way to go play college football. That will be true even under the new House settlement revenue sharing agreement, if it gets through the final approvals, that will take place on July 1.
Curtis, the nation’s top-rated QB prospect, was supposed to visit Georgia for G-Day and then Oregon for its spring game. DawgNation has been told that fairness will come into play here. He’s not going to see Athens for one more glimpse, so that means he’s not going back to see Eugene either.
While that is always subject to change, we feel that’s the most accurate information that we have regarding the Curtis recruitment and future visits at this time.
This has not been an easy process up to this point. It will not be an easy decision. There has been no decision made as of yet. I’m told this decision will be chopped up, looked at from every angle, and the Curtis family will pray about it.
Relationships. Stability. Growth. Development.
Those are the buzz words for the endgame stages of the Curtis recruitment. The dream is the NFL, and the choice will be what he feels gives him the biggest advantages of chasing down that career goal.
It has also been described as a “mature” approach. Perhaps the prom is a good way to balance out all the transactional buzz around what could wind up as the biggest single recruiting battle of the 2026 cycle.
He’ll earn a package that should stretch into millions of dollars per season. That’s been the going rate for a 5-star QB the last few years, and we don’t expect college football’s robust economics to take a plunge with this cycle. Especially at the game’s most important position.
Curtis was at G-Day last year as a newly-minted UGA commitment. That was the non-binding verbal pledge he backed off of last October. The reason, and it is one we still believe here, is that it didn’t sit right with him to go see other schools as a UGA commitment. He decided he still needed to go on those visits to be sure.
“That’s just like how you heard it,” he said last November. “Just like I felt it was right to go ahead and decommit [to go on those trips].”
Auburn was a contender in this restarted recruitment at one point. So were Ole Miss and South Carolina. It eventually came down to Georgia and Oregon. Curtis saw Oregon first for a few days in March, and then he went back to Georgia.
When he was in Athens, a source used the phrase “like family” to describe how well that visit was going.
That will now turn out to be his last college visit before his decision.
Kirby Smart leads Georgia. Dan Lanning leads Oregon. If we’re putting together a ranking of the best head coach recruiters in college football, those two gentlemen would be the top two.
When Curtis decides on May 5, I wouldn’t look for it to be some elaborate commitment ceremony at his school. There will at least be an edit for his social media, and there’s been talk of an old-school commitment video as well.
Have you seen this week’s “Before the Hedges” weekly recruiting special on YouTube yet? Check it out below.
SENTELL’S INTEL
(check on the recent reads on Georgia football recruiting)
