National Signing Day 2018: Winners and losers
Not every college football program makes it out of National Signing Day smiling, and we look at the winners and losers from 2018 in recruiting.
National Signing Day is most certainly the most-hyped day of the recruiting process in college football. Between the televised events, the antics that prospects use to announce their decisions, and the drama of flips, fake-outs and so on, it’s not hard to see why that’s the case. And to be frank, there are decisions made on National Signing Day that undoubtedly affect programs in a big way.
With the early signing period for college football being instituted this year, however, the luster of National Signing Day was at least somewhat lost. In many cases, there were teams that had the majority of their classes set coming into Wednesday, Feb. 7. As such, there wasn’t much work to be done while all of the festivities were going on around the country.
Having said that, there were still teams and programs that needed to round things out or put a bow on their classes. Some of them were able to do so, some were not and others were able to do so with a little bit of flair (looking at you, Georgia). At the end of the day, though, it’s not just about NSD, but about the recruiting process as a whole and how Wednesday capped that off.
With that in mind, let’s take at the winners and losers of college football recruiting and National Signing Day 2018.
Winner: Georgia Bulldogs
How can you not call the team with the No. 1 overall recruiting class in the country a winner for the day? More importantly, how can you not look at the impressive feats that the Georgia Bulldogs were able to pull off throughout the entire recruiting period and then on National Signing Day and not say that they were the biggest winner of everything that happened.
Before Wednesday ever arrived, you could have called the Dawgs a winner for the job that Kirby Smart and his staff were able to do landing guys like dual-threat quarterback Justin Fields and running back Zamir White, both 5-star players. However, the fact that those two are just a pair in a total of seven 5-star recruits that Georgia was able to sign is just absurd. They were tearing it up on the recruiting trail and landing basically every big-time player that would listen to them.
If that weren’t enough, Smart and the Bulldogs really went for the kill on Wednesday during National Signing Day. They further beefed up their already phenomenal class by flipping two of the best outside linebackers in the country, Quay Walker and Otis Reese, from Alabama and Michigan soft commitments, respectively. That only furthered what they were able to do, and stuck it to big-time competition in the process.
After playing in the National Championship Game, it’s clear that UGA is going nowhere anytime soon with Smart at the helm and recruiting success like this.