Georgia’s 2026 recruiting class was one of the worst in the Kirby Smart era. The Bulldogs finished with the No. 6 class in the country which is the only time they’ve been outside the top five since Smart’s very first recruiting class after he became Georgia’s head coach.
On one hand this really isn’t a huge deal because had five-star quarterback Jared Curtis not flipped to Vanderbilt they would’ve been ranked inside the top five. But on the other hand Curtis’s decision shows that something Smart and Georgia are doing on the recruiting trail isn’t working as well as they would like.
And according to Smart it has to do with their NIL strategy and how other schools are using that to recruit against them.
Rival schools are using Georgia’s NIL strategy against them
The past few years Georgia has seen a lot of top recruits choose to commit elsewhere over them. Curtis is the biggest name that everyone knows, but guys like Tyler Arkinson (Texas), Jackson Cantwell (Miami), LaDamion Guyton (Texas Tech) and most recently Donte Wright (Miami) all turned Georgia down.
What do all of these losses have in common? They all were to schools who pay a lot of NIL money to incoming recruits.
That has never been nor will it ever be Smart’s recruiting strategy, but he is aware that these schools are using his NIL strategy against him.
“I want you to earn it and work your way up,” Smart said via dawgnation.com. “People hear it all the time in recruiting, they want to use this as a negative to us.”
It might be easy to say that Georgia should just start overpaying for recruits like these other schools. That would fix this problem immediately, right?
Maybe, but that would create another big problem for Georgia that doesn’t exist today.
Georgia rewards development over pay-to-play
If Georgia were to start overpaying for recruits they more than likely will start losing more players to the Transfer Portal. These recruits that choose schools based on an NIL offer are more likely to jump ship and transfer elsewhere in the future, but those recruits that come to Georgia because they want to be there will want to stick around their entire career.
That is why Smart chooses to focus on developing players rather than recruiting guys who just want to be there for the money.
“We’ve been a much more developmental,” Smart said. “We’ve been a much more, hey, we think this guy’s a really good player and we feel comfortable paying him, but we don’t have to pay him the most money. And then he’s just going to get better by being in our program. And that’s a developmental route versus a purchase route.”
So far this strategy has worked well for Georgia. Not only did they win two National Championships at the start of the NIL era, but they’ve also won the last two SEC titles as well. And going into this year they are one of the favorites to win the SEC again and make a deep playoff run.
These other schools will continue to negatively recruit against Georgia, but none of them have won at the level UGA has. And if that trend continues then maybe there isn’t a problem at all with how Smart and Georgia recruit.
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