This Sentell’s Intel rep on Georgia football recruiting has the latest with . He ranks as the nation’s No. 6 IOL and the No. 132 overall prospect for 2025 on the 247Sports Composite. The On3 Industry Ranking has him as the No. 11 IOL and at No. 157 overall.
LILBURN -- Cortez Smith just committed to Georgia football.
The 6-foot-3, 315-pound rising senior just announced his decision in front of a packed fellowship hall this afternoon.
“I’m going to Georgia,” Smith told DawgNation earlier this week. “I made the decision a couple of days ago. Well, actually on the official visit a couple of days after the official visit.”
There were some ebbs and flows here. Miami showed him a lot. Then came South Carolina with a big push. He was also extremely impressed by the pitch from Georgia Tech.
Why was it Georgia? It starts with the fact he knows there will be no easy days in Athens.
That’s the beginning.
“The community behind it,” he said. “Just that community behind it and how much they specialize in just you as a person. They make sure like everybody is treated the same with finances and money and education and resources and health. Everyone gets that same exact specialization with all those resources. They focus all of those resources at the University of Georgia on everybody, if that makes sense.”
He’d been trending to be a Dawg for some time.
That’s reflected in the way he’s worked with his trainers to become the type of plug-and-play mainstay at center that Georgia had in its All-American Sedrick Van Pran-Granger for three prolific seasons.
DawgNation first saw the signs of what Smith could becomes when the stepped out onto the field to start at center (of all places) as a true freshman back in 2021.
Smith, now 16, was a 13-year-old starter back then.
“Well, I liked the starter part when they said that,” Smith said. “But they said center and I’d never played center before.”
Let’s give the Parkview staff at the time all their flowers for their clairvoyance. They knew what they were doing. Even if he had never snapped in games. They easied him into that transition maybe no more than two weeks prior.
“That was not enough time to teach me how to snap,” he said. “For real for real.”
They didn’t ask him to identity the ‘Mike’ backer. Or to set any protections or line calls.
“They just said ‘Snap and do your job’ because we had a lot of seniors,” Smith said. “The older guys. I was kind of like the puppy.”
When he watches that tape now, he shakes his head.
“I know the snaps were bad,” he said. “Not the greatest. But I did pretty decent to say I just started snapping a week ago.”
Smith was better than that. He was playing winning football at 13 years old in the largest classification in Georgia in Gwinnett County of all places.
He won’t turn 17 until later this fall in October. That means he will still be 17 when he first steps onto Dooley Field in the fall of 2025 wearing the red and black.
“I’m really excited,” Smith said. “Because a lot of people think that I’m not going to be able to play at this school. They say that ‘I am going to be a number there’ but I don’t feel like that. I feel like I can work hard to do something great at this school.”
He knows what he will get in Athens.
“It came down to how they can make me the best person and football player possible,” Smith said. “How I will feel being there and the enjoyment of being in college.”
Georgia is already getting a really good one on both counts. Smith did something unique for a high school commitment ceremony. Before the event, he sat near the door of the fellowship hall and made sure to greet and thank every one who started filing in early to his event.
That’s the first time we’ve seen something quite like that at a commitment ceremony.
“What an incredible human being that we get to celebrate today,” Parkview head coach Joe Sturdivant said.
The first real good story we want to share about Cortez Smith
If this sounds like there’s a culture of achievement to chronicle with Smith, well that’s because there is.
He had more than 25 offers and his choice came down to a final group of Georgia, Georgia Tech, Miami and South Carolina.
Smith was that rare four-year starter in big-boy GHSA 7A football. When you watch him work on the grass, the word “explosive” comes to mind. We don’t see that all the time.
Not even with 4-star offensive linemen.
Then there’s the matter of what he does every spring. The early enrollee won the 7A state title this past spring in the shot put with a heave of 56 feet, 2 inches. He also finished second in the discus with an effort of 167 feet, 4 inches.
There’s a lot to learn about Smith from his athletic feats. But there’s just as much to learn here when taking a look when things don’t go his way.
When he took second in the discus, he came from way back in the field. Smith reached back and pulled off a near state title effort on his last throw.
“I came in second-to-lowest,” Smith said. “Surprised everybody with a big throw. Got second. Lost on the last throw. That was like the biggest jump out of the whole decade or something like that.”
There’s also the matter of what he did after perhaps his worst game in high school. It was a home game on a rainy Friday night last fall against Archer. The game was tight and Smith had a bad snap.
Archer got the ball and drove down the field to score to win the game. Smith felt like it was his fault. No one play defines a game, but that play changed the game.
It was a bad snap.
“But the resiliency he showed the week after, it was amazing,” Parkview offensive line coach Brian Lane said. “He graded out at 96 percent the following Friday. You could tell he had a chip on his shoulder all week long and he didn’t let that moment define him. Do you know what I mean?”
Smith was dominant the next week in a tight 28-21 win against Newton.
“He came to work the next week and put that behind him and he grew from that moment,” Lane said. “After the game the following Friday I looked at him in the eyes and I said ‘Dude you had the best game’ and ‘I don’t think you could have been any better’ and he executed perfectly. He’s very resilient, man. There’s not a lot of time where he is going to have to face resiliency because most of the times he’s the ‘Alpha’ and he’s dominating but I was very proud of him in that moment last year.”
“I think he took the blame on that Archer game. He said ‘That was my fault’ and the next game he freaking blew everybody up.”
The second real good story we want to share about Cortez Smith
Smith is now linked to Georgia’s 2025 football class as the 21st commitment. The four-year stater at Parkview High in Metro Atlanta becomes the highest-rated recruit of the three Peach State prospects that are now committed to play for Stacy Searels on his “Great Wall of Georgia” class.
He’s now the eighth-highest-rated prospect in the 2025 class in Athens. There are only three future Dawgs that are rated higher than him on the offensive side of the ball.
We’ve known a story about Smith for awhile now about how he really caught Georgia’s attention. It was at a summer camp prior to his junior season. There was a moment when he pancaked a current UGA freshman DL like he was a college senior working against a high school senior.
The Bulldogs have been aware of him ever since. Searels was a big factor here.
“He’s definitely going to push me to the max,” Smith said. “He doesn’t take it easy on nobody.”
Parkview staff is also effusive in their appreciation of Smith. When head coach Joe Sturdivant was hired in March of 2023, he was quickly impressed by the future UGA commit.
“Since I’ve been here Cortez has not missed a single workout, a single voluntary lift, a single afternoon workout , a single track practice, a single shot put practice,” he said. “He hasn’t missed a thing. Not a thing. So to me, that’s a football player.”
“That’s a guy that is going to take care of business. You want to talk bout guys and their projection? How far can they can go or will he be a great football player? Well, I know for dang sure he’s going to be able to walk into a college meeting room. He’s going to have his notepad and he’s going to be there every day. To me, that’s a requirement for being a great football player.”
The leadership skills are always there.
“What can you say to him?” Sturdivant said. “He hustles every time. He’s always here. When he talks to everybody, they listen. I think the biggest growth for him has been his leadership. Now combine that with his athletic ability and how well he can move. It’s a beautiful thing.”
That’s the biggest piece he gives Parkview. That leadership element.
“Now as a football player, he’s a road grader,” Sturdivant said. “He can move. When we run wide zone in a pro-style offense, he can reach a ‘3′ technique and that’s really hard to do. But he can do it.”
Put him in that old Denver Broncos wide zone scheme. The one made famous by the late great Alex Gibbs for the Mike Shannan offense.
He can get to that “3″ tech from center in an “Over” front.
“I would show a play where he’s takin that guy and knocking him into the dang ‘D’ gap, pushing vertical and blocking a linebacker and movement,” Sturdivant said. “That’s all happening at the same time at full speed. It is really hard to get a high school kid not only to do that but just to run out of a stance.”
Cortez Smith: He had an interesting take about NIL for recruits
Smith said he heard a lot of those negative recruiting aspects about UGA from other schools. That actually motivated him more than it created a sliver of doubt.
When it comes down to it, I’m not sure how that type of recruiting is supposed to sit with recruits. That’s an indirect way of saying that a player is not good enough to play at one spot, but you can come play for their school.
“I heard it a lot,” Smith said. “Everybody said you were going to just be a number. I’m trying to prove somebody wrong.”
He also had his share of NIL proposals to consider. There’s a growing trend right now in that space for some schools to offer a lot of financial incentive up front. Especially for the first season.
He has a different way of looking at it.
“It is great and all and I guess I would of course love it,” Smith said. “It is money and all. But I guess I just feel like personally that a kid this age shouldn’t have this much money handed to them. Like I haven’t even got to campus yet. I haven’t done nothing yet.”
“I didn’t work for it.”
This decision didn’t come easy. This young man doesn’t like to be predictable.
“I don’t like people just saying where I will go myself,” he said. “Like I was really leaning away from Georgia at first, but like it is just too good. The pros and cons here, man. What they put on paper? What they have done? There’s just not many cons.”
As stated earlier, there’s an entire package to appreciate here.
Smith has made his decision known today.
It isn’t shocking to report here that a prospect of his caliber with this backstory had been trending to UGA for some time.
Check out his junior film below.
There’s a few things to pay close attention to. The first would be how easily he can reach a 3-tech on film. That’s not some advanced O-line play for him in his third season of GHSA football.
Smith was able to do that his freshman year at Parkview. When thinking about that at 13 years of age, it is remarkable.
“He can really do anything,” Parkview offensive line coach Brian Lane said. “As an offensive lineman, he can play all three positions. But I’ve seen him reach a 3-tech from center and it look so good. He can do it all. He’s just an amazing athlete. He’s strong. He’s fast. He knows every position on the field. He knows what everybody is supposed to be doing.”
“I think probably his greatest characteristic is his understanding of everything.”
The best position for Smith will be at center on Saturdays. Georgia will have a battle at center after Jared Wilson moves on to the NFL. That might be after this fall or after the 2025 season.
If Smith plays early at UGA, it will be because of his understanding of the game and his footwork.
“His feet are so smooth,” Lane said. “I mean everything looks effortless and sometimes we’ll be watching him and we’ll be like sometimes we don’t feel like Cortez is giving us his best max effort but then we see he’s getting places, man. It is just like he just makes it look so easy. It almost makes it look like he’s not trying.”
It is hard to believe we were looking at a young man that is 15 and barely 16 years old in those junior clips.
That’s why he’s a Dawg today.
Check out his pre-commitment DawgNation Conversation below.
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