Want to attack every day with the latest Georgia football recruiting info? That’s the Intel. This rep has the latest with 5-star QB Dylan Raiola. He ranks as the nation’s No. 1 QB and the No. 1 overall prospect for 2024 on the 247Sports Composite ratings. The On3 Industry Ranking also has him as the nation’s No. 1 QB and the No. 1 overall prospect.
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Dylan Raiola is on his way to Georgia. Just not the University of Georgia just yet.
The 5-star QB commitment from Arizona plans to make the move to Georgia for his senior year of high school football. He will play for Buford High School. Rusty Mansell of DawgsHQ was the first to report the news.
That in and of itself, is a bombshell for the 2023 high school season in Georgia. The Wolves, who have won 11 state championships since 2000, are immediately now seen as the team to beat for this fall.
That’s not exactly news. The Wolves are that team in Georgia every year. Now they have just added the nation’s No.1 overall prospect to their team. Buford already had a trio of 5-star recruits on the roster for this fall.
Raiola now makes it four Wolves with a 5-star ranking. That’s on a roster covered in players with Power 5 and SEC offers.
While this will be Raiola’s fourth high school team, this is a move that makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons.
For starters, this will accelerate his development.
The 5-star now gets the chance to play at the highest levels of Georgia high school football. The one thing that scouts and analysts wondered about the 5-star was what type of competition he was facing in Arizona and then in Texas for his sophomore year.
There will be no doubt about his college readiness after spending a season under center for the Wolves. There’s not much of a debate to be had about the speed of the game being greater in Gwinnett County and with Buford’s national schedule compared to what he was set to face out in Arizona.
It must also be noted here that Raiola will have to compete for the starting QB job at Buford. Just like any other player would have to do so among the Wolves.
It super-sizes his impact as a recruiter to finish out Georgia’s 2024 class
Raiola has worked tirelessly behind the scenes for months now to help nail down the nation’s top-ranked recruiting class for the 2024 cycle according to several services.
It was going to be very hard to do that from Arizona. Now that he’s making a bona fide move to play in Georgia, he will be less than an hour away.
If he wants to pop into Athens to visit with a priority target down the stretch, he’s not going to have to hop from plane to plane and deal with cross-country flights.
He’s made more than 60 or 70 calls and texts over the last few months trying to do his part to nail down the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class. The 5-star QB will now be able to make more of those contacts in person.
Raiola is now on the same high school team with 5-star safety KJ Bolden. That’s the player that DawgNation ranks on its weekly “Before the Hedges” program as the No. 1 remaining top target in the 2024 cycle for the Bulldogs.
This move also sets up well for more than just this season
Raiola will have just one season left of high school football this fall. He’s played in Texas, Arizona and now Georgia. He will be enrolled at the University of Georgia in January.
But this move also makes a great deal of sense for the Raiola family. They’ll be able to be at easy Georgia home game this fall when the Wolves are not on the road traveling. They will also be able to be at every one of his UGA games over the next three or four seasons.
But this also makes sense for the high school career of his younger brother Dayton Raiola. Dayton Raiola is an emerging QB prospect in his own right in the 2026 cycle. He will see his own growth as a player benefit from spending his next three seasons of high school football playing in the Buford program.
This move also makes sense for Raiola considering his transfer status at Pinnacle High School in Arizona. It is believed that Raiola was also facing having to sit out a handful of games due to that transfer. He was not going to be cleared to play immediately to play this fall by the high school association out in Arizona.
The move also sets up a dream matchup for Georgia high school football fans in the 2023 season.
There is also the real chance that Buford will eventually have to meet up with Carrollton High School at some point in the playoffs this fall.
That would set up a dream QB matchup between Raiola and future 5-star sophomore Julian “Ju Ju” Lewis. A recent ESPN.com report rated Lewis as the No. 1 overall high school football prospect regardless of classification.
The rising sophomore led his Trojans to the state final as a freshman in 2022. Raiola was ranked as the nation’s No. 4 overall high school prospect regardless of classification in that same report.
SENTELL'S INTEL
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