This Sentell’s Intel rep on Georgia football recruiting has the latest with the 2025 Georgia football recruiting class. In this edition, we share the thoughts of the parents of the current commitments in this cycle. What did they have to say about the Dawgs?
Consider this space a digital suggestion box for the families of 2025 commits on their way to their college careers in Athens.
Or better yet a movie poster touting the wares of the nation’s third-rated recruiting class at this time.
In this day of NIL moving the dial for so many recruits and in some cases being the ultimate catalyst for their decision, how well do the Dawgs control what they can control?
We asked the parents of the 2025 commits what they thought of how the Bulldogs still handle the entire recruiting experience. That’s from the car door to the Butts-Mehre front door to the Sanford Stadium floor and the entirety of the recruiting experience.
How do the Dawgs keep reeling in the 5-stars when they are not the highest NIL bidders in college football?
Sure, the Dawgs have the momentum of that 42-2 mark over the last three years. Georgia also has two of those “natties” in their trophy case. There’s the NFL Draft pipeline booming.
They are still the team at the top in all the preseason rankings.
But at the core of it all, do the Bulldogs still recruit well? Or do they lean on all of the above?
This exercise was simple. Speak to as many families of the current crop of recruits as possible this summer. The focus of those interviews was just three simple questions:
- Does Georgia still stand out to you among the many other schools you’ve seen?
- How is Georgia different?
- How did the Bulldogs win your family and your son over?
What did they have to say?
the headline quotes say a lot. Let’s start with the thoughts of Mike Montgomery. He’s the father of Georgia QB commitment Ryan Montgomery.
“The word I keep coming back to is elite,” Mike Montgomery said. “It is an elite program for a reason, right? You get to come in on an official visit and have all of those touch points. It is easy to see why that’s the case. From Coach Smart down, everybody that we came across was an elite person. They are elite at their job. They are elite at recruiting and they are elite at just being a person. Easy to talk to.”
“So when you see that, then you see that passion when they talk about the passion they have behind the institution and their job specifically, whatever that may be, it starts to make sense, right? How do you become THE program in the country? Which in our eyes that’s what Georgia is given the last five years or so and its neat to see that. That’s what I keep coming back to. Elite people across the board.”
The Montgomery family’s experience covers the gamut. When they spoke about academics with Christina Harris, it was that way.
The way that Angela Kirkpatrick and Logen Reed frame every visit to UGA with the color and warmth of their unique personalities, it is there.
When it was time for the return of the photo shoots for the official visits, the Montgomerys felt like they were at a “rock concert” and that has to do with the work Kirkpatrick, Reed and David Cooper and so many others do on their end, too.
“Coop” is just not there for DawgNation for the edgy tweets, folks. Not to a lot of these families.
That quote from the father of 4-star QB commit Ryan Montgomery was telling in another way. His family has been involved with big-boy recruiting for what seems like six or seven years now. His older son, Luke, was an All-American Class of 2023 OL who eventually chose Ohio State.
The Buckeyes also operate at the highest levels of recruiting.
Montgomery has also seen UGA from the prism of coming around when Ryan was very young and Todd Monken was his lead recruiter. That was when the future Georgia QB was just a freshman. When Ryan first saw the Bulldogs practice, it planted a seed that eventually told him Athens was where he had to be.
He’s been committed to UGA since April.
There was also this takeaway from the mother of one of the newest UGA commits. Phenix Gaston, the mother of massive OT Juan Gaston Jr., has this specific view about life in Athens.
Her son Juan is as a man of few words. Even to some of his teammates at Westlake High School.
Georgia found a way to make her 5-star introvert feel chill. Gaston said a chief reason why he chose the Dawgs was that he knows half the team already.
For her, it all starts at the top.
“Kirby,” she said. “He’s just so genuine. He’s one of one. Every time we’ve gone up there he’s been very kind to the twins. My daughter. It is just very family when we go. It is very laid-back. It is not very uptight. It is very ‘What’s going on?’ and ‘Tell me something good’ and ‘Juan I’m going to get you to talk today you’re going to give me 10 words’ so he’s been able to pour into him in that respect as well as [offensive line] coach [Stacy] Searels.”
“They’re like family. Built a phenomenal relationship with Coach Smart and his team. Coach Searels and his wife. Everybody there is phenomenal.”
Deep dive: Why did the family of one 5-star recruit choose UGA?
We want to share an in-depth conversation with the mother of one 5-star that said this about Smart.
“There’s nobody else I want my son to play for.”
There have been similar quotes about UGA and its recruiting operations this summer. Even with the negative headlines that seem to follow the program the same way it was with Oklahoma in the 1980s, Nebraska in the 1990s and Miami in the 2000s.
They center on the same topic: The parents of those commits feel UGA is a machine from the top all the way down to the folks putting soap in the dispensers in the bathroom.
Candace Gibson, the mother of 5-star EDGE commit Isaiah Gibson, kept a notebook of all the things that came to her attention on every official visit her son went on.
She was a college athlete and schoolteacher and is currently in the U.S. Army. Her days in public education are on pause while she’s served the last nine years and attained the rank of captain.
Gibson saw a lot of schools as a priority recruit, including Alabama, Auburn, Clemson, Florida, FSU, Georgia Tech, North Carolina, Ohio State, Oregon, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee and USC.
Candace Gibson has that military background plus the perspective of a former college athlete. She shined in basketball at East Tennessee State. She was a power forward and a post that willed her way to the success she had on the court after her physical gifts could only take her so far.
“I’m glad we went on a lot of visits,” she said. “Because when you go to a lot of schools the amount of detail that UGA puts into their program is unmatched. I told him, even at Southern Cal, I’m in the [golf] cart when one of the coaches stepped off, I said ‘They don’t practice hard like UGA’ and ‘They don’t practice hard now’ and you can see that because I’m looking at how they are practicing. How are they getting after it? Are they able to beat somebody that is coming in hard? I mean I’m coming like a Dawg. I’m coming like a beast when I’m playing. Are they going to be able to be a team like that? I told him ‘Are they able to beat these people who are leaving their all on the line?’ when they are over here. They’ve got these necklaces on. They’ve got all this stuff. The details.”
“Are they focused or are they worried about other stuff? I look at the details and so I pay attention to all of those. At UGA, when you go there they pay attention to every single detail. Kirby Smart, all of his coaches, every little detail they pay attention to.”
She took a month off this summer to spend with Isaiah when they saw Auburn, Georgia, Ohio State, South Carolina and Tennessee. She had a very watchful eyes on all her visits.
“Do they have a go-getter attitude?’” she said. “Like the coach? You want a coach that has a Type A personality? Are they laid back or do they have a winning attitude?”
Her notebook stretches across some 30 pages. She calls it her recruiting journal. She’d chronicle whether or not a coach’s philosophy would match Isaiah’s playing style.
It wasn’t like Georgia was the only strong option. Team Gibson was impressed by Auburn, FSU and Oklahoma. It was just UGA was that much stronger than the select programs that also seemed like good landing spots.
She’d look at other things. Jotting down whether or not a school and their staff members were repetitive. Or when someone said something insightful. She’d journal her thoughts on how each school made them feel right after the visit. She believed it was human nature to forget some of that stuff over a period of time.
Especially while seeing so many schools back-to-back.
Candace had like “20-something questions” for every school. They were the same for each program, but the variety of answers filled up her journal.
Isaiah always kept coming back to UGA. So did she while compared everything.
“As far as academics, they way they put details into every single factor,” she said. “The defensive coordinator at Georgia talked to me about Isaiah’s hips. I was like ‘Oh, like they’re paying attention to the mechanics of all the players that they recruit’ and you don’t see that at other places. Like you ask them a question and at other schools and most of the coordinators give you a basic answer. So now I asked the same questions at every school. I had the same questions for the defensive coordinators, questions for the head coaches, questions for the position coach and they’re all the same questions and they all answered them so differently. When we looked at it, I said ‘Isaiah what else do we need to see?’ and to him relationships are a top priority. He developed a great relationship with the football players at UGA.”
“They will just call him to see how he is doing. It is not like a recruiting tactic or anything to him or to me at all. They just get along. Like they are friends.”
Gibson agreed with Montgomery’s assessment of a culture of “elite” people at UGA.
“They are all elite,” she said. “Each person. Even down to all the recruiting personnel. They know their job better than anyone else. Better than anyone. Like they know little details about every person that comes there. It’s about building relationships and its not that they talk to me more than other schools. It is that they talked about the right things. (Laughing.) That’s what they did. They talked about the right things. The things that mattered. Their attitude that they have is always positive. When Isaiah committed originally to Southern Cal, Kirby Smart was the first person to call him. Well, maybe text him. That made Isaiah comfortable. Like wow. He’s that type of guy. The other schools? They sent negative things. I was like ‘Just turn your phone off Isaiah’ but they are all great professionals [at UGA]. Those coaches there can go somewhere else and be a head coach but they’d rather stay there and grow as people and as coaches. Because it is like the atmosphere there is an elite atmosphere. Like you can’t be a coach there and suck. You can’t go there and not do your best every day.”
That wasn’t just what she saw among the coaches on the staff.
“Kirby he does not play,” she said. “He has a Type-A personality that accepts nothing but the best. It is not just him but he has all these people around him that are like him. That has that same go-getter attitude. I don’t care if there’s the person doing the water at practice. At practice, I’m paying attention to all of these people and I’m like ‘Oh my gosh’ all of these people at practice running around the field are good at their job. Like nobody is being lazy. Nobody is slacking. Everyone is on it. Everybody desires to work hard because all those fine details matter when it comes to the end for championships.”
She remembers being at schools and being asked what she wanted to see. She told them she wanted to see practice. Instead, they’d take her to meetings for like eight to 10 to 12 hours.
It frustrated her because she’d done all her research. She knew about the bullet points on those slide shows.
“I wanted to see the nitty gritty,” she said. “When you go to a Kirby Smart practice he’s up in the tower and next thing you know he’s down on the field. He is everywhere. He sees everything.”
Coach Chidera-Uzo Diribe had the lead for Gibson’s recruitment. But it seemed like Smart was right there with him. Then he was also being recruited by defensive line coach Tray Scott and defensive coordinator Glenn Schumann.
The depth of Georgia’s program stood out. To her, there was no head coach in her son’s recruiting quite like Smart. But she said the next-closest was Mike Norvell at FSU. The rub there with the Seminoles was they didn’t have a staff full of “go-getter” coaches like Smart. The rest of the staff didn’t matched the personality and energy she saw from Norvell and Smart.
“Kirby can just relate to anybody. He’s really down to earth. He married a basketball player so he knows what’s up. He has a great memory and makes you feel welcome. But he challenges the people around him. He challenges them for the better.”
That was a big way that UGA separated itself.
Uzo-Diribe just turned 32. Candace felt he reminded her of her older son Ivan. When Isaiah pointed that out to his mother, she saw that, too. It added to their familiarity with the staff.
Gibson said she knew UGA was the choice for her son in his junior year. She always wore UGA gear to his games last fall. It came down to the point when he was ready with his final decision that he had to cross-reference that school, if it was not UGA, with what they had seen in Athens.
“I said ‘when you make your final decision Isaiah I need to know what school is better than UGA in all the categories that are important to you’ because I don’t have to play there,” she said. “You have to play there. I would say ‘in all the categories you said that are important to you what school is better than UGA in all these categories.’ He was like ‘Mom none of the other schools are’ and I said ‘exactly’ and I told him I’d been telling you this. I don’t know why you didn’t commit when I told you to to commit. (Laughing.) I was the one who wanted him to commit earlier.”
Gibson said she really knew this spring. It was just after his prom. Just before they were about to take that month off and go see what seemed like half of the SEC plus Ohio State.
She knew they still had to see everything to compare and verify what they were feeling.
That said, she still told him to go ahead and commit during his official visit the first weekend of June. He told her he still needed to see all the other schools “just to be sure” of what they were already feeling.
“I said we have got to see what we were looking for. All our things. Things like the relationships. Are the coaches who they say they are? Do they have championships on their mind? Do they have that mentality if they are going to be a championship team? Are they rebuilding? How is all of their staff? Not saying their staff is jolly, but is their staff getting after it? That’s what I am looking at. The main thing with him was the relationships.”
“Georgia made all of that really easy. It really wasn’t even a comparison. If Georgia was at a ‘10′ the next school was probably at like a ‘7′ and the reason why is the head coach doesn’t coach every position. But the head coach has to be the type of person that is able to lead properly and Kirby Smart is that guy. If you see him coach, like at practice, he gets after it.”
“There is nobody else I want my son to play for.”
SENTELL’S INTEL
(check on the recent reads on Georgia football recruiting)
