It’s been a profitable week on the recruiting trail for Georgia, adding Carrollton linebacker Chaz Chambliss, offensive lineman Dylan Fairchild, and transfer quarterback JT Daniels over the past seven days.

This despite what’s seemed like a never-ending dead period, which has kept recruits from making on-campus visits since campuses were closed due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic which began back in March.

Last week, the NCAA extended the dead period to July 31, meaning it will be almost two months before high school student-athletes can resume taking visits.

Head coach Kirby Smart admits it’s been a challenge.

“First off, it’s extremely different. The recruiting world has changed as much as anything, because you’re just not capable of going to high schools,” Smart said. “May was a very active month for all college football coaches, not just us. We'd be going out watching spring practices, going school-to-school. I wouldn’t be able to, because I don’t get to go out in May. So that didn’t really change for me, but it changed for a lot of our coaches.”

The biggest change obviously is the way coaches and recruits now communicate.

Everything is done via phone, face to face on Zoom, along with other forms of social media.

We’ve done what you guys know to be the case. There’s no magic potion. There’s nobody doing something magically that everybody else isn’t doing,” Smart said. “We’re jumping on Zoom. We’re communicating with parents, coaches, recruits---we’re doing everything virtually, and that’s really the best we can do.”

So far, Georgia’s good has been, well, pretty good.

Although the Bulldogs currently rank 12th in the Rivals 2021 standings with their nine commitments, Georgia’s average star rating of 3.89 ties the program with No. 1 Ohio State for the top mark in the country thus far.

“Who manages that the best will be important—a lot of this is who had the best relationships leading into this because, at the end of the day, you can only develop so much of a relationship through a phone, through a text, through a virtual activity,” Smart said. “We’ve tried to be creative in the way we use that. I’m certainly not going to divulge everything we’ve done, because I don’t think that’s open for everybody to do, and I think we’re all competing in the SEC, trying to make ourselves different.”

Smart said the dead period is putting an extra burden on the recruits as well.

Instead of getting to see campuses for themselves, players who haven’t been before are having to rely on virtual tours to get an idea what schools such as UGA are truly all about, and what each has to offer away from the playing field.

“It’s probably created a bigger burden on our recruits, and if I were a recruit or a recruit’s parent, I would be more concerned with that volume of virtual usage and phone usage, and it’s probably led to more kids committing, because you can make the case that they’re committing because they can’t go anywhere,” Smart said. “I would make the case that they’re sick and tired of being barraged by phone calls and virtual activities. Will we see more kids come November or December decommit, or go back and start visiting? I don’t know, because I don’t know when we’ll be able to bring kids to campus. All that will probably come out at the end of July, when we know more about what kids are going to be able to do in recruiting.”