With every high school or junior college commitment comes a story. Looking back, many recruits that made the decision to don the silver britches did so in a memorable way.
Isaiah Crowell made the decision to play for the Bulldogs while holding an actual bulldog. Quay Walker chucked a Tennessee hat from his table. Recently Smael Mondon hid a UGA hat under an LSU hat, scaring the Georgia faithful. The list goes on. But what goes on behind the scenes of commitments is just as interesting.
Current Georgia linebacker Nakobe Dean was the highest rated inside linebacker in the Class of 2019. He had many suitors, with Alabama and Auburn among them. You’d think that a guy who just recently had a three-game stretch with 12 or more tackles in each contest would be self-assured and unbothered by the moment. But, when he put pen to paper in December of 2018, that wasn’t the case.
“Signing day was weird to me,” he said. “It was just a lot and I was unsure. I ended up telling every coach that was in my top five that I wasn’t coming. I just wanted to stop hearing from them so I told them I wasn’t coming.”
Dean had no clue which college he’d be attending when he woke up on Signing Day. It wasn’t until his drive to school that he ultimately made his choice.
“I decided in the car on my way to the high school where I actually did it (the ceremony) at,” he said. “I didn’t tell the Georgia coaches I was coming until after I had signed, so I think it surprised them too.”
Fellow member of the Georgia defense, Jermaine Johnson, took a much different path to being a Bulldog.
Johnson was a two-star prospect according to Rivals.com out of Eden Prairie High School in Minnesota. He chose to attend Independence Community College, the site of season three of Netflix’s “Last Chance U.”
All Johnson did was bolster his stock and become the third-highest junior college recruit in the class. Johnson drew interest from several schools before ultimately deciding on the Bulldogs.
“Georgia came in pretty early. They recruited me hard,” he said. “I’m a pretty big guy on loyalty. And for a big program like Georgia to come after me so early on, it was kind of all I really needed. I told the other coaches that the “G” had my heart from the beginning and I just went with what my heart wanted me to. And you can’t really get mad at a recruit for an answer like that.”
Almost two years later, Johnson is in the midst of his best season yet, with a sack in five consecutive games. The senior edge-rusher believes his decision to attend UGA was one he wouldn’t dare change if given the chance.
“Coming to the University of Georgia, I’d probably do it all the same again,” he said. “I love it here. I feel like me and my coaches get along very well. My family, all they keep talking about is how great the “G” is and having that all over their clothes. In terms of myself, I feel like I’ve done pretty well here.”