The athletic prep school in Florida once again has enough elite talent to sustain a whole, good signing class.
The IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., is not a typical high school, and it does not have a typical array of college football recruits. We’ve covered the school at length before — how the average day for a football player there resembles what a player in an SEC program might go through, how Tennessee once offered scholarships to 20 players there in a day, and how its seniors could, on their own, make for an excellent college signing class.
Well, we’re doing that again in 2018.
In the class of 2019, the 23 IMG players with 247Sports Composite ratings would comprise a top-15 signing class if they all went to the same school, which signed nobody else.
According to 247’s class calculator, those players would give a college class a Composite score of 260.75. That’d slot them just behind Auburn at No. 13 nationally on the verge of Signing Day. Depending on what Ohio State, Notre Dame, and Tennessee do, the fictional IMG class could fall a little bit, but it would still likely fall in the top 15.
As good as this class is, IMG’s produced better classes recently.
The 2017 IMG class was even more absurd, with a 276.92 Composite score that would’ve placed it eighth in the rankings. The class of 2018’s 278.42 would have been ninth.
At least one of those classes was set to place higher, but might have fallen later do to ratings adjustments. So this top-15 all-IMG class is actually a slight downgrade.
This is the second year in a row IMG’s had the No. 1 defensive end in the country. Last year it had five-star Xavier Thomas, who signed with Clemson and joined the Tigers’ rotation in a national championship season. This year, it has five-star Nolan Smith, one of several “No. 1” recruits and the one atop the industry-consensus Composite ratings.
The IMG class of ‘19 also has the No. 1 running back, Alabama signee Trey Sanders, and the No. 1 offensive tackle, Alabama signee Evan Neal. (Yeah, Bama has the top class.)
This is a hypothetical thought exercise. IMG players come to Bradenton from all over the country and don’t sign together in droves.
It’s common for players to sign near where they’re actually from after spending a year or two focusing on football at the academy. This year’s No. 1 overall recruit, Smith, is one of those players. The Georgia native signed with UGA. There are IMG players like that every year, and by all descending on Florida, they juice the state’s blue-chip numbers a bit.
Still, IMG has the best collection of talent under one roof of any high school in recruiting history, so it’s best if your team has a pipeline there.
The schools that landed IMGers in 2019:
- Georgia
- Alabama x2
- Penn State
- Florida State x2
- Oregon
- Arkansas x2
- USC
- Michigan
- Syracuse
- Auburn
- LSU
- Wisconsin
- Tennessee
- Appalachian State
- Indiana
- Missouri
- USF
- Clemson
- UAB
- Washington State (two players, neither of whom has a Composite rating)
One rated player has yet to commit.
App State and UAB are notable, because the overwhelming majority of rated IMG players sign with Power 5 schools. App State QB signee David Baldwin is the third-highest-rated QB signee in the Group of 5, only behind Southern Miss’ Jaden Johnson and SMU’s Terrance Gipson. If a G5 school can repeatedly pull players out of IMG, it would be a huge edge.
In 2020, IMG’s probably going to have a smaller class than usual, which might make this post a little less fun to repeat.
But even if you pooled, like, 15 IMG players together, you’d get a better class than most of the Group of 5 will sign, and probably a few power conference teams, too.