With another recruiting cycle down, SEC football programs will be welcoming in a host of high-end talent to the conference in 2019. Who are the ten best?
The SEC’s stranglehold on elite high school talent continued during the 2019 cycle, with 19 of the 33 composite five-star recruits in the 247 composites signing letters of intent with schools from the Southeastern Conference.
Four of the top five in the team rankings hail from the SEC, with Alabama, Georgia, Texas A&M, and LSU finishing with top five classes. Florida, Auburn, and Tennessee all joined them in the Top-12, meaning half of the conference inked Top-12 classes.
In all, 11 of the Top 25 in the team rankings were SEC schools; no other conference had more than five teams make up the Top 25.
Only Vanderbilt ranked outside the Top 40, with the Commodores, and their stricter academic standards, coming in with the No. 58 ranked class.
The SEC has long held the mantle as college football’s premier conference, continuously hauling in the best recruiting classes year-after-year, and sending more talent to the NFL than any other league.
That’s not say that teams like Clemson can’t unseat the Alabama’s of the world at the top of the college football mountain; the Tigers have used strong recruiting success, player development, and coaching staff continuity to become the pinnacle of the sport.
The days of the conference winning six straight national titles are probably over; that run of unprecedented success will probably never again be duplicated, but the conference continues to have a significant talent edge over every other league, top-to-bottom.
That talent gap doesn’t appear to be changing any time soon, with the SEC once again off to a quick start to the 2020 cycle.
Before we can move on to 2020 recruiting, it’s time for a final look-back on the 2019 class, and to examine the 10 best recruits joining the SEC next season.