ATHENS — Kirby Smart understands why Brock Vandagriff ended up transferring out of the Georgia program.
Only one player can really play quarterback, and Georgia has Carson Beck. He’s one of the top players in the country and he elected to return to Georgia for a fifth season after a strong first year as a starter.
Vandagriff had waited three years for a chance to start. He had already earned his degree from Georgia. And so with Beck returning, Vandagriff found a home in Kentucky, where he has started the first two games of the season.
“I‘d say the quarterback position, there comes a point in time when if you haven’t played, you’re running out of time to play,” Smart said. “So I don’t know what you want a kid to do, wait out his whole career and not play, I mean, he did graduate. He became a better player.
“He certainly feels that he had a great experience at Georgia and two national championship rings. So I think that that’s a positive more than it is any kind of negative.”
Vandagriff came to Georgia with tons of hype. He was a 5-star quarterback in the 2021 recruiting cycle, playing for nearby Prince Avenue Chrisitan School. He was the No. 23 overall prospect in the class and the No. 2 player in the state.
For most, 5-star quarterbacks are seen as program-changing recruits. With NIL, schools in this day and age are willing to be top dollar for the best high school quarterback prospects in the country.
But as Georgia has learned, those recruits don’t always deliver. Every quarterback that was a 5-star recruit in the On3 Industry Rankings that Georgia has signed ended up finishing their college career elsewhere.
Jacob Eason was the first 5-star quarterback Smart landed, signing him back in 2016. Eason started 13 games in his Georgia career, all but one coming as a true freshman in 2016, Smart’s first season in Athens.
Eason got hurt in the opening half of the 2017 season and in stepped freshman Jake Fromm. Eason never got the starting job back and ended up transferring to Washington at the end of the 2017 season. He ended up at Washington and was taken in the fourth round of the 2020 NFL Draft. Ironically, he was drafted before Fromm in that same draft.
For what it’s worth, Fromm wasn’t some unheralded recruit. Rivals had him as a 5-star prospect, and he finished the 2017 cycle as the No. 48 overall prospect. Not a 5-star player, but not a bologna sandwich either.
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