No surprise whatsoever here, but nevertheless Quintavious Harrow committed to Georgia today. Per the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:
Quintavious Harrow committed to the Georgia Bulldogs on Wednesday, Carver-Columbus coach Dell McGee said.
"He decided to go ahead and commit to Georgia because he felt like it was the best situation for him and he felt comfortable doing it today," McGee told the AJC. "Coach Richt was really happy and pleased about it after they talked on the phone. [Richt] said he was going to take good care of him, off and on the football field. We’re just happy for Quintavious."
As it turns out, big shock, if you give a firm scholarship offer to a kid with literally zero interest from anyone else a mere two weeks before National Signing Day, chances are pretty good that you'll get a commitment. After all, when you literally have no one competing against you, it's easy to swing kids in your direction. At that point, the kid basically has three options: (1) sign with your school and get a full paid ride for four or five years, (2) walk-on somewhere and pay tens of thousands of dollars of your own money, or (3) just give up football and perhaps college all together. Given those options, it's not exactly hard to pick the correct choice. In reality, this was always inevitable.
The official spin on this commitment is that Georgia had always been interested in Harrow but that poor academics have kept them extending an offer. Supposedly Harrow recently received a standardized test score sufficient to make qualifying academically feasible under the NCAA Sliding Scale given his core GPA. That may be partially true, but it's likely more pretext than anything else; academic cases get recruited every day, and it's likely that if he had the requisite amount of talent to play at this level Harrow would have been recruited by at least a handful of schools prior to receiving his most recent test score. In reality, academics notwithstanding, this is probably just a desperation move on the part of Georgia in an attempt to get Isiah Crowell.
The good news for Alabama is that, based on the comments of Isiah Crowell's mother after his official visit to Alabama, the Crowell family is not exactly impressed with this move by Mark Richt. I would imagine that, as Gentry Estes speculated, when Crowell and his family were on his official visit to Alabama last weekend, our coaching staff was very blunt that they were not going to offer Harrow and did not mince words about why Georgia extended an offer to Harrow. Obviously having a close friend in Athens will not do us any favors in this race, but at the very least it seems that this move by Mark Richt and company has not been anywhere near as damaging to our chance's with Crowell as most initially feared.