The IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., is sometimes referred to as a football factory. It’s a school whose curriculum is geared toward the athletic development of its students, and virtually every year, it produces at least a few elite college football recruits.
This one Florida high school could produce a top-5 college football recruiting class all by itself
The IMG Academy has more elite talent than anyone else.
IMG students typically come to the school after starting high school somewhere else. It’s an athletic-centric boarding school, where football players ordinarily go for the last year or two of high school to get set for college. (The school has seven other sports, too.) The day-to-day at IMG is a lot more similar to that at a major college than what most high-schoolers see.
Last winter, Tennessee offered scholarships to 20 IMG players at once, spread over three classes. Two of 2017’s 32 five-star recruits — Alabama linebacker commit Dylan Moses and Florida State defensive end pledge Joshua Kaindoh — are IMG products. Under the same roof, on the same field, that’s two more five-stars than there are in a more than 2 million-square mile radius in the middle of the country.
What if a college team signed an entire class of only IMG Academy players?
Let’s do a thought exercise, with the help of the recruiting class generator at 247Sports. The complete list of IMG players in the class of 2017 is significant. It’s got those two five-stars, plus another 10 four-star recruits. Only five college teams have classes lined up with more than IMG’s total of 12 blue-chip prospects.
The 247Sports Composite, which aggregates evaluations of recruits, marks down 22 rated recruits from IMG in the 2017 class. If a college team signed each of those 22 players and nobody else, it’d ring up a Composite class score of 276.92. That’d be the No. 5 class in the country, a bit behind Alabama, Ohio State, and Georgia and nearly tying Michigan, with four of those teams losing blue-chips to the IMG class.
In 2016, IMG had 23 rated players. If they’d become one team’s entire college class, their 2016 Composite score, 256.97, would’ve made them the No. 14 college class in the country. If every IMG player went to the same school, there’d be none of them at other schools, so other teams’ class ratings would decline, too.
Player ratings change over time, as prospects finish their high school careers and move toward college. But right now, the picture in 2018 looks potentially even better. IMG’s got two more five-stars that year, in defensive tackle Taron Vincent and all-purpose back T.J. Pledger.
Most college teams only have a small handful of commitments for 2018, so there’s little sense in dropping in IMG’s current class as a full college class. But if you did, it’d be No. 1 overall, and it would likely settle in the top five again by February 2018. We’ll be able to revisit this in a year.
This won’t be a reality, but it explains why so many teams recruit IMG.
No high school of IMG’s stature would ever send all of its players to a single major college, and no major college would only take players from one high school.
But every elite program in the country recruits IMG, because it has more elite players in one place than any other school in the country. That’ll keep being the case, and teams don’t need to get an entire class’s worth of IMGers to make having a presence in Bradenton worthwhile.
