The IMG Academy in Bradenton, Fla., is not like other high schools. It’s a prep school that’s explicitly built to develop athletes, who start their days with early cardio work and spend hours honing their craft. IMG sponsors seven sports other than football, but it’s developed a reputation as a football factory. It’s a gold mine for college recruiters.
IMG Academy has a top-10 2018 college football recruiting class. IMG Academy is a high school.
This isn’t a regular high school.
If you took the 25 highest-rated players from IMG in the class of 2018 and somehow got them into one class, you’d wind up with a 278.42 class score on the 247Sports Composite, per the website’s class calculator. In national class rankings, that class would slot in at No. 5, just ahead of Miami and behind Ohio State, Georgia, Texas, and Penn State (and both Ohio State and Texas would slip a spot each, if their classes lost their IMG commits). It would hold in the top 10 through Feb. 7’s National Signing Day.
That underlines the importance of one school in the national recruiting landscape.
If you don’t have relationships in South Florida and at IMG, you’re closing yourself off to the single easiest place to see blue-chip talent. The school has 12 players ranked four or five stars in 2018, and some of its lower-rated three-stars have signed with Power 5 programs.
The two best players at IMG this year are Clemson defensive end signee Xavier Thomas and Ohio State defensive tackle signee Taron Vincent. Both are close to unstoppable mixes of speed and power.
This equation changes little from year to year. In 2017, IMG’s players could’ve yielded a top-five class all on their own, too. Tennessee once offered scholarships to 20 IMG players on the same day, which has probably never happened at any other high school.
South Florida has a higher volume of football talent than any other area in the country, but IMG is the tip of the spear.
Lots of players who go to IMG wind up playing in college somewhere closer to the hometowns where they started high school. This year’s IMG commits are going to schools as far from Florida as Northwestern, Minnesota, Illinois, and Syracuse. Only one is going to a Floridian school.
IMG’s presence in Bradenton tips the scales in Florida’s favor a bit when counting up blue-chip recruits by state. But in 2018, Florida has more four- and five-star recruits than any other state, even if you don’t count anyone at IMG. Florida high schools get more players recruited by Division I programs than their counterparts anywhere else.
