A Seth Emerson reminder ($$) that Kirby is always on the recruiting mother:
The narrative on Cameron Nizialek is he just picked Georgia on his own, showed up in Athens two years ago, and the eventual SEC and Rose Bowl champions had their starting punter drop into their lap. But that’s actually not true. And it offers some lessons on why Kirby Smart’s program operates the way it does.
The real backstory: Nizialek was graduate transferring from Columbia, an FCS school, after the 2016 season. And as obscure as he might have seemed, he was already on Georgia’s radar. James Vollono, then a special teams analyst, had known Nizialek through the kicking community and reached out to him. Nizialek also was talking to Clemson, which had invited him to attend the South Carolina game two days after Thanksgiving. That was a night game. Georgia played at noon just over an hour’s drive south. Why don’t you stop by here first, Vollono asked Nizialek, who agreed.
“And I actually talked to Kirby for like 20 minutes before the Georgia Tech game that year,” Nizialek recalled last week. “So, yeah, I think Kirby downplays his role in me coming there a little bit. But they definitely wanted me to come. Now, obviously, I wasn’t on scholarship, so it just kind of looked like I showed up. But they were definitely interested and wanted me to come from the beginning.”
That level of attention for an Ivy League punter… can you imagine what Smart puts into pursuing a five-star in-state stud?