The best rookie deviates from Florida St to play for Prime, Jackson St | Sports

Football recruit № 1 at the country’s high school was shocked on Wednesday by deciding to visit Jackson in Jackson and play for coach Daion Sanders after being in Florida for months.

Travis Hunter, a lawyer from Suwan, Georgia, made an unprecedented statement during a ceremony at Collins Hill High School. Hunter was the main prospect in the country in the summary ranking of 247 Sports, which takes into account his own rankings plus the rankings of other major recruitment websites.

Sanders is a former Florida star and a member of the Professional Football Hall of Fame who has coached Jackson State, a historically black college in Jackson, Mississippi, for the second year in a row.

At the signing ceremony, Hunter was holding three baseball caps in front of him as he prepared to make the announcement: Florida, Auburn and Georgia.

He threw them off the stage one by one and unbuttoned his sweatshirt to reveal a Believe T-shirt. He then caught Jackson State’s cap – with a dark blue J on a white background – which was thrown at him from the crowd, and put it on.

“I had the only chance in my life to play for one of the greats,” Hunter told WXIA-TV in Atlanta after his report. “I had a chance to change the story.”

As the high scores and ratings of high school recruits began to rise in the late 1990s and early 2000s, no player as highly regarded as Hunter has ever signed a high school scholarship with HBCU such as Jackson State.

The top 100 players rarely sign up outside of traditional football programs that participate in the strongest conferences such as the Southeast Conference and Big Ten.

State Jackson competes at a level a few steps below these conferences in the second tier of the NCAA I Football Division, a division of the championship. Schools like Jackson State rarely sign three-star players. Hunter is one of several dozen five-star prospects in the 2022 recruiting class.

A longtime member of the Southwest Athletics Conference, Jackson State won his first SWAC title since 2007 last month.

“We’re going to shock the country,” Sanders said Tuesday, ahead of the opening of the early signing period, in the Barstool Sports podcast “Unnecessary Roughness”. Sanders has his podcast on Barstool, “21st and Prime,” and is a regular on Pardon My Take’s most popular show.

Hunter was expected to sign from Florida when the early signing period for Football College opened on Wednesday. In March, he gave an optional verbal commitment to the FSU and was considered the center of what the Seminoles hoped to become a recruiting class that would change the fate of a struggling superpower.

Florida has won three national championships, most recently in 2013, but recently the program has had some tough times: four consecutive seasons lost under two coaches.

“We had 14 great young people join our program today,” Florida coach Mike Norwell told reporters at his news conference on the day of the signing. “That will be our focus.”