Justin Fields is the best quarterback prospect I've ever seen.

One of the first high school football games I covered in this industry featured a kid named Andrew Luck at Houston Stratford. I watched Jameis Winston up close for several days at the Elite 11. I watched Deshaun Watson at The Opening Finals. I invited Sam Darnold to the Army All-American Bowl. I've seen some good ones, but Fields is the best. And with his pledge on Friday, the best I've ever seen is heading to Georgia.

The thumbnail sketch for Fields is 6-foot-3, 225 pounds, a 4.5-second 40-yard dash, No. 1 player in the country and a native of Kennesaw, Georgia. He's strong and physical with the ability to shrug off defensive linemen. He's fast with that blazing 40 time and a propensity to leap over defenders. He's precise as a thrower and he has a huge arm.

If you want a comparison, he's in the Deshaun Watson mold, and like Watson, he's much more than a sum of his stats. Fields is a winner. As a junior, he led his Harrison High School team to its first playoff win since 2010. He's 18-6 as a starter at a program that is 27-39 without Fields since 2009.

This summer, I had the pleasure of watching Fields compete at The Opening Finals and Elite 11 quarterback competition. His performance at the event is the best Elite 11 showing of all time, and that's not even really debatable. At the event in Oregon, alongside 11 of the other top quarterbacks in the country, Fields completed 71 percent of his passes (best in attendance) and led his 7-on-7 all-star team to touchdowns on 70 percent of his 23 drives while the other 11 quarterbacks combined for a rate of 29 percent. He didn't throw an interception all weekend.

Fields is an unprecedented talent, but his decision to commit to Georgia compounds the phenomenon. He joins a quarterback room at Georgia that added the No. 5 player in the country, according to the 247Sports Composite rankings, in five-star Jacob Eason in 2016. It added the No. 5 pro-style quarterback in the country and the No. 44 player overall out of the class of 2017 in Jake Fromm. Now it adds the No. 1 player in the nation.

With Fields' commitment, I feel comfortable throwing some more hyperbole around: This is the greatest three-year recruiting stretch at the quarterback position in the history of modern recruiting.

In a day and age when quarterbacks are hypersensitive and hyperaware of depth charts and playing time, it's rare to see even back-to-back classes of elite, highly-touted arms. Three straight classes of five-star caliber talent at quarterback is unprecedented.

Fields is a player that can start from day one, and yet, Georgia has convinced him that he should come to a program with a true freshman starter under center and a true sophomore five-star as a backup that is sitting in the top five nationally.

Kirby Smart was hired at Georgia largely to land commitments like this. For all his success, Mark Richt wasn't always able to keep the top players in the state of Georgia home. Transcendent talents like Watson (Clemson) and Robert Nkemdiche (Ole Miss) elevated programs outside of the Peach State. That looks to be changing under Smart. Last recruiting cycle, Smart brought in Georgia's best in-state haul since 2003 with 13 of the state's to 21 players. The commitment of Fields should help springboard his 2018 efforts in stat as well.

Fields is a national championship quarterback. It's going to happen; it was just a matter of what uniform he would be wearing when he hoists the trophy. Smart has convinced him he looks good in red. 

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