Georgia in-season, September 1: 393 programs with two-plus games logged, and the weekend's RPM standouts

Recruit Intel's live check-in on Georgia's 2026 season: how far the state's 542 tracked programs have gotten, the highest RPM scores from the scoring window through August 28, and three underclassmen worth an early note, each verified against our canonical database.

Georgia's tracker, September 1

As of September 1, 2026, Recruit Intel is tracking 542 Georgia high school programs for the 2026 season. 393 of them show two or more games recorded in our season tracker and 29 show exactly one, a coverage snapshot taken that day against the state's own tracked population. That count is not a played-games count, though: for many programs the tracker already carries a full season schedule, games not yet played included, so games recorded measures how much of a program's schedule has loaded, not how many games have actually happened. See How we counted, below, for what that means for the 393 figure specifically. The rest of this piece works from the far end of that coverage, the games that are in, scored, and ready to read.

The weekend's highest RPM scores

Recruit Intel's RPM system scored the national pool of skill and defensive performances for the scoring window that runs through the games of August 28, and ranked the field by RPM, our performance metric. RPM is a percentile within each position family (quarterbacks against quarterbacks, defenders against defenders), computed across the full national pool scored that window: 19,063 scored performances in all, one aggregate line per player for the window rather than a box score count. A Georgia player's score reflects where he stood against every family-mate scored nationally, not only against the rest of the state. 882 of those 19,063 scored performances came from Georgia schools. Naming here is restricted to players carrying a certified handle in Recruit Intel's own record, so what follows is not a full ranking of the state's best performances, only the highest scores among the ones we can name.

Brant Horst, MLB, Southeast Bulloch (Savannah), class of 2029. Fourteen tackles, seven solo, against East Laurens, with 3.5 tackles for loss, two sacks, and two forced fumbles. RPM 99.62, the highest score among Georgia's certified-handle players this window.
Caiden Gaddy, LB, Hillgrove (Metro Atlanta), class of 2028. Thirteen tackles against North Cobb, two for loss, with a sack, a forced fumble, a fumble recovery, and a pass deflection. RPM 99.37.
Aiden Montford, LB, Hillgrove (Metro Atlanta), class of 2027. Montford's own line from the same North Cobb game as his teammate Gaddy above: thirteen tackles, three for loss, a sack, and a pass deflection. RPM 99.18.
George Lamons Jr., TE, Brooks County (South Georgia), class of 2027. A four-way night against Pierce County: four catches for 77 yards and a touchdown, a rushing touchdown on two carries for -16 net yards, a 21-yard completion on his only pass attempt, and 74 return yards on kicks plus 37 on punts. RPM 98.59.
Marquis Fennell, RB, Valdosta (South Georgia), class of 2027. Nine catches for 90 yards and two touchdowns against Howard, plus four carries for 102 yards. RPM 98.56.

Hillgrove's defense put two players inside the state's top handful in the same game, which is its own small data point: North Cobb ran into a Georgia linebacker corps that graded near the very top of the state's production this window, twice over.

Underclassmen worth an early note

Three names below come from players with exactly two dated games in Recruit Intel's own stat record this season, so read these as early signal on a young career, not a settled read.

Philantae Lumpkin, RB, East Paulding (Metro Atlanta), class of 2028. Twenty-three carries for 161 yards and two touchdowns against Harrison. RPM 96.92. Lumpkin has two dated games in our stat record this season.
Caden Jones, QB, Lassiter (Metro Atlanta), class of 2029. Nineteen of 27 passing for 335 yards and four touchdowns, one interception, against Allatoona. RPM 94.47. Jones has two dated games in our stat record this season.
Jeremiah Scott, RB, Johnson County (Middle Georgia), class of 2029. Seven carries for 77 yards and three touchdowns, two catches for 11 yards and a fourth score, plus 75 kick-return yards, against Warren County. RPM 93.02. Scott has two dated games in our stat record this season.

How we counted

RPM is a percentile score computed within each position family for the scoring window that runs through the games of August 28 (research finding RI-RF401 documents the family-percentile method and its credibility factor, which discounts single-game lines toward the family median rather than letting one big night post an inflated score). That window holds 19,063 scored performances nationally as of today, and its opponent-strength adjustment has resolved for 6,505 of them, about a third, so its absence on several of the lines above reflects the model's current buildout, not a missing adjustment specific to these players. Every stat line above comes from Recruit Intel's canonical database, and every named player was verified by record, including class year and school, against a current 2026 roster with a certified handle on file. Common names were resolved to a single record by school and class before anything was published.

The state coverage total above is drawn from Recruit Intel's v_school_season_progress view and is now registered in research finding RI-RF404, re-derived live on September 4, 2026 and reconciled back to September 1: no Georgia program has entered or left that view in between. RI-RF404's own September 1 pull was taken minutes before a school was added to the view, Carver in Atlanta, so that pull carries one program fewer than the total printed here. The Georgia-filtered RPM board above is unaffected and is drawn from RI-RF404 as recorded. The 393 figure needs its own caveat: games recorded in Recruit Intel's tracker is not the same as games played. Many of those programs carry a last recorded game date months past this snapshot, meaning their tracker entries include a full season schedule loaded in advance rather than only games already played. Southeast Bulloch, for example, shows 11 games recorded with a last game of November 6; Valdosta shows 12 with the same November 6 date; and Parkview shows 10, also running to November 6. So 393 measures how much of Georgia's slate has loaded into our tracker, not how many programs have actually taken the field twice. A team-level, schedule-adjusted board for Georgia is not yet available: as of this snapshot, Recruit Intel's adjusted team board carries zero rows for the 2026 season across every state, so that board is not part of this piece and will follow once it populates.

Correction, September 4, 2026. Several figures carried in the version published on September 2 have been removed from the text above, because they do not reproduce against the live database and were not recorded in either cited research finding: the count of Georgia programs with no games yet recorded, the count of two-or-more-game programs whose last recorded game falls after publication, and the two window-composition counts for performances dated past the window's closing day, which were taken from the raw stat table rather than from the scored pool the sentence around them described. A schedule-loading example built on Hillgrove has been dropped as well, since that program's tracker entry has filled out to a full November slate and the contrast it was drawn for no longer holds. The two-or-more and exactly-one splits above are RI-RF404's own September 1 readings, registered there under that date; the view is live and has kept moving since, which is the same schedule-loading effect this section describes. Every other figure on this page was re-derived live on September 4, 2026 and is registered in the cited findings, RI-RF404 and RI-RF401.

This is one of Recruit Intel's in-season state check-ins, published as programs get deeper into their 2026 schedules.