National Signing Day always makes for a few surprises each winter, but it’s been a few years since we witnessed a recruitment as unique and bizarre as Macon County, Ga., linebacker Roquan Smith’s.

The four-star prospect and one of the top linebackers in the 2015 class waited until National Signing Day to announce his commitment to UCLA, surprising many in picking the Bruins over his home-state Georgia Bulldogs. But when UCLA linebackers coach and Smith’s primary recruiter, Jeff Ulbrich, left campus to assume the same role on the Atlanta Falcons’ coaching staff, Smith was less than pleased.

Can you blame him? The man he expected to directly report to, the man he thought would serve as his mentor throughout his college career, the man who inspired him to not just leave home but travel 3,000 miles across the country, left literally hours after Smith committed. For an 18-year-old preparing to leave home, that’s scary, and while there’s no proof, one can imply that Ulbrich waited to announce his departure until after he’d won Smith’s services for UCLA.

Unfortunately, that’s not an uncommon principle in modern college football recruiting, but unlike other recruits who roll with the punches, Smith opted to open his recruitment back up without signing a National Letter of Intent.

He eventually committed to Georgia, though even three months after the National Signing Day fiasco he’s yet to sign a NLI. So technically he’s still not officially a Georgia Bulldog, that is, not until he arrives on campus and enrolls in school next month.

Which begs the question: Is he going to follow through on that plan?

You see, without an NLI, Smith’s commitment is as binding as the commitment by a current high school freshman still four years away from college ball. That is to say, Smith can change his mind tomorrow and decide he’d rather go to Michigan or back to UCLA, and there wouldn’t even be a hitch in his change of plans.

And if you were wondering, yes, other schools like the two mentioned above are still pursuing Smith to some extent, hoping for a miracle to occur on the eve of the 2015 season.

“A few schools, such as UCLA and Michigan, have been talking to me. But I haven’t really been doing too much with them. Right after I committed to Georgia, they asked me ‘Are you sure you’re 100 percent? Are you going to change your mind about Georgia?’ I told them that I’m going to stick it out with Georgia,” Smith told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “Those other schools haven’t said much about it in the last few months. But I still keep in touch with those guys. They are good people, so I keep in contact with them every two or three weeks.”

So to recap, yes, Smith still keeps in touch with recruiters from schools other than Georgia, and no, he has no plans to open up his recruitment for a third time. He attended Georgia’s spring game last month and is slated to graduate from high school later this month. Again, the plan is for him to arrive in Athens next month and enroll in classes, binding him to the Bulldogs program at that point.

Smith told the AJC he’s been working out on his own, and added he’s kept in touch with Georgia assistant coach Mike Ekeler throughout the ongoing offseason.

Adding Smith into the mix will not only help Georgia replace departed NFL linebacker Ramik Wilson and Amarlo Herrera, but it will also help the Dawgs brace for the upcoming departures of talents like Jordan Jenkins, Lorenzo Carter and Leonard Floyd. It’s not hard to see why winning Smith back from UCLA and maintaining him through his arrival next month is so critical.

But Georgia doesn’t seem to be sweating it, considering it has only one coach maintaining almost all of the program’s contact with the linebacker, and Smith stated rather bluntly that he intends to be a Bulldog.

So despite all the buzz surrounding his name and his recruitment since the start of 2015, not much has changed in Smith’s camp. If you’re a Georgia fan, that’s fantastic news; if you root for anyone else in the SEC, perhaps you’re not as thrilled by the news.

But that’s neither here nor there. It may still be a few weeks from being official, but as far as all parties are concerned Smith is heading to Athens after all.