Maryland football outside top 6 for local 5-star 2020 WR Rakim Jarrett

Five-star St. John’s (D.C.) junior wide receiver Rakim Jarrett released a top six as part of a mini-highlight tape Wednesday, and Maryland football is on the outside looking in. The nation’s No. 27 overall prospect in the 2020 class has Ohio State, USC, Florida, Tennessee, LSU and Alabama in his list of favorites.

Jarrett is one of the headliners of a loaded class of DMV prospects in 2020. He’s the No. 27 overall player and No. 4 wide receiver in the country and the No. 2 prospect in Washington, D.C., per the 247Sports Composite. Jarrett one of four St. John’s players in the top 100 recruits nationally, with the other three all on the defensive side of the ball. In all, there are 26 combined blue-chip prospects between D.C., Maryland and Virginia, including seven five-star recruits.

Jarrett told InsideMdSports last week that Locksley’s hiring at Maryland “didn’t jump them to the top of my list, but it jumped them into my top 10.” So unless he’s eliminating all but six schools with 51 weeks until he can sign a Letter of Intent (unlikely), the Terps are still somewhere in the mix, albeit with a steep hill to climb. That leaves plenty of time for Mike Locksley to continue building a relationship with Jarrett—he’s already been recruiting him for Alabama—and for current Terps to keep pitching the hometown school.

Elsewhere in “recruiting blue-chip local wide receivers in the 2020 class,” Maryland is in the top 10 for four-star McDonough wideout Curtis Jacobs, who’s the No. 8 player in his home state, per the Composite rankings.

In other news

We haven’t had any content since Monday, so here’s what happened over the holidays:

Mike Locksley—whose birthday is on Christmas Day!—spoke yesterday and answered questions about both Alabama’s upcoming Playoff matchup against Oklahoma and his building process at Maryland. Here’s the full transcript, and the video is below.

Maryland men’s basketball, which lost to Seton Hall on Saturday, didn’t receive a single vote for this week’s AP top 25 after being two spots from the rankings last week. The women’s team, on the other hand, moved from No. 5 to No. 4.

Here’s InsideMdSports’ Josh Stirn on why Mark Turgeon’s team is off to a somewhat uninspiring start.

The Terps are down two spots to 11th in BT Powerhouse’s Big Ten Power Rankings.

But I’ll leave you on a more positive note, with Scott Van Pelt’s “1 Big Thing” from Christmas night. He cites an essay from Henry Van Dyke, called “Keeping Christmas,” that closes:

And if you can keep it for a day, why not always?

But you can never keep it alone.

So the day itself may have passed, but Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all.