NEW ORLEANS -- Jahkeem Stewart has played 12 varsity football games, the last almost a year ago. And yet, when college football's early signing period opens on Wednesday, the 17-year-old will choose between Ohio State, Oregon, USC or LSU. As ESPN's top-ranked defensive end prospect in the 2025 cycle, he is expected to receive a multimillion-dollar NIL package from the school he picks.
How did Stewart -- one of the most fascinating questions atop the Class of 2025 -- get here?
Once ranked as ESPN's No. 1 overall prospect in the 2026 class, this fall was supposed to be Stewart's junior season. But when the Louisiana High School Athletic Association ruled him ineligible to compete following an in-season transfer in September, he reclassified into the 2025 cycle and is now the 11th-ranked recruit in the ESPN 300.
Sidelined for the past three months, the 6-foot-6, 290-pound Stewart has exchanged a traditional path through high school football for a professional training regimen, a decision he and his camp believe will have him prepared to compete for playing time as soon as he lands on a college campus as an early enrollee next year.
"How many times do you have to listen to Beyoncé sing to know that she's a good singer?" Clyde Alexander, Stewart's trainer and guardian, told ESPN. "Look at the game film. Look at the camp film. Since this kid stepped foot on a national scene, he's either been the No. 1 or No. 2 player in the country his entire life."
Despite his lack of high school game time, college scouting departments consider Stewart a potentially generational defensive line talent -- a unique blend of top-end size with an elite, 82.5-inch wingspan, 4.8-second 40-yard dash speed and the versatility to play across the line. But seldom, if ever, has a more highly coveted prospect landed in college football having played so little. Stewart presents a potential multimillion-dollar gamble, a test case against the conventional norms of prospect development.
"He won't come in with the reps at that position," one ACC player personnel staffer said. "So where is he mentally from a football standpoint? You can't re-create the game environment."
Added an FBS director of player personnel: "I don't care how big and strong you are, it's still a developmental sport where reps are the first-, second- and third-most important thing to your growth and development. For someone to be skipping that, I'd have a lot of reservations."
Two weeks from his commitment date, sitting in a booth at Neyow's Creole Cafe a few miles from Bourbon Street, Stewart laughs off the criticism.
"When people see me go get 10-plus sacks next year," he said, "they'll see I lived up to the hype."
AS THE FOOTBALL team at New Orleans' Edna Karr High School practices on a recent November evening, Stewart is working out in the school's weight room. When the Cougars' varsity squad returns for a film session an hour later, Stewart drops the weights and takes the team's place on the turf, running sprints and agility drills alone under the lights with Alexander.
This is what football has looked like for Stewart for the past few months, since the September night Alexander took Stewart to a bench on the West Bank of the Mississippi River and told him he wouldn't be playing high school again this fall.
Not long after Stewart's 85-tackle, 20-sack sophomore season last at New Orleans' St. Augustine High School, Stewart and Alexander sat in front of a whiteboard, weighed the pros and cons and decided Stewart was ready to go to college a year early. But St. Augustine resisted Stewart's plan to reclassify in the summer, sparking an ugly exit when the school ultimately denied his bid in August. Weeks into the new semester, Stewart left St. Augustine and enrolled at Edna Karr in the second week of September, still hoping to play again this fall before the state athletic association ruled him ineligible for the remainder of the season.
"The kid had grown tired of high school football and had dominated everything and everybody that has ever stepped in front of him," Alexander said of the decision to reclassify. "It was no longer a challenge. For someone to stand in the way of his dream? I had a real problem with that."
Alexander has been present for nearly all the mile markers in Stewart's journey since 2019.
An Edna Karr alum who played football at Nicholls State, Alexander began training prospects a decade ago with the goal of helping local football players land college scholarships. Soon, he was chaperoning athletes to football camps across the region a dozen at a time in a rented sprinter van. Among the long list of New Orleans-area prospects to emerge from Alexander's "Edge Assassins" program are Texas' Barryn Sorrell, LSU's Sai'vion Jones and Ole Miss' Cam East.
One of the core tenets of Alexander's development program is flexibility. Scouts often talk about the unique flexibility of Stewart's powerful frame, and on a busy weeknight at Edna Karr, Stewart breezes through an agility drill, lunging over and under a series of track hurdles.
Minutes later, back in the weight room, Edna Karr head football coach Brice Brown helps explain why Stewart has been relegated exclusively to individual training this fall.
"The second snap he ran over the pulling guard and tackled the running back and hit the quarterback at the same time," Edna Karr coach Brice Brown said. "The season he would have had this year -- I think a lot of people would have said to themselves he does not need to play a senior season because he is that far advanced over a normal high school player."
Stewart was a 6-foot-4, 340-pound sixth grader when he started working with Alexander. Two years later, he was 60 pounds lighter with a transformed body, an elite long-arm move and a list of offers that included Alabama, Georgia and LSU. By the time Stewart finished middle school, he'd already turned Nick Saban's head at Alabama's defensive line camp and tormented Julian Lewis in the 8th grade Under Armour All-America Game.
Two key developments unfolded around this time: Bigger, faster and stronger than all the kids in his age group, Stewart gave up youth travel football to begin training with Alexander full time. And after the Stewart family home in Reserve, Louisiana, was destroyed by Hurricane Ida in Aug. 2021, Stewart began living with Alexander, about an hour away from his family in Reserve, eventually enrolling at St. Augustine in 2022, where transfer rules barred Stewart from playing varsity football in his freshman year.
So when Stewart was sidelined earlier this fall, Alexander already had a training program in place. Without after-school practices and Friday night games, the pair have simply gone in harder. Extra time in the home gym and the weight room at Edna Karr have Stewart up to 290 pounds this fall. More training sessions with BT Jordan, a New Orleans-based pass rush trainer with a client list of nearly 200 NFL defenders, to sharpen technique and film study skills.
Stewart hasn't been operating like a high school player for some time. Within his camp, there's not only a belief that Stewart's early exit from high school football won't hurt his development, but a sense that he's become an even more complete prospect this fall.
"I've heard people say that this whole recruitment process is sped up or rushed, but that really isn't the case," Alexander said. "From day one, he has been training to be a pro. Not even just physically, but training to have a pro mentality."
FOURTEEN DAYS BEFORE the early signing period, in the booth at Neyow's, the end goal of everything Stewart and Alexander have been working for over the past five years feels close as Stewart downs a pink lemonade.
Soon, Stewart will have to answer the questions that have hovered over him this fall.
"I only played one year of high school football, but every time I stepped on the field -- it was havoc," Stewart said. "I had a lot of head coaches stressing about playing me. Nobody in high school right now could block me one-on-one. "
Whether the choice is Oregon, Ohio State, LSU or USC, Stewart believes he'll be prepared to compete when he arrives on his new campus. And his lack of game time hasn't dampened interest from the nation's top programs in chasing what will be a lucrative signature on Wednesday.
Stewart's camp expects him to be ready to compete for starting time in Year 1 and hopes he will earn a minimum of $6 million across the three seasons he plans to spend in college football. Other sources offer slightly more conservative estimates on what Stewart could command. In any case, his next program will be placing a sizable bet on the promise of his measurable traits, camp performances and a limited sample of high school action.
"If he was still the top prospect in 2026, you'd be paying out the a-- for that kid," one SEC scouting director said. "Kids like that don't grow on trees. It's a risk you can afford to take."
Risks might still exist. Personnel departments typically place red flags on prospects with multiple high school transfers, while others are generally hesitant about prospects who chose to forgo multiple seasons of high school football. Multiple personnel sources are curious about how Stewart's season out of competitive football will impact his technique and football IQ.
"I've never seen any high school that is as developed and polished on the field and in football knowledge as Jahkeem," Jordan, who began training Stewart in the summer, countered.
One general manager of a Big Ten program points out that the reclassified prospects who succeed early in college typically arrive with a wide body of work from high school. Star Alabama freshman Ryan Williams, for instance, has emerged as one of college football's breakout stars this fall since reclassifying last December, but only after he totalled more than 4,400 yards of total offense and scored 76 touchdowns in 39 high school games.
"If a guy produces like that, it's one thing," said one FBS director of player personnel. "But fast forward four years: if Jahkeem was a college kid who didn't play for a season and just went and worked with a trainer, nobody would say he's getting better right now. The story would be that he's not playing."
Stewart and Alexander believe they have answers to all of the above questions. They took a substantial bet on themselves this fall. Stewart's signing day ceremony, which will take place inside the Edna Karr gymnasium, sits at the end of a road significantly less traveled.
Two weeks ago, they returned to the bench on the bank of the Mississippi River where Stewart learned that his high school career was essentially over. Staring out over the water toward the New Orleans skyline, he weighed the balance of a defining experience he's about to put behind him and the other that lies directly ahead after Wednesday.
"If I would have played this year, I never would have had the time to do what I've been doing these past three months to get me ready for college," Stewart said. "That was fate."