Neville Gallimore becomes the first Canadian-school player to make the Rivals 250 list

There's been an impressive upsurge in the calibre of Canadian football talent in the last few years, and the U.S. is taking notice. A record-setting number of Canadian-born players were selected in this year's NFL draft, but plenty of Canadians are being noticed long before that. The latest example is Ottawa-born defensive tackle Neville Gallimore of Canada Prep Academy in St. Catharines, who just became the first player from a Canadian high school to make the famed Rivals 250 (a list of Rivals' top 250 high school prospects across positions for a given year) for 2015. Here's a video of Rivals' national recruiting director Mike Farrell discussing Gallimore (ranked #214) and other unusual prospects on this list:

I spoke with Farrell about Gallimore by e-mail Tuesday, and he said Gallimore is more polished than your typical north-of-the-border high school prospect.

"His initial film evaluation was in April when his film started to make the rounds and right around that time is when he started to pile up the offers," Farrell said. "His film was very impressive, but we are always cautious on level of competition for Canadian players for obvious reasons, so we wanted to see him in person. He showed up at our Detroit Rivals Camp presented by Under Armour and he was outstanding, checking in as the No. 2 defensive performer overall."

Here's a video of Gallimore's on-field highlights, via Canada Football Chat:

Farrell said much of what makes Gallimore impressive is how quick he is for a big defensive lineman.

"He’s a 300-pounder who can really move well," Farrell said. "He has a great first step, he’s agile and well balanced out of his stance, he has a couple of advanced 'go-to' moves and he is always working towards the quarterback. He’s a high effort kid, he is explosive and he’s more technically sound than we are used to from Canada."

There will be elements of his game for him to refine in college, though.

"He needs to continue to work on his pad level, he plays a bit high and can tend to open himself up as a target," Farrell said. "When his pad level is too high, he’s too easy to block."

So far, Gallimore (who also played junior football with the Cumberland Panthers) has received offers from 19 different U.S. schools, including Miami, Mississippi State, Nebraska, Ohio State and UCLA. That's at least one school in each of the five power conferences, plus Notre Dame. Other big schools, including Florida, Virginia Tech and Washington, have reportedly expressed interest in him. Farrell said it's too early to call where he'll wind up, especially with so many schools targeting him.

"He hasn’t made any unofficial visits so it’s impossible at this time to say who he likes the best," Farrell said. "He wants to trim down his list sometime in the fall so he’s a long way from deciding and currently in the planning process. I think he’s a bit surprised and overwhelmed by so many offers."

Gallimore told The Ottawa Sun's Tim Baines he doesn't expect to make his decision until next February:

It's happened quickly for him, and others may follow in his wake. There are always plenty of Canadians who head to the U.S. and do well in the NCAA, of course; in fact, last week's CFL draft was noticeably shallower than normal thanks to a rule change that meant there were very few NCAA players eligible this year. There have even been Canadian players who wound up higher than Gallimore on the Rivals 250; one in particular is Ottawa-born quarterback Michael O'Connor, ranked #184 overall (and #7 amongst pro-style QBs) in the 2014 Rivals 250. O'Connor eventually opted for Penn State and chose to stick with the Nittany Lions earlier this year despite a coaching change.

However, the typical path for top Canadian players like O'Connor (or Bo Lokombo, or John Urschel) is to spend their last couple of high-school years at American schools, boosting their recruiting profiles. While some Canadian players (like Arjen Colquhoun) have earned NCAA offers right out of Canadian high schools, they've typically been lower-ranked prospects who have been mostly targeted by NCAA schools near the border. As a nationally-recruited hot prospect out of a Canadian school, Gallimore is quite different. Farrell said it's tough to say yet if Gallimore is unique or just the first in a line of nationally-recruited Canadian-school prospects, but Canadian talent is getting better, and more closely integrated into the American prospect pipelines.

"More and more Canadian players are making their way down to the States for camps and we see more and more of them every year so I think there’s a chance the number could increase," he said. "It’s the right day and age for it with so many options outside of just mailing off film."

We'll see how this plays out for Gallimore, but he certainly seems to have a bright NCAA football future ahead of him. For a Canadian-born and Canadian-trained prospect, that's quite impressive, and maybe it suggests that staying at a Canadian high school can still be a perfectly viable route to the NCAA's bright lights.