DL Dominick McKinley, the No. 1 player in Louisiana, commits to Texas A&M

Death. Taxes. Texas A&M signing elite defensive line recruits. In what has become an annual event, the Aggies got a commit from yet another top shelf defensive line recruit, this time getting a pledge from four-star DL Dominick McKinley from Lafayette, LA.

McKinley is rated as the No. 38 player in the country, the No. 7 defensive lineman and the No. 1 player in Louisiana, according to the 247 Sports Composite Rankings. So while he is technically a four-star recruit in the composite rankings, he’s about as close to five-star status as you can get. The Aggies’ chief competition for McKinley’s commitment was his homestate LSU Tigers as well as the Texas Longhorns, though he obviously had a litany of offers in addition to those.

The Aggies now have three defensive linemen in their 2024 class, with McKinley joining fellow top 100 recruit Dealyn Evans as well as three-star DL Gabriel Reliford. They’ll join what has become an absolutely loaded Aggie defensive line, with five-star D.J. Hicks from the 2023 class, an absurd FOUR five-star d-linemen from the 2022 class (Walter Nolen, Shemar Stewart, Gabriel Brownlow Dindy and Lebbeus Overton), and five-star Shemar Turner in 2021. If McKinley can make the move into five-star status, it will mean A&M will have brought in SEVEN five-star defensive linemen in four years. Just absurd.

For the 2024 A&M recruiting class as a whole, this is commitment No. 21, and moves their class from No. 7 up to No. 5 in the country. It also worth nothing that McKinley is A&M’s third member of this class ranked as the top player in his state, joining WR Cam Coleman (Alabama) and OL Isendre Ahfua (Washington).

Dominick McKinley Highlights