Franz Beard’s Basketball Confidential

From all indications, last week’s official visit by Eloy Vargas (6-10, 220, Plantation, FL American Heritage) was a knock your socks off kind of visit. Although he is visiting the School Out West this weekend, apparently Vargas has it down to Florida and Pitt and the Gators have the lead.

It seems that everybody has the warm and fuzzies about Vargas now, and that goes from the folks here in Gainesville to the folks down in South Florida. From all indications, even the Gillion brothers, who head up the Team Breakdown AAU program which Vargas led to the national championship, have seen the orange and blue light. For the longest time, there has been speculation that the Gillion Brothers might steer Vargas to Pitt because of the close relationship with Pitt assistant Orlando Antigua, a native of Dominican Republic with ties to Santiago and Vargas’ parents and family. Antigua has made Vargas his recruiting project and for the longest time it looked like Pitt had a clear lead over the rest of the field, but in the last six to eight weeks, the playing field has been leveled.

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Franz Beard
Back in January of 1969, the late, great Jack Hairston, then the sports editor of the Jacksonville Journal, called me on the phone one night and asked me if I wanted to work for him. I said yes. The entire interview took 30 seconds. It's my experience that whenever the interview lasts 30 seconds or less, I get the job. In the 48 years that I've been writing and getting paid for it, I've covered Super Bowls, World Series, NCAA basketball championships, BCS championship games, heavyweight title fights and what seems like thousands of college football, baseball and basketball games. I'm a columnist and special assignments editor for Gator Country once again, writing about the only team that ever mattered to me, the Florida Gators.