I don’t know about you, but it feels to me like this has been an unusually busy January for the Florida football team. There’s a good reason for that: it has been.
For one thing, the relentless pace of Billy Napier’s hiring has barely slowed down. Last week the 50th member of the army was announced, and there’s still a little bit of time to announce one or two more January. This will easily be the biggest football staff the program has ever had, and most of it was hired this month. That’s the first factor.
The second is that the portal has been humming in both directions. Mohamoud Diabate, Kemore Gamble, and Ty’Ron Hopper all entered their names — Hopper, for his part, did it twice — and announced future landing spots. Those three alone match the total number of transfers out in Dan Mullen’s transitional year, and Napier’s lost three came after a trio of other exits in December.
On the inbound side of the ledger, O’Cyrus Torrence and Montrell Johnson from Louisiana and Jalen Kimber from Georgia picked Florida as their landing spots. There were some other transfers that UF was in on who ultimately went elsewhere, so just the confirmed moves here don’t account for everything.
Then there has been a lot of activity with offers and campus visits to finish out the 2022 recruiting class. The February signing day has lost most of its excitement with the advent of the December signing period, but UF has had some interest there before.
In 2018, the February date was necessary to fill out Mullen’s transitional class. It’s impossible for a new coach to fill out the majority of a class on short notice in December unless it’s an inside promotion like Marcus Freeman at Notre Dame this year, so that was expected.
In 2019, UF was in on a few players and made a splash by flipping Khris Bogle from Alabama and beating out Georgia for Kaiir Elam. In 2020 UF missed out on most of its late targets, though it kept Xzavier Henderson in the fold and landed Princely Umanmielen. Last year was a real dud, as Mullen didn’t sign a single recruit after the early signing day. The Gators had a couple of commits left unsigned after December, but if I recall correctly there was always doubt about them making it in the class for various reasons. UF merely touted transfers on its website despite it being signing day.
I don’t expect future Januarys under Napier to be quite this busy barring some big changes. For one obvious factor, I can’t see Napier needing to hire this many people again. Florida is not going to lose dozens of staff unless Napier himself is fired or leaving, and it’s not going to expand the staff by dozens in a single month. It may grow over time, but not by this much this quickly.
Also the higher number of February signees is mostly being done out of necessity, not by choice. Not entirely by necessity — Napier probably could’ve kept a few more of the Mullen commits around had he wanted to — but mostly.
A large number of prospects will continue to want to sign in December in the future. It’s a stamp of quality for a player, because he’s getting to sign right away and not being told to hold off until February and we’ll see if we have a spot for you. It also ends the incessant contacts of the recruiting process, which I understand can get pretty old after a while. Plus a lot of players can make up their minds by then, and if they’ve done so, why not sign?
Some very good players will still wait until February for their own reasons. Elam did, and UF is in hot pursuit of 5-star linebacker and top ten 247 Consensus player Harold Perkins right now. But unless the early signing period goes away — and there’s been some disorganized talk of doing so because of how out of control the coaching carousel is getting — December will be when Napier gets a larger share of his signing class than he’s doing this cycle.
The transfer market may or may not be this busy in the future. I would hope that the Gators won’t annually lose six players (and counting, more could leave after spring practice), and they should recruit well enough out of high school to only need or want to bring in choice selections that no one would pass up. I’m happy that Antonio Valentino, Daquan Newkirk, and Tyrone Truesdell were able to become part of the Gator family last year, but they were purely a necessity and won’t really be remembered for standout play in the way that Van Jefferson and Jonathan Greenard are. UF should be bringing in more like the latter two and fewer like the former three.
Anyway, this month was a taste of what things were like before 2018, especially with how Napier was willing to wait for the NFL season to end to hire some assistants. I don’t know how many people remember this, but when Will Muschamp was hired, he decided to wait until after the bowl to hire a position as important as his offensive coordinator. It wasn’t a reveal that was worth the wait, but a defensive head coach waiting until January to hire the coordinator on the other side of the ball wasn’t unheard of. Napier half did that this year with co-DC Sean Spencer’s hire coming this month.
But absent a change to the recruiting calendar, the next few Januarys shouldn’t be this busy.