When Devin Moore signed with Florida in December, it was hailed as the first major recruiting victory of the Billy Napier era.
It’s easy to understand why that was the case. He’s a four-star prospect who has the length and athleticism to play every position in the secondary. He had accepted an invitation to play in the All-American Bowl, and he went on to make an interception in the game.
He intercepted five passes and returned one for a touchdown as a junior at Naples High School. He broke up 11 passes in 10 games as a senior despite opposing teams not throwing his way that often.
However, while his football accolades are impressive, those who know him best say that Moore will bring much more to the UF campus than just some interceptions and tackles.
“He really is just such an amazing human being,” Naples head coach Rick Martin said. “He’s one of those guys that he does things that you’re just not used to. He’s that guy that when we get off the bus, he thanks the bus driver for driving them. He’s the guy that, when our administration needs to hand out laptops for COVID, he helps out without even being asked.
“I guarantee you when he gets on campus, he’s not just going to be a football player. He’s going to be involved in other things, and he’s going to make that campus a better place. I promise you that.”
He’s also a terrific student, so much so that UF’s academics were one of the biggest reasons that he chose Florida. His academic standing also made enrolling early a no-brainer.
“The kid’s a genius in the classroom,” Martin said. “He’s got a 4.8 GPA or whatever it is, and he was ready for that.”
Moore’s father, Chris Moore, said that Devin’s thoughtfulness and commitment to academics stems from the way he was raised and from his time playing travel basketball.
Chris has coached a travel basketball team called the Florida Phenoms for about 15 years, which meant that there were frequently other kids in their house or in their car. Chris made it a point to impart more than just basketball wisdom on them, and those things stuck with Devin.
“Academics is a must in my family,” Chris Moore said. “It’s just a must. It ain’t that hard for you to go to school, come back, study for your exam, put the work in, and good results will happen. Now, if something comes up that you just can’t figure out this subject or whatever it may be, we’ll get you a tutor, but if you can take time and practice for a test, you should do pretty well on a test.
“He knew that his parents didn’t tolerate getting in trouble in school and not having good grades. That’s the least you can do for your parents when your parents are doing so much for you. So, we’ve got certain rules in our family. That was one of the rules is there’s no reason he shouldn’t make A’s. The least you should make is a B.”
On the field, it didn’t take long for the Naples’ coaches to figure out that they had a special athlete to build their defense around.
Martin coached the freshmen team when Moore was a freshman. He only got to coach him in three games that year because he got promoted to varsity.
Defensive backs coach Marvin Gray remembers a sequence of plays that Moore made in a game as a sophomore that blew him away.
Naples led Lehigh 7-0 late in the first half, but Lehigh broke off a 70-plus-yard run that looked like it would tie the game. Instead, Moore chased the player down from behind and shoved him out of bounds. On the very next play, he intercepted a pass to keep his team in front at halftime.
His tackle on the long run was the kind of effort play that college upperclassmen and NFL players don’t always make.
“That is a play that I will always remember because, as a defensive player and as a player in any sport, you’ve got to have a short-term memory, and that play right there is something that I’ll always remember as far as never giving up on a play because you never know what could happen on the next snap,” Gray said.
While Moore was a really good player as a freshman and sophomore, Martin said that the offseason between his sophomore and junior seasons was a pivotal period for him.
Moore begged his coaches to let him play cornerback after he played safety his first two years. They eventually agreed.
“I don’t know if it was so much that he thought he was going to make us better, even though he did, but I think he just wanted the challenge,” Martin said. “He wanted to learn a new position. He wanted to make sure that he could go back and forth to it.”
He also hit the weight room hard and added more than 30 pounds.
“He really wasn’t much of a weight room guy,” Martin said. “He was more of ‘I’m a speed guy. I’m a 7-on-7 guy. I’m a football guy.’ And we kept telling him ‘Devin, you’ve got to get in the weight room. Devin, you’ve got to kill the weight room, man. I understand what you’re saying, but you’re 170 pounds, and you’re going to get broke. You’ve got to go.’ And, coming out of his junior year, he was weighing in at like 205. He really cranked the weight room from his sophomore to junior season.
“He kind of took it to that next level, and you could tell that he was really becoming a polished football player. We knew something was happening. We knew he was going to be special.”
Yessir!! @realdevinmoore3 pic.twitter.com/7YVVWd3lYq
— Naples Golden Eagle Football (@naplesfootball) January 8, 2022
By the time he was a senior, Moore had become an irreplaceable part of Naples’ defense.
Just how valuable was he?
Well, in 10 regular season games, the Golden Eagles gave up a combined 45 points and posted six shutouts. They were on pace to be the best defense in school history.
Then, with Moore out with an injury, they gave up 49 points in their playoff loss to Miami Northwestern.
A special player like Moore really can make that big of a difference on a defense.
The Gators hope that he’ll make a similar impact in their secondary, but he very easily could be in South Bend, Indiana, right now.
He committed to Notre Dame over Florida, Alabama, Auburn and others on the Fourth of July prior to his senior year. Other than an unofficial visit to the Swamp for the Florida-Alabama game, he didn’t visit any other schools throughout the fall.
“The first thing was the academics,” Chris Moore said. “It was just the brand. It’s just the brand, academic-wise. Graduating from an institution like that would’ve carried a weight for a long time after football.”
Moore had his mind firmly set on playing for Notre Dame. Then, of course, came one of the wildest and most unexpected coaching moves of the early offseason. Notre Dame coach Brian Kelly bolted for LSU without an inkling that such a move might be forthcoming.
That proved to be the turning point in Moore’s recruitment. While he liked the academics and had good relationships with some of the assistant coaches, he was particularly close with Kelly.
So, he decommitted from Notre Dame on Nov. 30.
“He just sat back and relaxed and thought about it and said, ‘Oh, maybe I need to think about this again since the coach left,’” his dad said. “That was pretty much it. Once Brian Kelly left, I guess stuff started creeping into his mind. He wanted to sit back and think about it, and he wound up thinking about ‘It might be better if I just stay close to help the family out.’”
Because he wanted to play closer to home, that automatically put UF back in play. Then the family started doing some research on UF’s academics and were surprised to learn how well the university matched Devin’s academic goals.
“What Devin likes to do is business administration, and he wants to eventually get into real estate,” Chris Moore said. “So, we did a lot of research on Florida, and Florida came up very good academic-wise and especially business. So, Florida jumped in the picture and just academic-wise, me personally, I was very surprised. I knew they were a very smart school, but I didn’t realize it was [that] smart.”
Moore took an official visit to Florida over the final weekend prior to signing day. Two days before that, reports came out that Napier had hired Corey Raymond away from LSU to coach the cornerbacks.
Chris Moore thinks that was the moment that tipped the scales in Florida’s favor. Raymond coached seven First Team All-Americans and 14 NFL Draft picks at LSU.
“His background, me personally as a dad, I think when Coach Raymond came on, that was the final piece he was looking at,” he said.
Napier then impressed the family during his official visit.
“The main thing is the vision,” Chris Moore said. “You can listen to a person and get an idea of what type of vision they have about the future, and the vision and the way he comes off, it was very nice. For you to go to a school where Napier came from and he turned the program around, it takes a special person to turn a program around.”
Still, Devin Moore kept his cards close to the vest in the days leading up to signing day. Even his father didn’t learn of his final decision until signing day.
Of course, he chose Florida and is currently a week into his first semester as a Gator.
https://twitter.com/realdevinmoore3/status/1471101544737259521?s=20
Moore should have one of the best chances of earning immediate playing time among the freshmen. He’s listed as a cornerback, where the Gators don’t have any proven depth behind Jason Marshall and Avery Helm, and even Helm still has a lot to prove.
He can also play at safety or nickel, where the Gators return starters but are severely lacking in depth.
“It makes our job a lot easier,” Gray said. “We know when he’s at corner we don’t have to worry about his side of the field, and, if he’s the middle-of-the-field safety, just like a lot of people in the country have seen, he’s literally sideline to sideline, and [his] ball skills are off the charts. Nickelback, he’s a problem in the box or really just covering the slot receiver. He creates nightmares for opposing offenses and offensive coordinators.”
Moore is also an extremely intelligent player, Gray said. He picks up on new concepts very quickly.
“As a freshman, you tell Devin Moore something one time, bam, he’s got it, and he’s really able to get everyone else lined up around him, and that makes our jobs as coaches a lot easier because he really was like a coach on the field for us and able to get guys lined up in the proper defense and proper coverage,” he said. “So, we didn’t have to worry about that really at all.”
A good comparison for him might be former UF defensive back Chauncey Gardner-Johnson. Gardner-Johnson was also a position flexible player who played all over the place for the Gators and is now with the New Orleans Saints.
Unlike Gardner-Johnson, who loved to talk trash to his opponents, fans, coaches, equipment managers and the guy selling hot dogs in section 37, Moore has a more laidback personality. He lets his play do his talking.
“He’s a bit of an introvert, actually,” Martin said. “He’s a real even-keeled, quiet kid. He doesn’t really speak up a whole lot. He’s not the class clown. He’s not the kid that’s going to talk constantly. When you see him walking through the hallways at school, he’s just another kid, keeping to himself and saying hi to people, and that’s it.”
Moore’s path to early playing time has begun, as the Gators have assembled and begun to do some strength and conditioning drills.
Chris Moore said his son hasn’t found the transition to college football too challenging so far.
“He went to his first workout [Tuesday], and he let me know, he was like, ‘Man, I’m so advanced in all the drills that we used to do since [I] was like 6 years old,’” he said. “I made it important that ‘Hey, if I’m going to feed you, the least you can do is go outside three, four days a week and work on your ladder drills.’ He’s been doing ladder drills ever since he was like 6, 7 years old.
“He texted me saying, ‘Thanks for making me at a young age do ladder drills’ – not make him but encouraging him to do ladder drills at a young age, and now he sees why I stayed on him so much doing ladder drills.”
Moore’s former high school coaches expect him to accomplish wonderful things in the near future, and football is only a small part of that.
“He’s going to knock it out of the park,” Martin said. “Whatever he decides to do, he has all of the tools to be great at whatever it is that he’s going to do. I think he’s going to do phenomenal on the football field. I think he’s going to do great in the classroom, and then, whatever he decides to do after that, if God blesses him to play football afterwards, that’s awesome. And, if He doesn’t, he’s going to do great things.”