Florida football is not yet showing itself to be a quick rebuild

The Florida football program has spent the offseason stubbornly refusing to reveal itself to be a quick rebuild.

In the new transfer portal era, some teams have reinvented themselves quickly through transfers. Michigan State from a year ago is a good example.

UF to date has landed six players from the portal. Three came from Billy Napier’s former school of Louisiana: a likely one-year rental in O’Cyrus Torrence, Montrell Johnson, and quasi-project Kamryn Waites (he’s not refined enough to be a major contributor this year). The others are potential starter at corner Jalen Kimber, replacement-level backup QB Jack Miller, and much-needed slot WR Ricky Pearsall. Comparing that list to those lost to the portal — Khris Bogle, Jacob Copeland, Mohamoud Diabate, Kemore Gamble, Lamar Goods, Ty’Ron Hopper, Emory Jones, Gerald Mincey, and Carlos Del Rio-Wilson — and it’s a wash at best.

Even with more players leaving via the portal than arriving, Florida is over the 85-man scholarship limit. It’s not a surprise either; it was evident back in February and even before then.

Napier talked a big game about being “aggressive” in the portal during spring practice. However since the end of the spring session, only Del Rio-Wilson entered the portal and only Pearsall has emerged from it. With no exodus of existing players, there was no roster room to be aggressive in the portal — not that too many guys UF would’ve wanted actually became available post-spring anyway. Napier cut three players from the team this week, but he still is two scholarships over budget with a deadline of the start of fall practice.

It’s hard not to see Napier’s public portal talk as a miscalculation in the end, though exactly what was miscalculated is still a mystery. He might’ve expected more high caliber players to decide to transfer after spring, but few did. He also might’ve expected more current players to want to leave, but the team building work that the staff has been doing from the start might’ve swayed more minds than he predicted.

Whatever the case, UF was not actually aggressive in the portal this offseason. Napier has improved some spots with key players like Torrence and Pearsall, and Johnson was good insurance for a position with multiple top returning players having bad injury history. However, guys like Bogle, Copeland, Gamble, Hopper, and Diabate would’ve played major snaps had they stayed.

The recent returns on the recruiting trail haven’t boosted spirits either. Just in the past week, top quarterback target Jaden Rashada pushed back his commitment to take a visit to Miami. Yesterday, a flood of 247 Sports crystal ball projections have him going to the Hurricanes. Also yesterday, four of 247’s Michigan State analysts filed crystal balls for 4-star offensive tackle target from Orlando Payton Kirkland to become a Spartan. Earlier in the week, a pair of people including 247’s national director of recruiting Steve Wiltfong predicted RB Treyaun Webb — cousin of former Gator corner Dee Webb — to go to Penn State.

It’s not just in the prediction market that hits have been coming. A pair of 5-star defensive back targets appear lost, as AJ Harris committed to Georgia on June 16 and Tony Mitchell released a top four yesterday that didn’t include UF.

In terms of track record, the Gators upgraded their coaching staff from a recruiting perspective. Going from up-and-comer Jules Montinar to Corey Raymond as cornerbacks coach was a massive upgrade alone, but Florida has lost a pair of top corner recruits in the past couple of weeks. What’s going on?

One easy answer is that UF hasn’t had an it factor as a destination for top players in a while. The Gators haven’t had a top-five rated class in a decade, with the No. 3 class of 2013 being the last one. It probably takes time to turn that kind of perception around.

I know a lot of Gator fans hoped Napier could land a blowout class this cycle to gain immediate momentum the way Urban Meyer did at UF back in the day or Kirby Smart did at Georgia more recently.

Thing is, Florida hadn’t fallen as far for as long on the trail when Meyer took over. He still had Steve Spurrier signees on his team in ’05, and for all of Ron Zook’s failings, recruiting wasn’t one of them. Plus, four of Mark Richt’s last five teams won at least ten games, including a squad in 2012 that came about five yards away from winning the SEC and likely going on to beat Notre Dame for the national title. Napier took over a program that won ten games just twice in the past five years with a pair of seasons under .500 in that span.

NIL is the other elephant in the room.

It’s not hard to find folks attributing Miami’s momentum on the recruiting trail to megabooster John Ruiz being willing to spend freely on NIL deals. Those deals, if they exist, have netted the Hurricanes one 4-star and six 3-star commitments to date, compared to UF’s three 4-stars and four 3-stars. Obviously if Rashada declares for UM and has a big NIL deal all lined up, then the story and math starts to change.

This being the first full cycle with NIL at the fore has made for some odd interim results. As I write this, Alabama sits at No. 38, 2021 Playoff participant Michigan is at No. 39, Florida is at No. 40, LSU is No. 41, and Miami is No. 42. All have seven or fewer commitments.

I have read and listened to comments from Eddie Rojas, former UF baseball player and head of the Gator Collective. It’s clear from what he’s said that the plan has been to take care of current players with NIL contracts and then rely on them disclosing the size of their deals to recruits as the method of telling prospects what someone could make by signing with UF.

It’s indirect, but it stays on the right side of both NCAA rules and Florida state laws. Other programs are doing it differently, and there may or may not be consequences for it. Ever since the scars of probation in the ’80s, however, Florida has never been a place to probe the limits of the rules.

NIL is so new, and there is so much incomplete, bad, misleading, or flat-out wrong information out there that there’s no way to know what’s precisely going on. Little that is happening right now may turn out to be sustainable over the medium or long term.

Rojas, for his part, has said that he’s running the Gator Collective with an eye towards it being sustainable over the long-term. That’s good as far as it goes. I am reminded, though, of the economics aphorism that goes approximately like, “Markets can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.”

If the NIL market can stay irrational for a while, then someone sticking closely to the rules might find themselves going insolvent if fans make the no-confidence vote of withholding donations and subscriptions for lack of results. It also appears that there might be a collective or two trying to employ a fake-it-til-you-make-it strategy of trying to stay irrational until they become solvent. Meaning, they throw unsustainably large sums around hoping that the success they see from cutting big deals will induce enough fans to start contributing at a level that makes the previously unsustainable become sustainable.

I can only guess as to how any of this will turn out. The same goes for everyone else, because again, there is so much incomplete, bad, misleading, and flat-out wrong information circulating.

Earlier on in the offseason, it was easy to give Napier some benefit of the doubt. He was getting visits and top-whatever placements for many more highly rated recruits than Dan Mullen did. The odds seemed to be that even if he didn’t land all of them, he was in the running for enough of them that things should still work out in the end.

Whether it’s reputation hangover from the past three head coaches, NIL, something else, or some combination of factors, UF is not presently where anyone would like it to be. Seven recruits, evenly split between 3 and 4-stars with an average rating around the 3/4-star cut line, sounds indistinguishable from a summertime McElwain or Mullen class.

There still is the potential for flipping players; the Gators just flipped a 4-star Edge from UCF this week. However if NIL deals really are driving decisions for a lot of top players, then flipping gets a lot harder. In the old paradigm, Eric Dickerson could take a Trans-Am from Texas A&M and then go sign with SMU with no downside. Anyone who has already signed his NIL rights away to a particular collective is going to have a hard time going anywhere else.

However you slice it, Florida is not going on a straight line up in the Napier era. The transfer portal inflicted as much or more pain as it took away this offseason, and the Gators are finding it hard to secure commitments from elite prospects. The head coach’s comments set expectations that weren’t met in regards to the portal, and his choices in accepting transfers and signing recruits led to players getting outright cut this week with still more to come.

There is still a long way to go before signing day, and Mike Price aside, no head coach’s tenure was irrevocably damaged before the first game was even played. However, turning Florida back into a national contender appears to be a task that’ll take longer to accomplish than some fans had hoped.