How Dan Mullen extended and improved Florida’s run of bringing in transfers

National Signing Day came and went, and Florida signed zero players. After no high school players put their names on National Letters of Intent for UF, the school issued a news release on transfers joining the program for the upcoming season. All four transfers, one of whom will be a walk on, had previously announced their intentions to come to Gainesville. Nothing in the release was new.

It’s the culmination of a couple of trends that are now intersecting. One is the December signing day taking over for the February signing day, and that has been covered in depth elsewhere because it’s not that new.

The other is Florida as a program increasingly leaning on transfers to patch holes in its roster. By my unofficial count, UF still has one initial counter for the 2021-22 school year left open, and I’ve seen others who cover the Gators suggest the number could be slightly higher than that. Instead of welcoming any new high school players today, however, the program appears to be holding whatever spots are left available for transfers.

The transfer portal has gotten and should get a lot of credit for making the process more visible, but the Gators’ reliance on transfers goes back beyond its creation in 2018.

The Before Times

The NCAA first did a trial run of the graduate transfer rule in 2006. Florida took advantage, as Urban Meyer got his former cornerback Ryan Smith to transfer from Utah. It’s not an exaggeration to suggest those circumstances made a big impact on whether the Gators won that year’s national championship or not. Smith started the whole year, and the weak 2007 secondary showed there wasn’t a lot behind him.

Other than Smith, can you name a transfer in the Meyer era? Emmanuel Moody was a visible one, coming over from what was then the country’s premier program USC after winning Pac-10 Freshman of the Year honors. Carl Moore was a JUCO transfer, but we’re not really talking about JUCOs here.

Will Muschamp didn’t take many transfers either. He did bring in a couple of offensive linemen with first with Max Garcia from Maryland and later Tyler Moore from Nebraska. Muschamp only signed four total offensive linemen across his first two classes, and two of those never contributed. He needed the help, so he made exceptions for them.

Transfers were rare under those coaches, and most were in positions of extreme need. To an extent, that’s still true. It’s just that the recruiting failures of the Muschamp and Jim McElwain regimes changed how many positions of extreme need existed.

Mac

McElwain had the unenviable task of trying to clean up a roster mess left behind by his predecessor. For all of Muschamp’s plusses as a recruiter, managing numbers at every position was a nut he never could crack.

Muschamp taking two transfers with limited years of eligibility left didn’t miraculously solve the offensive line problems, so Mac had to get immediate help. Grad transfer Mason Halter made the rare FU to UF switcheroo, heading south for Gainesville from Fordham, and he started every regular season game of his last collegiate season. TJ McCoy was of longer-term help, redshirting in 2015 before working his way up to a starting job late the following year.

Muschamp was great at finding quarterbacks for other programs; three of his signees went on to start and get drafted from elsewhere. He did not leave a lot of depth behind, and things would get worse when Will Grier decided to leave after his PED suspension during Mac’s first season.

So, McElwain went out and got the same kind of thing at quarterback with one short timer and one guy for the future. Josh Grady was one-year insurance policy in case something happened to both of the only two scholarship signal callers, Grier and Treon Harris. Luke Del Rio would start games in each of the following two years, but he had to sit out ’15 due to transfer rules.

The final was grad transfer Anthony Harrell, a depth player at linebacker. He did little of note in his short time in the program.

The next year brought two more transfers. One again was at quarterback, grad transfer Austin Appleby. As Del Rio proved not terribly durable, the former Boilermaker needed to step in a few times to prevent one of a couple of true freshmen in Felipe Franks or Kyle Trask from having to go. The other transfer was Tommy Townsend, brother of then-starting punter Johnny.

Mac completed the sweep with yet another quarterback transfer in 2017 with Malik Zaire. It… didn’t go well. He got also help on the lines for the future from Jean Delance and Marlon Dunlap, who both sat out the year due to transfer rules.

All told, McElwain took ten transfers in three years: five, then two, then three.

Mullen

By the recruiting service averages, Mac was the worst recruiter of UF head coaches this century. His 2016 class in particular had a lot of 3-star talent that showed out above that assessment, though it took Mullen and his staff’s development to get many of them to a higher level.

Wide receiver needed and got an infusion of high-end talent with Van Jefferson and Trevon Grimes while the homegrown signees finally started improving with good coaching, and Buck linebacker got a double dose of help in 2019 with Jonathan Greenard for the present and Brenton Cox the future. UF wasn’t using a Buck in Mac’s time, so going after experienced players there made sense after signing a bunch of them in the 2019 class.

Most of Mullen’s transfers have been guys with multiple years of eligibility left. He’s not been stuck continually trying to apply one-year band aids like McElwain did at quarterback.

One thing that makes Mullen’s transfers different than McElwain’s is that he’s used them to fix his own shortcomings. Muschamp did that a little, but Mullen is on a whole other level.

Only one of two 2018 receiver signees made it to fall camp and the wideouts he got in 2019 were varying degrees of projects, but Justin Shorter is helping smooth over that issue. Offensive line didn’t net a lot outside Richard Gouraige in 2018 and John Hevesy is bringing most of the 2019 signees along slowly, so Stewart Reese helped inside the same way Shorter did out wide. Recruiting at defensive tackle was an abject failure in 2018 and 2019, so Mullen had to go get two grad transfers in Antonio Shelton and Daquan Newkirk for this year.

Here’s where things get interesting. Mullen struck out at running back in the 2020 recruiting cycle, but he accepted Lorenzo Lingard’s transfer from Miami last winter and got one of his top ’20 targets anyway when Demarkcus Bowman chose to leave Clemson in the fall. Mullen even tried to sell the line that Lingard was the staff’s top pick for running back in last year’s cycle and would only take a high school recruit that was elite.

Whether that was the real truth or spin I don’t know, but it was the first time I’m aware of that Mullen publicly pitched transfers as explicit substitutes for recruits. This year it does appear that the program left initial counter spots open following the December signing day for transfers, and the release touting transfers on the February signing day comes across as a tacit admission of that tactic (in addition to being a way to avoid complete silence on an important recruiting day).

Mullen took ten transfers in his first three years, the same numbers but in reverse of McElwain. Three entered the program in 2018 (Jefferson, Grimes, Adam Shuler), two entered in 2019 (Greenard, Cox), and five entered or announced their intentions to do so in 2020 (Lingard, Shorter, Reese, Jordan Pouncey, and Bowman). It’s not the same as Mac’s time, however, as most have already started or project to do so at some point, and the non-grad transfers have had a lot better luck at getting waivers to play right away.

Unless the initial counter rules change, and Mullen is one of a number of coaches to lobby for adjustments, UF will have to do what it did this year and undersign high school recruits to keep bringing in big time transfers. There are pluses and minuses to the strategy.

You have to do what you have to do when it comes to the dire depth situation at defensive tackle prior to Shelton and Newkirk coming, and you don’t turn down a Bowman or an Arik Gilbert who want in. However, signing 20-22 high school recruits is closer to a transitional class size than a normal one. There will always be attrition, and starting out at 22 instead of 25 only ensures there will be more holes to patch in the future. There’s a reason why most programs don’t lean heavily on JUCO transfers, who are like FBS transfers in the way they enter a program with a reduced number of years of eligibility.

McElwain sought a lot of transfers because he didn’t have a lot of choices following Muschamp’s mismanagement. Mac wasn’t sterling at roster management either, but Mullen has explicitly signed UF up for the transfer treadmill. So far it’s working, and if the NCAA gets around to approving a much-discussed rule allowing all players one transfer without sitting out a year, a lot of programs will jump right in alongside Florida.

The trick is that if you stumble on the transfer treadmill, you’re setting yourself up for years of being under the 85 limit. That doesn’t necessarily have to be catastrophic outcome, but it does reduce margin of error. It’s a choice that’s not free of tradeoffs.

The Gators have three of the 247 Composite’s top 25 players from 2018 and three of the top 20 players from 2020. All but Gervon Dexter were transfers. It is working for Mullen in a way it never came close to for McElwain.

But if other teams get in on the action too in a post-one-time transfer world, he could find the competition a lot stiffer. It’s something to watch going forward as Mullen doesn’t just patch holes but builds a transfer-welcoming strategy into his overall program management.