Florida has added two players from the transfer portal since the 2020 season ended, and both are interior defensive linemen. First was Antonio Shelton from Penn State last week, and then yesterday Orlando native DaQuan Newkirk came over from Auburn.
With Kyree Campbell having already announced for the NFL Draft and both Tedarrell Slaton and Marlon Dunlap having walked on Senior Day, it seems likely that the Gators will lose all three senior defensive tackles from last year’s team. Campbell’s periodic absences revealed just how thin UF was at the spot to begin with, as there was a dramatic difference between him being available and not. Now, it appears that they’ll lose everyone with more than two seasons of experience on the team.
It was a position of extreme need, in other words, and it’s big that Florida was able to recruit a pair of experienced defensive tackles. Shelton was a two-year starter in Happy Valley, and Newkirk started all of 2020 on the Plains. Neither appears to be an immediate All-SEC kind of player, but those kinds of players at DT never make it into the portal in the first place.
How did it get to the point where UF had to scramble for interior linemen? To a certain extent, they’ve been scrambling for help for a while. Here’s the year-by-year story that goes back to the early Jim McElwain era.
2016
The program signed three defensive linemen in ’16, but all of them were ends. It’s never a terrific idea to forego signing interior linemen, but the Gators were decently stocked at the time.
Joey Ivie was the only senior in the main rotation. Caleb Brantley was a junior, Taven Bryan and Khairi Clark were redshirt sophomores, and sophomore Cece Jefferson was in the phase of his career when the UF coaches thought he should play inside.
But then, Brantley played well enough that he declared for the draft. The Gators would need some more help.
2017
The Gators corrected their error from the year before by signing three defensive tackle prospects in Slaton, Campbell, and Elijah Conliffe. Over the summer they took Dunlap as a transfer from UNC, though he’d have to sit out the season due to transfer rules.
McElwain nicknamed Slaton and Conliffe the “bam-bam boys” for their size and power, but Clark and Bryan were the starters on the interior of the line. With Jefferson back outside for good, DE Luke Ancrum would do some spot time as an undersized middle defender as well. It’s hard for freshmen to play much at defensive tackle, and Slaton in particular was not in shape to play a lot of snaps in his first year.
Bryan would declare for the NFL Draft after the season, leaving UF with one returning senior in Clark and a lot of youth and inexperience.
2018
In Dan Mullen’s small transitional class, the Gators signed only two defensive linemen. As in two years prior, they were both ends. One of them, Malik Langham, would later on get some work in practice in the middle after bulking up, but he transferred to Vanderbilt before playing in the subsequent 2019 season.
The Gators did, however, bring in a rare grad transfer with two years of eligibility. Adam Shuler, a defensive end at West Virginia, found a home as an increasingly effective defensive tackle next to the block-eating nose guard spot.
Florida had no seniors among the interior linemen, so the program would be set in the middle for two seasons. The lack of defensive tackle signees in the ’18 cycle was a mistake but somewhat understandable in the way that any position is liable to have a weak showing in a transitional class. Either the outgoing staff set things up properly there or it didn’t, and then it’s a matter of deciding whether to take a bit of a risk in someone without much of a relationship with the incoming staff or not.
Did Florida address the issue with its next recruiting class?
2019
It did not. UF loaded up on Buck rush ends but signed just one defensive tackle in Jaelin Humphries. He’d battle injuries throughout most of his true freshman season, and he dealt with them some in 2020 too.
Now the middle of the defensive line was terrific but quickly running out of eligibility. Shuler, Campbell, Slaton, and Dunlap made for a fine rotation, but all were upperclassmen. Conliffe would miss the year with an injury, or else there could’ve been another skilled player there.
Shuler graduated, but everyone else was set to return. The numbers at the top should’ve been okay, but there was a void below.
2020
Mullen and staff finally addressed the defensive tackle spot in a big way. They landed Gervon Dexter, the first 5-star recruit for the program since 2015. They also picked up three other 4-star tackles in Lamar Goods, Jalen Lee, and Johnnie Brown, though Brown didn’t qualify and went the JUCO route.
Conliffe couldn’t fully recover, however, and he took a medical exemption. That meant that UF had just three experienced tackles in Slaton, Dunlap, and Campbell, and the latter missed the first three games of the year. That meant Dexter got a lot of playing time early, and while promising for sure, he looked like a true freshman. The Gators were playing Zachary Carter out of position in the middle to help fill in until Campbell returned, but he’s a more effective player outside. Humphries saw the field against Texas A&M but didn’t distinguish himself and never played again.
Again, Florida was mostly fine when Campbell was in the rotation. When he wasn’t, it was bad.
2021
Florida signed an enormous space eater in Desmond Watson plus another tackle in Christopher Thomas, both of them early enrollees. The early buzz is that Watson could get some playing time if he can get into better shape, not unlike the way Ethan White earned snaps after dropping bad weight in his freshman year. We’ll have to see what sort of offseason training and spring practice is possible with the pandemic still ongoing.
If all three seniors are truly gone, then the homegrown tackle situation is Dexter and a bunch of guys who’ve played sparingly. Humphries will be in his third year, but he appeared in one game each in his first two campaigns. Lee appeared in five games, and Goods did not play while dealing with what was termed a foot strain before Mullen quit talking about injuries. Watson and Thomas will be true freshmen.
So yes, Florida did need help from the portal. One of Shelton and Newkirk is likely to start next to Dexter unless Lee really shows out. Between the new transfers, Dexter, and Lee, there are at least four guys healthy to work with. Humphries and Goods are still pending on the health front as far as I know, and the true freshmen are true freshmen.
In the five recruiting cycles prior to this year, Florida either signed no defensive tackles or got no production from that spot in three of them.
The 2016 class is a fair distance in the past, so that failure doesn’t play too much into 2021. However Jeremiah Moon from that cycle will still be around at Buck after taking his 2020 eligibility mulligan. A DT from that class would have to be either someone who was generally ineffective or, like Moon, a promising player who’s had bad injury luck. Either way, UF is in a place where another warm body with actual experience wouldn’t be a bad thing to have. Conliffe could’ve still been around from the ’17 class as well I suppose, but his career is over.
Signing no defensive tackles in 2018 and just one in 2019 was never a smart way to go. Bulking up an end to play inside as with Langham was an option, but he transferred. Humphries had injury issues going back to his senior year of high school. UF gave itself little margin of error at DT with those recruiting classes, and what little it had evaporated quickly.
Shelton and Newkirk are one-year stopgaps, as both would be out of eligibility if not for the 2020 eligibility do-overs. UF may still have to go get a defensive tackle out of the portal for the 2022 season depending on the longterm health of Humphries and Goods and the development of guys who’ve yet to play much if at all on the college level.
Mullen has made a good living with the portal life so far, and at defensive tackle, he’ll probably have to go shopping there again next year too. It’s an easy way to make up for past roster management mistakes, but once on the transfer treadmill, it’s hard to get off.