I have not seen a firm enunciation of Florida’s roster building strategy, and more specifically its transfer portal strategy. In general, Billy Napier is in the camp of building primarily through high school recruiting and supplementing through the portal, as opposed to some of the more transfer-heavy programs out there.
Building that way is in Napier’s wheelhouse — part of why he got the job was that he was going to emphasize recruiting a lot more than Dan Mullen did — and it still looks like a winning strategy given how results have played out. Even the transfer-heavy FSU team that started 13-0 in 2023 included a fair number of transfers who’d been there multiple years. That outfit stands in contrast to teams like 2024 Ole Miss and Miami that went on portal shopping sprees to try to peak this year but still missed the playoffs.
Last week’s Gator Nation Football Podcast (the episode dated January 13) went on a deep dive on roster construction that I won’t rehash but will fully recommend listening to. I am not yet ready to co-sign the idea that success in this era means going all-in on an NFL-sized roster construction project where you focus your time, energy, and budget on the top 55 or so players and let the rest function like a practice squad. College football still isn’t completely the NFL, and the lack of contracts (an issue they discuss on the show) is a live one for this level.
However, it would be possible to see Florida’s moves this year as, if not matching that strategy exactly, at least dovetailing with it. Taken now with some ability for hindsight, Florida appears to be minimizing what would be termed as “career backups” or “rotation guys” and focusing on starters and prospects.
UF has lost 17 players to the portal by 247 Sports’s count, some of whom are walk ons. Five have gone to other SEC schools, two to other P4 schools, two to G5 schools, one to an FCS school, and seven are uncommitted.
Losing seven players to other power conference schools, with five staying within the league, sounds like a big number for someone who wants to be a contender. And it is, in some ways, especially considering that true playoff contenders Alabama and Texas A&M each landed a former Gator and LSU got two. This is not the early days of Napier’s tenure when a lot of Mullen recruits left and the destinations largely topped out at the likes of Pitt, Nebraska, and South Carolina.
But also, UF only lost two starters from 2024 and one projected 2025 starter to the portal. The former two are Jack Pyburn, who left for LSU, and Arlis Boardingham, who has not chosen a destination yet. The latter is Ja’Keem Jackson, who missed ’24 to injury and reunited with his former position coach Corey Raymond at LSU. The other 82% of the players leaving for the portal are rotation guys or players who were never going to play much, if at all outside of special teams.
Pyburn, who came from a big Gator fan family, is the one that sticks out most, and I am going to stay about of the back-and-forth about what exactly happened with his exit. The safest thing to assume, which I don’t mean to be uncharitable to the player at all, is that UF didn’t want to pay him as much in NIL as he wanted, but LSU was willing to.
It’s long been true that employees can usually get bigger pay bumps by changing jobs than by staying in their current jobs and asking for a raise. There are myriad reasons for it, and the magnitude of the effect grows and shrinks over time, but it’s generally been the case. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t be true for college athletes in NIL/free transfer era, so I don’t begrudge anyone leaving for that reason.
So, it is perhaps most notable then not who is leaving but who is staying. There hasn’t been a single whisper that DJ Lagway ever considered pulling an Etienne and parlaying good play for a non-championship competing Florida team into a spot on a true contender. Goodness knows he would’ve been coveted on the transfer market. And while Brandon Crenshaw-Dickson was always going to run out of eligibility following the season, the other four guys blocking for Lagway weren’t. All are returning, even the newly minted All-American Jake Slaughter.
Florida’s defense improved greatly with adjustments made during the off week following the Mississippi State game. It made some of its biggest strides in the final three regular season games, however, once Caleb Banks turned into an absolute unblockable monster. Him doing so helped free up Tyreak Sapp off the edge, and Sapp got half of his team-leading sack count (3.5 of seven) and more than half of his team-leading tackles-for-loss count (eight of 13) in those final three games.
Florida Victorious offered enough to make sure that Banks and Sapp are returning for 2025. Pyburn played a different kind of role than Sapp did and finished with 13 more total tackles in one fewer game than Sapp. However, guys who can get sacks and tackles for loss are more valuable in the game of football, and Pyburn finished with just one sack and four TFL. Sapp got the same number of TFL against Pyburn’s new team as Pyburn did all season long. George Gumbs, a raw transfer from Northern Illinois who only moved to defense from tight end in 2023, had five sacks and also had double Pyburn’s TFL count.
I’m not trying to denigrate Pyburn here, as he was terrific at what he did and was a ton of fun to watch for his constant high effort. However, it’s the case that his skill set is more replaceable than that of Banks, Sapp, and Gumbs. And so when dispassionate decisions have to be made within the constraints of a budget, a savvy team will pay to keep Banks, Sapp, and Gumbs and let Pyburn walk if someone else is willing to pay him more.
Again, I don’t have any inside information about how any of this went down. I’m sure a lot of these decisions had multiple factors to them besides just money.
However, it appears to me that the group of people making roster management decisions are looking at the question of who is good in an absolute sense and not just who was the best on the team. Not doing whatever it would take to keep Boardingham is the clearest example of that for me.
Boardingham was a freshman All-American in 2023, but his role diminished in 2024 as Lagway doesn’t use the tight ends in the same way Graham Mertz did. Boardingham also didn’t progress in his blocking in a substantially large way. I can’t honestly say there was much of a noticeable difference between the one-tight-end packages when Boardingham was in versus when Hayden Hansen was in.
So with Hansen and Tony Livingston going nowhere, former blue chip recruit Amir Jackson coming up the experience chain, and, given the loading up at receiver this offseason, maybe possibly some adjustments to offensive approach, it didn’t make sense to pull out all the stops to keep Boardingham around despite him probably being the best all-around tight end on the team. It’s a ruthless way to look at it, but if any given player is not a potential all-conference performer, he is probably not worth breaking the bank over.
UF lost Trevor Etienne because he wanted to play for a contender, but Jadan Baugh had nearly identical production. Princely Umanmielen was a real loss too, but in ’24 Florida had more of both sacks and tackles for loss than it has since 2019, the last time the Gators had a defense that could legitimately be described as “good”. Sapp’s 13 TFL in 13 games was pretty close to Umanmielen’s 13.5 in 12 games for Ole Miss, and Sapp and Gumbs combined for more sacks (12) in 13 games than Umanmielen had (10.5) in 12. It’s not the same, but it was close enough.
This all tells me that UF does have some roster management savvy for the new era, even as it’s not landing very many splashy transfers. It’s easier to look savvy when recruits and multi-year transfer players are being developed well, but that’s all part of the calculus too.
Every offseason’s moves will have to be judged based on subsequent results, and no one can argue that Napier’s moves have resulted in a quick turnaround. But if you look closely, you can see a potentially heady method for managing a roster underneath all the moves. It’s up to Napier and his staff to back up that appearance with wins.