The 2025 season is a milestone in the quickly changing landscape of college football. It’s the fourth season where NIL was a real factor for recruits in addition to college players. It probably feels like it’s been longer than that, but the first freshmen to get recruited with the concrete reality of compensation outside of scholarships are now seniors.
The free-transfer era is even younger than the NIL era, so we are still all trying to work out what the optimal strategy is for building a team in this time. A few folks like Lane Kiffin and Deion Sanders chose to bet big on transfers. Some, epitomized in the extreme by Dabo Swinney but also including some others, choose to stay big on high school recruiting with little portal supplementing. Most coaches have been somewhere in between.
Billy Napier went slowly at first, choosing not to try to do any serious roster flipping right after his hire in winter of 2021-22. He then had a couple a large portal years as he turned over a lot of the old Mullen recruits and got largely his own team in place.
By late in the 2024 season, Napier had weathered some serious September turmoil, much of it self-inflicted, to get back on more solid footing. He had a choice of whether to use Scott Strickin’s pre-Texas vote of confidence to try to load up on high school recruits or to hold scholarships back for more serious portal shopping. No one would’ve batted an eye if he’d chosen the latter route, given that the game result after Stricklin’s pronouncement dropped his team below .500 on the season.
And yet, he chose to go the former route and load up on high school players. He signed a bumper crop of 27 recruits with just five winter portal transfers and one spring portal transfer. He did try to get another nose tackle and safety in portal with no luck, so the fairly extreme 4.5-to-1 imbalance of signees to transfers is only mostly due to choice.
Even so, it’s very obvious from his actions that Napier is strongly on the side of wanting to build through traditional recruiting while using the transfer portal as a means to fill holes rather than a primary source of talent.
It’s also clear from the roster that Napier has largely achieved his vision of building through recruiting.
On offense, 19 members of what I project to be the top two lines of the depth chart have played nowhere else but Florida. There are 17 guys who signed with Napier out of high school or JUCO, two more who signed with Mullen, and just three transfers.
The two holdovers are starting offensive linemen Jake Slaughter and Austin Barber, both 2021 high school signees with the prior regime. Two of the transfers are also expected starters, RT Damieon George and WR J. Michael Sturdivant. Likely backup quarterback Harrison Bailey is a transfer, and the only other real option there is Yale transfer Aidan Warner. There is another high school signee besides starter DJ Lagway, but Tramell Jones will need some time to get ready. Not every quarterback can compete for a backup job in the SEC in his first season, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Those guys aside, though, all the rest of the starters and backups are Napier signees. There could be some question about whether Caden Jones might pass up Bryce Lovett at right tackle, since both won spring awards, but it doesn’t matter since they’re both Napier recruits. I also am not 100% sure right now whether Dallas Wilson or Aidan Mizell is going to be the third starting wideout when UF is in 11 personnel, but again, it doesn’t matter for these counting purposes. I do have Roderick Kearney as the backup at both offensive guard spots because I think he’s the next man up at those spots either way, so adjust as you need depending on your analysis of the OG spots.
There are double the transfers on defense, but it’s still a small share. UF has 15 Napier signees in my projected two-deep, plus one holdover and six transfers.
The holdover is Tyreak Sapp, a fellow ’21 signee with the two offensive linemen. Three projected starters are transfers in Caleb Banks, George Gumbs, and Pup Howard. The other three are backups, with Cormani McClain, Michael Carraway, and spring transfer DL Brendan Bett.
I’ve seen a few people slotting McClain in as a starter, but I’m not there yet unless Dijon Johnson misses time related to his recent arrest. I still think Devin Moore is the starter over McClain, but also the next season Moore completes healthy will be his first.
There are some questions about slotting like on offense, but not many. Will Aaron Gates or Sharif Denson play more snaps at Star? I don’t know, but both signed with Napier. Who will play the most alongside Howard at inside linebacker between Jaden Robinson, Myles Graham, and Aaron Chiles? I’d bet Graham for now, but again, for these purposes it doesn’t matter.
So those are the numbers for this year. How do they compare to last year? Well, I have just five transfers in the likely starting lineup for 2025. In Week 1’s official depth chart last year, there were six on offense alone: Graham Mertz, Montrell Johnson, Chimere Dike, Elijhah Badger, George, and Kam Waites (Brandon Crenshaw-Dickson, another transfer, started most of the year). Three more regular transfer starters on defense — Banks, Howard, and Cam Jackson — meant that the 2024 starters had the same number of transfers as the entire likely two-deep this year. One extra, even, if Asa Turner hadn’t gotten hurt, or if you’re counting back-half starter Trikweze Bridges. That’s how big a change it is.
If you’re still with me by now, you’re probably wondering where my full two-deep is to look over. I didn’t put it here on purpose. If you’re more than 950 words into a detailed roster analysis piece in May, there’s probably little for me to add that you don’t already know.
And that’s kind of the point of this too. I’ve noted some spots of uncertainty, but there aren’t that many and most involve players you know. The Napier roster flip is complete. The depth chart is covered in familiar names, and there is a largely (though not entirely) experience-based pipeline established all around the roster.
There are some unusual aspects to the two-deep, like the backups at safety likely being true freshmen due to graduations, Greg Smith leaving, and no safeties entering via the portal. There are some question marks, which I discussed above.
However largely, the top 22 on both sides of the ball are familiar faces in familiar places. I have no breaking news, no inside information to blow your mind with in regards to this team.
It’s totally and completely Napier’s team, with even the few remaining holdovers having spent over three times as much time under his and his staff’s tutelage than they did with the prior regime. There has been plenty of time to address any issues remaining from a head coach who was fired in no small part because he didn’t recruit hard enough.
This is it. This is a Napier team through and through with very little gap-filling via the portal anymore. We’re all about to find out how well a fully Napier-built Florida team can compete in the SEC and on the national stage.