Talented five-star defensive tackle Thomas Holley will have to wait a year to get his Florida Gators football career started as Will Muschamp announced that Holley will have to undergo surgery that will end his season. “Thomas Holley is having surgery today,” Muschamp said. “This is all coming from high school. This is a situation with his hip.” Holley’s initial physical once he arrived in Gainesville showed where Holley had a sports hernia while in high school. So when the talented defensive lineman started feeling that discomfort again, the coaches and training staff assumed it was from that. An exam showed a separate injury, one that would need surgery. “He had a sports hernia in high school, had it repaired before he came here. We thought that’s where his discomfort was,” said Muschamp. “On the initial physical, we found a labral tear in his hip, an impingement in his hip. So they’re going to repair the labral tear and shave the bone. So he’ll redshirt this year. Our medical people did an outstanding job of finding it. Something that happened in high school and we got it taken care of. Holley originally chose Penn State over Florida coming out of Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn, New York. When Bill O’Brien bolted from Penn State for a job with the Houston Texans — news Holley found out about while participating in the Under Armour All-American game — Holley jumped ship and pledged allegiance to Florida. Holley did everything he could to stay on the field this season. He, along with the training staff, knew that surgery would have to happen but both tried to give it a go on the field and see if the pain was something that the freshman could manage. It wasn’t, which leads us to the news that Holley will miss his first season in Gainesville. “We wanted to see how far we could take it but we knew eventually there was probably going to be a surgery involved,” Muschamp said. “He just had a lot of discomfort involved, so we just decided to go ahead and do it.”
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It’s just as well he’s redshirted. It’s very rare for a true freshman to be ready tp play on either side of the line anyway. UF may be the beneficiary of that rare occurence with Gerald Willis this year. Maybe he can help improve UF’s anemic pass rush.
This guy would have played a lot this year. He is probably the best DL we signed this year and could be the best since we signed Easley and Floyd. I believe he would have been starting midway through the season. Fortunately, we have some depth on the DL.
GI-Gator What do you base your opinion on Holley on? He hasn’t played a down of college football and he would have been a starter midway through the season? You should know by now that being a highly rated recruit doesn’t mean you can play well in college. UF is the poster boy for highly rated recruits that have not been good players. Both Brantley and Driskel were highly rated, Brantley was a bust, and this is Driskel’s last opportunity to prove he’s not one as well. D.J. Humphries and Jonathan Bullard were both consensus top ten players. Neither one has been a good player. Andre Debose, the next Percy Harvin? Of the 5 stars UF has recently had, only Hargreaves has shown that he might warrant the hype. Why don’t we wait until Holley actually plays to make any evaluation . It’s no wonder that Florida fans can be thought of as a little nuts, like both Spurrier and Meyer alluded to, when they talk bout someone being a great player that has never even played a down. The latest victim of that was Demarcus Robinson, he sucked last year, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from saying he’s going to be a great player this year, has it?
Snowprint, Florida is the poster boy for highly rated recruits not panning out? Seriously? Many schools have their share of players who dont pan out, not just Florida.
VPFINEST78 I agree that other schools have guys that don’t pan out. But it does seem that UF has had an extremely high percentage recently. Both Brantley and Driskel were the number one quarterback. Andre Debose was the number one receiver. D.J. Humphries was the number one offensive tackle. Bullard may have not been the number one defensive end, that honor may have went to Mario Edwards Jr., but he was a consensus top ten player in America. Vernon Hargreaves was the number one corner. Of all these top players, only Hargreaves has lived up to the hype so far. Bullard, Humphries, Driskel, and Debose still have a chance, but none of them have done anything yet to give you any confidence that they will become great players. Maybe I’m just singling out Florida unfairly, maybe some other team has experience the same rate of missing out on guys.
I don’t know how well it supports the notion that 4 and 5 star high schoolers don’t always pan out in college, but a couple of years ago I spent the time to go back over 10 years of national recruiting classes. I had wondered why teams that weren’t in the top 10 or even top 25 in recruiting often finished in the top 10 in the final polls. Today I revisited that and found the most recent 4 year averages of recruiting rankings for Rivals and Scouts. Clemson, Oregon, Texas A&M, South Carolina,Oklahoma State all were considerably lower ranked in recruiting than our Gators (#2 Rivals, #7 Scouts) over the last 4 years. However the four year on-the-field records were respectively: 38-15, 47-6, 36-16, 42-11, and 41-11, compared to our 30-21 . The big surprise was Stanford currently number 25 average over the last 4 years in recruiting, but put together 46-8 on the field. Why do some teams seem to do more with less?— I don’t know if it’s coaching, lack of player development (coaching), signing highly ranked players that are wrong for the system, or any number of factors – Who knows the reasons why some players don’t live up to the hype. It makes it fun to watch when some do live up to the hype, or better yet, when lower-rated recruits blossom and play beyond all expectations.—– BTW, the 2nd best team in Florida last year, #10 UCF has no 5 star players – Blake Bortles was a 3-star in the 2010 class. Has UCF ever had a top 50 class? I don’t think so, in spite of having alums like Bortles, Asante Samuel and Brandon Marshall.