By Will Miles
Early Signing Day
I don’t like the early signing day. It has compressed the schedule with coaching changes where you have a situation where Billy Napier has to leave his team before its bowl game to take over with 10 days left before signing players.
I get what it was trying to accomplish. But at the end of the day, all they really did was move up signing day from February to December except for a few stragglers. For example, 14 of the top 20 players signed on Wednesday. That 70% number is pretty consistent further down the board as well.
Alabama has 24 commits and 22 signees. Texas A&M has 25 commits and 25 signees. Georgia has 27 commits and 23 signees. For the big boys, the 2021 cycle is virtually over.
If you don’t like the coaching carousel and the early firings (I don’t), then early signing day is the culprit. And even if you don’t mind that part of it, I just can’t believe that college football has decided to give up the offseason juice that February used to provide to have this quasi-signing day a week before bowl games.
For a sport that is all about maximizing revenue, giving up the February interest just seems insane.
Success on Early Signing Day
Of course, that doesn’t mean I didn’t pay attention to early signing day this year.
Billy Napier made sure to emphasize that he wasn’t expecting very much on this early signing day for Florida fans, then he went out and gave us some pretty big Christmas gifts.
The class started the day ranked 79th in the 247Sports rankings and was up to 50th by the end of the day. The day started with people wondering whether DT Chris McClellan’s visit to Oklahoma was going to render his commitment to Florida before Napier’s hire irrelevant.
Instead, McClellan stuck with the Gators and Napier also picked up top-100 players in composite 5-star safety Kamari Wilson and composite 4-star Shemar James. Perhaps more significantly, Napier beat out Georgia for Wilson and Alabama and Georgia for James.
That seems significant.
Kamari Wilson
The Wilson commitment is significant for a bunch of reasons.
First, he’s a Florida guy. He is from Ft. Pierce and while a lot of IMG Academy players aren’t from the state of Florida, that’s not true for Wilson.
Second, he’s an IMG guy. Neither Dan Mullen nor Jim McElwain had been able to pull a major recruit from IMG Academy. Napier did it in less than two weeks.
Third, Kirby Smart wanted Wilson. Florida is going to lose some battles to Smart (they did later in the day with defensive tackle Shone Washington), but they can’t lose all of the battles. The recruitment of Wilson indicates that the days of Smart just stuffing Florida coaches in a locker when he wants a player are over.
Is Napier going to be able to win more battles than he loses? Only time will tell. But Smart had multiple years to build up a rapport with Wilson and Napier was able to build one in 10 days. That’s a really good sign for the Gators.
Overall Evaluation
The Gators class now contains 10 commits, 9 of whom signed. The joke heading into signing day was that the hashtag #Chosenfew22 was an appropriate heading for this year given the dearth of players.
But with the signings of Wilson, McClellan, Shemar James and Chris McClellan, the Gators now have a 247Sports average player rating of 89.84. That’s really close to Dan Mullen’s 12th ranked class in 2021 (90.30), his 9th ranked class in 2020 (90.74), his 9th ranked class in 2019 (90.56), and his 14th ranked class in 2018 (90.75).
What that says is that the only thing that Napier is missing is volume.
If he’s able to fill out this class to 20 commits and maintain, or even improve, the overall ranking for this class, he’ll be exactly where Dan Mullen was after his 2018 transition class. Given that Mullen leveled out in his entire tenure at Florida, you can take that as a glass-is-half-empty analysis or a glass-is-half-full analysis.
But the reality is that Napier has snagged the high-end players who make it to the NFL more consistently than others. Even Nick Saban only had two All-SEC players from his transition recruiting class in 2007 after taking over at Alabama. It wasn’t until 2008 when his class brought in 8 All-SEC players, including 6 All-Americans and a Heisman Trophy Winner that the Tide really hit their recruiting stride.
So while I’m encouraged by Napier’s start, there is still a lot of work to do.
Top-100 talent
I’ve been writing about this for a while now, but top-100 recruits get drafted significantly more often than pretty much any other category (~40%). But it was surprising to me that once you get to the 200 ranking or so, there really isn’t much difference in draft probability or draft position between a player ranked 200th and a player ranked 500th (~15%).
That means that if you have 10 guys ranked between 200-500, you’re probably looking at 1 or 2 getting drafted. Conversely, it only takes 4 or 5 players ranked in the top-100 to produce the same 2 draft picks.
With Wilson (28th nationally), James (64th) and McClellan (100th), the Gators have three players who fit that category now. They have three guys who fit the 200-500 range also (Devin Moore, Tony Livingston, and Jamari Lyons). The rest are ranked 673 or below and should probably be evaluated more as projects.
Even still, just with these numbers, you would expect Florida to have at least two players drafted from this class. I suspect we’ll probably look back and see maybe one true difference maker from this class. That’s certainly what happened with Mullen’s 2018 class where Kyle Pitts was elite, but the rest of the class just provided non-elite starters, backups or some who never even played.
Napier is going to need to fill out the depth, whether it is with this class or the transfer portal. But the fact that he brought in three top-100 players says something, considering that Dan Mullen was only able to bring in three top-100 players last year in his fourth year at the helm.
Portal Needs
What Napier did in the last 10 days is impressive (and difficult), but now the really hard part starts.
He has to assess who he has in the locker room, understand who is transferring out, and figure out who he wants to bring in through the transfer portal.
Defensive tackle is the obvious hole. Only Gervon Dexter has shown the ability to be a difference-maker up-front for the Gators, and the three transfers brought in last year were one-and-done players who aren’t going to be around in 2022. But with the departure of Emory Jones, QB is also going to be an interesting place to see what Napier decides to do.
There aren’t really any elite signal callers still available on the board. Ryan O’Hara visited 2-star QB Robbie Roper from Roswell, GA this past week, but that doesn’t feel like it will move the needle. Whether Napier likes the players in his QB room the same way Mullen did remains to be seen.
Anthony Richardson becomes the starter by default at this point. But his injury history suggests Florida is going to need a strong backup. We’ll see what Napier does.
Counters
One thing in Napier’s favor is that the NCAA passed legislation earlier this year to allow a “like-for-like” use of initial counters for players transferring in and out of programs, up to 7 players.
In English, what this means is that if 7 players transfer out of Florida, they can bring in 7 players through the portal and that doesn’t affect the 100 players they are allowed to sign (or “count”) from high schools or junior colleges. That means there is a benefit to the program if players who are poor fits with Napier transfer out rather than sticking around.
But you still have to pay attention when you do this from a roster management standpoint. You are only allowed 85 scholarships and so the expectation is that the 100 initial counters will eventually whittle itself down to 85 through general attrition.
The good news is that there are transfers out there (think Demarkcus Bowman last season) with a lot of eligibility left. That means you get almost as much value as a high school recruit while not having the counter penalty that previously existed.
That legislation means that the transfer portal got a lot more valuable, and fortunately for Florida, it arrived at exactly the transition period when the Gators and Napier need it most.
Pump the Brakes
I’m as excited as anyone about the commitments of Wilson, James, McClellan and company. It speaks to what Billy Napier is building in Gainesville.
But I recall back in 2018 being really impressed with Dan Mullen’s transition class. Emory Jones flipped from Ohio State on December 20, 2017. He was able to get Jacob Copeland to recommit and keep Richard Gouraige and Kyle Pitts in the class.
He even got elite play from Pitts with Copeland, Gouraige and Jones providing solid minutes as starters. So what went wrong?
It was the 2019 class that did Dan Mullen in. His top recruit (Chris Steele) never played a game. Only two players have been significantly above average from the class (Kaiir Elam, Mohamoud Diabate). The reality is that Florida had more contributions from its 2020 class this past season than it did from its 2019 class.
Remember what I said above about Alabama. It was the 2008 second, or “bump”, class that set up the Tide for long-term success. So just remember that whatever happens from here on out for the 2022 class for Napier and the Gators, you shouldn’t get too high or too low.
The 2023 class is what will make or break the Napier-led Gators.
Emory Jones post-hoc
Emory Jones did everything right. He waited his turn, first behind Feleipe Franks and then behind Kyle Trask.
He could have transferred when it was clear that Trask was going to lead the Gators in 2020. He could have disrupted the locker room when Anthony Richardson played better than him and got more playing time throughout the year.
Instead, he put his head down and quietly worked to get better. Better wasn’t good enough for this Gators team. They needed a Trask-level performance many weeks to overcome the Todd Grantham-led defense, and a few times when that defense did play well, it coincided with a bad week for Jones.
That kind of thing happens. I don’t believe Jones to be an elite QB and that was what Florida needed. When he couldn’t come through and started turning the ball over, that doomed the Gators not just to losing to Alabama and Georgia, but to Missouri, South Carolina and Kentucky as well.
But that doesn’t make the Emory Jones tenure a failure, at least not to me. Because while he may not be an elite QB, he proved himself to be an elite person.
Hope
At the end of the day, recruiting is a necessary prerequisite for success. We all know it. The numbers prove it out. And the Dan Mullen era brought that lesson home to Gators fans who tried to deny that reality.
Mullen left the program better than he found it in late 2017, but just better than the McElwain era isn’t good enough for what Florida fans expect. That means Napier was brought in to restore Florida to what it is in its fans’ and supporters’ eyes: an elite, blue-blood program.
That means recruiting, but it also means hope. You have to believe every Saturday when you lace it up that you’re either going to be able to compete with the best or that you’re building towards being able to compete with the best.
That’s why recruiting gets so much interest. It isn’t that we know whether Kamari Wilson will be one of the 5-stars who turns into the next Ed Reed or flames out. It’s that there is hope that he will be able to shut down the 5-star wide receiver from Georgia or Alabama who is staring him down in a couple of years.
Billy Napier didn’t win a national championship with his 2022 early signing day haul. I mean, he has the 50th ranked class. But Napier has preached patience and adherence to a process. We started to see some fruit of that process on Wednesday.
And that means that we have hope that there is more to come.