According to reporting last night, Jaden Rashada officially requested a release from his NIL. I can’t see any reason why UF wouldn’t do that, since nothing good can come of refusing to let him go.
The whole Rashada deal became a no-win situation publicly once it became known that he didn’t enroll early as planned. The reporting from The Athletic‘s G. Allan Taylor combined with things that the Gator Collective and Darren Heitner have been hinting at on Twitter make it sound like some individual booster accidentally agreed to a massive NIL deal for Rashada that he or she didn’t actually want to do. The booster pulled out, leaving money short, and then Rashada refused to enroll until he could get some kind of assurance that the original deal would be made whole.
Even if that’s not exactly it — and who knows, really — it’s probably close enough. UF and the UAA couldn’t salvage things because they’re prohibited by NCAA rules from being involved in NIL contracts. No, the NCAA doesn’t have the staff to make sure no NIL deals are actually pay-for-play deals, but it probably could bust a school or two for actually getting involved in NIL contract talks if any was dumb enough to do it openly. Besides, UF hasn’t been one to try to skirt rules ever since the probation era of the 1980s.
Florida is now the place where NIL is a mess and you can’t necessarily rely on a promise to be fulfilled. Adding “and they won’t release you if you ask” on top of that is a recipe for disaster.
I hope Rashada has a good career same as I would for any other player who doesn’t end up in orange and blue. I don’t know anything about his situation specifically, but it’s important to remember that it’s not always the players’ faults when there is recruiting drama. The adults around them are equally if not more likely to cause problems, historically. For what it’s worth, there have been reports of Rashada recently saying nice things about Billy Napier and the offense and being excited about getting started in Gainesville. I suppose it could’ve been an act, but that’s a lot of bad intentions to put on a 17-year-old without direct evidence.
Anyway, the roster is now one short at the quarterback position. Napier has said he targets having four scholarship signal callers, the Gators have three with Wisconsin transfer Graham Mertz, Jack Miller, and Max Brown. That’s two underwhelming transfers and one true project from the 2021 class.
I do think Napier fully believed Rashada was coming because he didn’t go to bat for former QB commit Marcus Stokes from Nease. Stokes was seen in a social media video rapping along to a song whose lyrics included racial slurs, and Stokes is white. We’ll never know if Napier would’ve found a way to justify keeping Stokes in the fold with talk about teachable moments or whatever, but with Rashada had recently committed, the program didn’t strictly need Stokes anymore.
From a quarterback pipeline standpoint, it makes more sense to take one from high school each year and supplement with transfers as needed. The bowl showed that Miller is not ready to start for a year to keep a 2022 signee from having to start from Day 1, so replacing a second ’22 signee (Stokes) with a veteran starter makes more sense. Stokes remains uncommitted, but it seems unlikely that Florida would go back to him to replace Rashada given how his prior commitment ended.
The best hope now is that there is some no-doubt starter out there who transfers in. It’s too late for any such guy to enroll for spring practice, so it’d have to be someone who can take over a team in the summer. It’s not impossible, but it’s not something to bet on either.
The next-best scenario is that Paul Chryst was severely mismanaging Mertz’s development, and/or Big Ten defenses had caught up to his archaic offense so much that Mertz never had a chance to reach his ceiling. I can’t rule it out, but Mertz also started two-and-a-half seasons and has 773 pass attempts to his name already. This year will be his fifth season. It’s more likely that he is who he is than he’s a secret All-American waiting to be unlocked by the right coach.
It’s still far too early to compare Napier to his former mentor Jim McElwain, but the quarterback story is starting to look eerily similar.
Each had a talented starter in his first year — Will Grier and Anthony Richardson — who for very different reasons wouldn’t stay past that initial year. Next for Mac came a year of two mediocre transfers in Austin Appleby and Luke Del Rio, and unless something changes, 2022 is the year of Mertz and Miller. Then in Year 3, McElwain banked on the highly rated (redshirt) freshman Feleipe Franks. Napier’s Year 3 might be the season of the highly rated (true) freshman DJ Lagway, provided Billy can hold onto that commitment to the end.
It’s frustrating and disappointing what happened with Rashada, but this is what we get when the NCAA makes rules it can’t enforce after having to be forced into change by state legislatures passing laws legalizing NIL. Using NIL as pay-for-play is a bad system, but direct pay-for-play by schools is still not allowed.
It’s unfortunate that UF was the first school to have a disorganized NIL situation like this, but it probably won’t be the last. Napier and crew just have to get back on the horse and do what little they can to reduce the chances that it happens again.