Billy Napier’s first two recruiting classes were on the small side, so this cycle’s was supposed to be the first big blowout class. He finally had multiple years to put together a complete haul in his deliberate, relationship-focused manner.
So, how did things turn out?
In the last month, the class went from top-five to outside the top 15. It lost more top-100 players than who signed. The disproportionate number of flips away came from the defensive side, which is the side that needs more help. Napier was reduced to intimating in his presser that some of the losses were encouraged because maybe they didn’t actually fit the team’s culture anyway.
Then yesterday, one day after, the top position coach recruiter for the class left. LBs coach Jay Bateman did get a title upgrade in becoming DC at Texas A&M, though he’ll be under a defensive head coach in Mike Elko who will truly architect the scheme. Regardless, the move had former Gator great Earnest Graham, father of linebacker signee Myles Graham, taking to X (formerly Twitter) to complain about the lack of communication about it, with Mike Peterson and Brandon Spikes attempting to do some damage control after it.
In other words, it wasn’t ideal.
The events of this week put the lie to the idea that recruiting will save Napier. High school recruiting, anyway. He did get the two most important players into the fold — DJ Lagway for the offense and LJ McCray for the defense — but the class as a whole stalled out in the red zone and couldn’t get over the goal line.
It’s debatable in this day and age whether high school recruiting alone is sufficient to build a power. It can sustain one if you’re already there; witness how little Georgia has brought portal guys in. But also, even if you are on the top, you can slip if that’s all you do. See what’s happened to Clemson as Dabo Swinney has refused to portal in guys.
From a pure numbers standpoint, Napier has to go to the portal to fill out the roster. And in a win-now year, maybe that’s what he should’ve been doing anyway. It’s too late to say that was the plan all along, as the former number of commitments was a matter of public record. However, it’s the only plan left.
I suspect that Scott Stricklin has been giving assurances to Napier behind closed doors in the same way that he has in public. Maybe he essentially guaranteed a fourth season, and so Napier wasn’t going portal-or-bust to try to get the win count up next fall.
Early NSD showed the limits of that kind of thinking. Private assurances aren’t worth much to the outside world, and public ones sound like the dreaded vote of confidence. And while you can get by on promises for the future for a while, going 11-14 across your two first seasons is negative recruiting bait of the highest order. Auburn got whomped by New Mexico State but still flipped multiple of UF’s targets in part because Hugh Freeze only has one bad year to his name there and not two.
We can debate all day about the value of patience with administrators and fans, but recruits aren’t dumb. They can see a flailing program the same as anyone else. If you don’t show any progress in record across your first two seasons, it’s going to be much harder to get some players to sign on to join.
Regardless, Napier has had to face the tradeoff of high school vs. portal, and flips may have forced him onto the right side of it.
If you squint you could see some of the tradeoff in the receiver position. On Wednesday UF lost Izaiah Williams from the high school ranks but picked up former Wisconsin Badger Chimere Dike from the portal.
Williams was not a play-now prospect like Tre Wilson was. He likely would’ve ended the ‘24 season with fewer than ten or even five catches. Dike is more valuable to the project of extending Napier’s tenure because he will finish the season with dozens of catches if he stays healthy. If Billy had to pick one, it should be Dike.
Of course, you’d really prefer both: one to help you win now, and one to help you win later. If all you do is get short term rentals, you’ll find yourself on the transfer treadmill of needing a bunch of quality portal guys every year. It’s really hard to get off once you’re on it.
The express way off of it is to get fired, though, so Napier will run on that treadmill as hard as he can now since there is no other choice. He’s wisely tried to avoid it even when taking a lot of guys last year by getting players with more than one season of eligibility. I mean, you take an O’Cyrus Torrence every time, but you can’t only take one-year guys and Napier hasn’t.
But also, many portal guys either only have two or fewer years left, or they will be gone in two or fewer because they go to the draft. It does the same thing to your roster that loading up on JUCOs did in the pre-portal era. It’s a dangerous game to play, and you can wreck your roster for years if you do it wrong like Charlie Weis at Kansas did.
But you can also do it right and be Lane Kiffin at Ole Miss. That’s outside Napier’s comfort zone; he clearly wants to be a guy who does almost all high school recruiting with limited portal supplements.
It could be that the time when anyone short of the truly elite can do that has passed though, and Napier will have to, as Kiffin tweeted, adapt or die. Right now, with a monster high school class no longer possible, is when we’ll find out just how adaptable or not Napier really is.