“It’s me. Hi. I’m the problem, it’s me.” -Taylor Swift, “Anti-Hero”
Hi Gator Country! I hope you had a great holiday season, and may you enjoy a peaceful and prosperous 2023.
The early National Signing Day was not the triumph that a lot of fans hoped Billy Napier’s first full class would be. There could still be some lingering brand issues from the Mullen era that held back recruiting, but there are two main reasons why UF (again) sits outside the 247 Sports Composite top ten this time: it’s a relatively small class, and there aren’t any top-50 recruits in it.
The average for the class is high, and that’s worth celebrating. Of the 20 players, 18 of them were 4-star guys. And even though there aren’t any top-50 players, there are four between 50 and 100 and another three between 100 and 125. It is missing something without a top-ten or so crown jewel, but there is plenty of sparkle nonetheless. It’s an all killer, no filler kind of class.
The only guys below the 4-star level are both offensive linemen. While elite-rated OLs tend to pan out at a high rate, it’s also a hard enough position to project that 3-stars routinely go on to have terrific careers. Both were high 3-stars at that.
Every class ranked ahead of UF’s is larger except for Ohio State’s, which also has 20 commits. OSU is also one of just four teams with a higher average player rank than Florida. The average will necessarily drop if the Gators sign any players in February because very few top prospects remain unsigned, but what they have now is a very good start overall.
But for all of the positives of the class, it’s hard to get Gator fans to focus on them. Why? We’ve been down this road before.
Not this exact road, where the problem is of quantity and not quality, but the road where some folks try to tell fans that a recruiting class that seems underwhelming on its face is actually better than they think. The effort is underway; I saw where Katie Turner gave a podcast interview in which she talked about how tight and close-knit this class is. It was a way of giving some previously non-public information to make the group sound more appealing.
I’m sure that factor really will help them build chemistry and camaraderie, but also you have to have a certain number of elite players in order to compete for the hardware that the Gators are after. Barring a truly impressive hit rate out of this class, which may not even be in its final form yet, UF may not have hit that number.
The portal hasn’t yet delivered here either. QB Graham Mertz has played enough snaps that we know he’s little more than a seat warmer for new signee Jaden Rashada. Two defensive tackles that no one had heard of previously have arrived too. Of them, Cam’Ron Jackson from Memphis looks the most likely to contribute right away. However, the sure-thing starters that Florida needs to land in order to avoid another single-digit win count simply haven’t materialized yet.
I know this. You probably knew a lot of this before reading the above. So do plenty more people in the fan base.
The reason is that Florida is incredibly well-covered by traditional media, fan sites, blogs, podcasts, and YouTube channels. Lots of good journalists are on the beat, and smart Gator fans have made enormous amounts of quality content about the team over the last 5-10 years or so.
I can’t speak to what it’s like for other fan bases, but I have been writing about UF football pretty consistently since 2006. I’ve seen lots of stuff come and go over the years. Sometimes I’ve been early on trends and other times I’ve been a follower, but there’s a lot more than the “run the dang ball Bobo” stuff that you’d see from Georgia for the longest time.
My specialty has generally been analytics. I used to have access to the play-by-play data for all of college football through a past site I wrote for, and I used my statistics and database knowledge I learned at UF to do a lot of good stuff with it. I’ve also made videos, both longer analysis for GC and quick hits for social media. I largely stopped doing that because between having kids and my day job I don’t have the time, but people far more knowledgable about Xs and Os have taken over that lane quite well.
I don’t flatter myself to think I drove any trends, but I did contribute to raising the bar for Gator coverage in my own small way.
And that is why I am part of the problem. The problem, here, being that the Florida head coaching job is an incredible pressure cooker that doesn’t seem to be all that pleasant to have. It’s chewed up and spit out every coach since Steve Spurrier — including Urban Meyer via stress, though he wasn’t exactly a balanced individual to start with — and even SOS left because he felt 10-2 wasn’t good enough for fans anymore.
It’s a long-running issue, then, but the thing is, the noisier fans have often been right. They were right that Will Muschamp should’ve been canned after 2013, not 2014. They were right that Jim McElwain was an unimpressive hire who shouldn’t have stuck by his unimpressive assistants as long as he did. They were right that Dan Mullen didn’t recruit well enough and also shouldn’t have stuck by his crony assistants as long as he did.
“The fans” aren’t uniform and do get stuff wrong too, but their hit rate is getting better. It’s getting better because the coverage of the team is just so good from all directions. It’s not falling off, either. There’s been turnover in some places in the last couple years, but the new additions are pretty much all great. I’m sure you noticed quickly here at GC that Nick Marcinko is a rising star.
No one has to wait to start opining because good analytics are near-ubiquitous, every site has a scholarship chart that’s promptly updated, and there are both detailed film breakdowns available a day or three after every game and summaries of those breakdowns shortly after that.
Napier seems to be the most grounded and personally stable coach that UF has had since Steve, and that might actually be the thing that’s needed most in the job. We are all jumping the gun a bit in passing judgment on the 2023 signing class with it not actually being complete yet, but we’re also kind of not because we have consumed the research showing what’s required to compete at the highest level. We get updates from the analysts every year, and several Gator-centric media outlets dutifully report on those updates and compare the program’s past results to the ideal.
It’s getting to be that the person in Napier’s position can’t effectively push back on negative narratives without revealing competitively sensitive information. He hasn’t been around long enough for “just trust me” to work, especially since the high job turnover has burned fans’ trust over and over.
Napier and his army will keep trying to spread positive messages, and there are plenty of fans who just want to hear nice things from the program. That’s good for them, and I begrudge them not a bit.
But it’s not going to work on the obsessives, and the high quantity of terrific coverage has created more and more obsessives over the years.
It’s a tough job that’s only getting tougher because Gator-focused media in general has done a great job. Napier has seven million reasons per year to help him get over it, but it’s increasingly untenable to try to put lipstick on pigs in Hogtown.
To be clear, there is a lot to like about the 2023 class as presently composed. I am particularly excited about the receivers, especially Eugene Wilson. But it’s also not the kind of class that removes all doubts about the direction of the program because it’s on the small side. I know it, you know it, and thousands of other fans know it because the various kinds of media that focus on the program have put in years of work to set the stage for us to be able to know it.