One of the most striking aspects of Billy Napier’s takeover of the program is how quickly he’s moved to start molding the program in his own image. I’m not even talking about the massive staff he’s assembling, though that has been as striking as anything.
He’s been overhauling the roster almost since the moment he was announced, and he’s been doing it without sparing too many thoughts for whether the pre-existing state was good or bad.
His strategy is unusual for new head coaches. You do see some new guys go scrambling for players. In recruiting terms, they have pretty much had to given the tight deadline of the December signing day.
Napier did the opposite. He did focus on the incoming 2022 class first, but he didn’t retain many of the old Dan Mullen commits. Among those he either couldn’t or didn’t want to keep around include guys who ultimately signed with powers like Georgia and Oklahoma. Napier is a terrific salesman and would’ve been selling players on something they’d already committed to buying before — that being a scholarship to UF — so he probably could’ve kept nearly anyone he wanted to.
He also prioritized the incoming class over speaking individually with players on the 2021 roster. Again, it’s a major time crunch in December for new coaches, especially those that stay at their old jobs an extra week to do conference championship games. Yet, I do wonder if he could’ve kept Jacob Copeland or Khris Bogle around if he had started working on the existing roster sooner.
Most new coaches try to keep things together as much as possible to minimize the transitional pains. Napier just hasn’t prioritized that.
Something that helped him out in this regard is that he had a number of SEC caliber players at Louisiana that he knew he could draw on. There probably were going to be a handful of Ragin’ Cajuns looking to go elsewhere after last year regardless of whether Napier stayed or left. The new one-time transfer rule made sure of that.
And sure enough, he’s pulled a pair of offensive linemen — one for the present in O’Cyrus Torrence, and one for the future in Kamryn Waites — and running back Montrell Johnson. All three of them were 4-stars in 247 Sports’s re-rankings. Two others from UL have gone to LSU and a third to TCU, so that ought to give you an idea of how deep the transfer pool in Lafayette was. Napier did a good job of getting and/or developing P5 level talent at a Sun Belt school, and the records from the last three years speak for themselves.
Elsewhere in portal moves, Napier brought in quarterback Jack Miller from Ohio State very early in the process. Early, as in, before November was even over. I know everyone, myself included, took for granted that Emory Jones would leave after the ’21 season. But he hasn’t. He’s still on the team. Neither of the 2021 signees have left either. Miller then makes the fifth scholarship signal caller on the squad.
Johnson is entering a large and growing running back room too. Now, Nay’Quan Wright and Lorenzo Lingard are nearing the end of their eligibility, Wright is coming off of a gruesome bowl injury, and Demarckus Bowman has had injury issues of his own. I get it. But between Johnson, current commit Trevor Etienne, and the second ’22 running back signee the staff is pursuing, the Gators might somehow have more scholarship backs this fall than they had last year.
It’s possible that the Covid eligibility mulligan is allowing the staff to overload at certain positions. I haven’t done the research on that because I only just thought of that while writing this newsletter, but they might be able to hold one or two extra players at certain spots if they have super seniors who don’t count against the 85-scholarship cap making up parts of the normal numbers of players at other spots.
Besides, I suspect the transfer portal will heat back up after spring practice. I mean that nationally; I don’t have any specific info about UF in that regard. Some guys will learn in spring practice that their spot at or near the top of the depth chart wasn’t as secure as they thought. Some players close to graduation stick it out one last semester to get their degrees before finishing up elsewhere. These kinds of transfers were common before the portal came about, much less the one-time transfer rule.
No matter how it shakes out, the difference between Napier’s entrance and Mullen’s is stark. Only three players left in Mullen’s first year, and one was quarterback project Jake Allen who clearly didn’t fit the new offense. UF has already has three major transfer losses among last year’s contributors in Copeland, Bogle, and Mohamoud Diabate, and Gerald Mincey could’ve competed for a starting spot. That’s already more departures than in 2018, and the post-spring transfer window is still yet to come.
There is a certain logic to the outwardly presenting ambivalence Napier has seemed to have towards Mullen’s players and recruits, given that Mullen just got fired. If the old staff had a more brilliant eye for talent, it would still be around.
But it’s also just very unusual to see too. This isn’t Josh Heupel watching a mass exodus at Tennessee that he’d have stopped if he could’ve. I don’t even think it’s Napier chasing guys off either given the reporting I’ve seen, though I do think he did cut some Mullen commits loose. He’s doing this build his way, and guys can either come along or not.
It’s a sign of great self confidence, if nothing else, and it may be a model to solve the question of how new coaches can deal with the quick December signing day deadline. We’ll all see how it goes for him this year and next.