Much has been made about Billy Napier as a judge of talent. Part of his promise as a head coaching candidate was that he would improve the recruiting, and he has done that. But putting together a good team is about more than just collecting star ratings.
A number of Florida’s best players last season were first-year Gators. All-American O’Cyrus Torrence obviously is the headliner, but fellow transfer from Napier’s Louisiana, Montrell Johnson, also earned a starting role. Ricky Pearsall came in over the summer and immediately became the team’s best receiver. Jalen Kimber was solidly in the corner rotation too.
Not every transfer was an immediate-impact kind of player. Kamryn Waites was always going to be a long-term developmental type, as he didn’t even play football in high school, and his rawness showed in the bowl game. Jack Miller also didn’t set the world on fire in the bowl either, though to be fair he’d missed significant time to injury and was down several of the team’s best pass targets.
For being a transitional class, the 2022 group of high school recruits had plenty of contributors. It’s encouraging in particular that it was a clean sweep at the top in terms of ready-to-go guys.
All of the top five players had impacts. Kamari Wilson was the jewel of the class as a borderline 5-star who broke the IMG curse. He played plenty, including a pair of starts, and looked reasonably good despite some of the first-year issues that all defensive backs tend to have. Shemar James was a standout as a rangy outside (but not edge) linebacker that the team hasn’t really had in a while. Chris McClellan was playing starter-caliber snaps by the end, Trevor Etienne was electric as the lightning to Johnson’s thunder, and Devin Moore was a regular presence before going down to injury five games in.
James was a Mullen commit before decommitting and then re-committing, and McClellan actually committed to the interim staff between Mullen’s dismissal and Napier’s hiring. The new boss did have to work to recapture James and hold off late charges for McClellan, especially from home-state school Oklahoma. Getting those two guys signed was a win for Napier, even as he had a built-in advantage that each had previously taken the big mental step of publicly committing to the program.
The final two blue chip guys in the class, Tony Livingston and Jamari Lyons, didn’t really have a chance to contribute. Livingston wasn’t even on the team, as he took a grayshirt year and didn’t start classes at UF until this month. Napier has deemed him a “developmental” prospect, so he probably wouldn’t have seen the field much had he enrolled last year. Lyons was behind a number of veterans at nose tackle plus McClellan, whose immediate emergence didn’t leave much room in the rotation in the middle.
The top two 3-stars by rating did contribute as well. Jack Pyburn started playing on the edge following Brenton Cox’s dismissal, and Caleb Douglas saw varying amounts of playing time as the availability of veteran wideouts came and went. I’m not sure Pyburn did much to distinguish himself, but some real game playing time gave him an idea of what to expect going forward. Douglas has real potential, but he needs to build some more strength to keep from having DBs break up as many of his catches as happened late in the year.
The last of the class to make a real impact was safety Miguel Mitchell, who saw increasing amounts of snaps towards the end of the season. Like Wilson, he looked like a true freshman, and there is a reason why Wilson saw more playing time early than he did. However, I liked what I saw of Mitchell when I wasn’t noticing obvious areas that needed refinement.
Now, most of the rest of the class essentially didn’t play at all. Trey Smack did find a role doing kickoffs, and JUCO transfer WR Thai Chiaokhiao-Bowman got a decent amount of of relatively unremarkable work in. But mostly, the rest were buried on the depth chart.
It’s these guys that I think will determine a lot of Napier’s legacy going forward. He has been able to get some coveted recruits, and his first crop of transfer portal findings were largely successful.
The same could be said of Mullen in the initial stages, though, as his first recruiting class had four top-100 players and his second had four more. His early transfers of Van Jefferson, Trevon Grimes, Adam Shuler, and Jonathan Greenard all turned out nicely.
It wasn’t smooth sailing for all of those prized recruits. Justin Watkins from 2018 left the team to avoid a dismissal after multiple arrests in his first offseason, and Chris Steele from 2019 famously transferred after his first spring. Nothing of the sort has yet happened with Napier’s top signees yet.
The bottom ten from those two classes are full of a lot of tales of woe. The ’18 class did have Evan McPherson down there, as kickers never get rated highly, and Dante Zanders did start last year after a long and winding road to get there. The rest consists of medical DQs (Randy Russell, Noah Banks), a dismissal (John Huggins), and transfers both early (Malik Langham, Chris Bleich, Iverson Clement) and recent (David Reese, Griffin McDowell).
The bottom ten of ’19 fared better with Jaydon Hill, Ethan White, and Kingsley Eguakun in the ranks. It too includes transfers both early (Dionte Marks, Chester Kimbrough, Jesiah Pierre) and recent (White, Trent Whittemore) plus some career backups (Will Harrod, Riley Simonds, Ja’Markis Weston).
Setting aside the two 2022 JUCO transfers who didn’t even get ratings (Chiaokhiao-Bowman, Jordan Herman), the early story of Napier’s transitional class is similarly bifurcated. Douglas and Mitchell played more as the year went on, and Smack found a niche on kickoffs.
Only three of the other seven players even appeared in a game, however. Two, offensive linemen Christian Williams and Jalen Farmer, only appeared against FCS Eastern Washington and in the South Carolina blowout. TE Arlis Boardingham made his debut when UF was severely shorthanded in the Vegas Bowl. Andrew Savaiinaea, David Conner, Max Brown, and Hayden Hansen all never appeared. Conner was on the injury list for the first few weeks of the season, but he was always a strong redshirt candidate.
Conner was a Mullen commit and a Hevesy special who, according to 247, only had other P5 offers from Arizona and Maryland. Napier’s staff kept him instead of inviting him to look elsewhere, so they must’ve seen something in him too. I’m not sure they would’ve really pursued him if he wasn’t already committed, though. And then Brown and Hansen were pretty explicitly projects. Brown was a flip from Jim McElwain’s Central Michigan with a lot of baseball delivery to excise from his passing motion, and Hansen is a primarily blocking tight end who Napier flipped from Louisiana after coming to Gainesville.
So, some of the guys played, some didn’t, and some were miles from being ready.
I don’t know if any of these guys will pan out or not. I don’t even know if the guys who played last fall will continue their progress; 2018 signee Trey Dean never again seemed as promising as he did in the 2019 offseason.
What I do know is that Napier is not just gunning for highly rated guys. He has also spent scholarships on players that no one else in Florida’s weight class appeared to want. That was less the case with the 2023 haul, though there still were a couple whose best other offers were around the middle-of-the-pack SEC teams.
UF is not yet on track to have the quality depth of a Georgia or Alabama based on recruiting ratings alone. The only way it can get there soon is if these diamonds in the rough really polish up nicely.