The most important number to the Florida Gators football team right now is 27. That’s how many new scholarship players will be participating in spring practice. It’s an unconscionably high number compared to past years, and it’s critical to keeping the roster overhaul on track to pay off by the time Billy Napier needs it to.
Even just a half-decade ago, it’d be news if a team could hit double-digits in new scholarship players for the spring. They’d mostly be guys who graduated high school a semester early and perhaps some number of JUCO guys who completed their coursework in December.
Maybe, just maybe, there could be an FBS transfer or two. That’d be quite unusual, but possible. Florida got both Van Jefferson and Trevon Grimes in for spring practice in 2018. The former decided to leave Ole Miss after NCAA sanctions came down, and the latter left Ohio State in part due to his mother’s health problems at the time and part to conflicts with the Buckeye coaching staff. Unusual, but possible.
The ’18 team had seven early enrollees, so it got to nine new scholarship players for the spring. The 2019 team was supposed to get to ten, but it had to settle for nine because Bahamas native Wardrick Wilson’s federal visa issue kept him from ever enrolling. They finally broke through just before the pandemic by getting ten early enrollees plus two transfers (Jordan Pouncey and Lorenzo Lingard) in 2020.
The number had been trending upward over time, but it’s a massive jump to get to 27 this year. The breakdown, if you don’t follow recruiting and roster moves super closely, is 17 early enrollees and ten transfers. Both are eye-popping numbers, so of course they remain such when combined.
The reason it matters so much is because Napier is trying to build a very different kind of team culture than had existed previously. Team culture has been a real problem in Gainesville for many of the last dozen or so seasons.
It’s no secret that the culture broke down in the last couple of seasons under Urban Meyer. He allowed a rift to form between veteran and younger players, and it got really bad in 2010 when the program had a leadership vacuum due to Meyer scaling back and substitute teacher Steve Addazio not being near as good a leader as a fully engaged Meyer.
The culture under Jim McElwain devolved into a toxic us-versus-them mentality where, by the end, the players thought of fans as their enemies. Then Dan Mullen reportedly began to lose control over the culture during the pandemic, as he’s just not the kind of person who can lead a massive organization remotely. He never got control back, and you know what happened in 2021.
The only regime in recent history I’m aware of that didn’t have large cultural problems among the players was Will Muschamp’s, but there was real discord among the staff for a time. Muschamp hired offensive coordinator Brent Pease and offensive line coach Tim Davis separately before the 2012 season. They didn’t see eye-to-eye on much, which is a pretty big problem considering their roles. Both ended up fired following the 2013 campaign.
Napier is doing his own spin on the Nick Saban culture, and he at least seems to have gotten what it’s all about. Muschamp took the pre-2014 shift manball component but not a lot else; McElwain apparently loved the rat poison routine (i.e., everything good said about you is rat poison because everyone outside the building is working against you) but missed some parts about attention to detail and commitment to excellence.
Napier is as detail oriented as they come, and he’s preaching process over outcome. That’s the biggest defining feature of Saban’s philosophy, and he’s a true believer.
At Bama, they never talk about winning championships. Part of that is an act-like-you’ve-been-there thing; the last time the Tide went more than two straight years without a national title was in the George W. Bush administration.
But mainly, it’s a trust The Process thing. Saban instills a belief that if you do everything the right way, the results will take care of themselves. To date, they largely have for him in Tuscaloosa.
Napier did not have a smooth cultural transition last year. He ended up dismissing Brenton Cox and Diwun Black mid-season. Kamar Wilcoxson, Marco Ortiz, Joshua Bran, and Trent Whittemore all announced plans to leave before November was over. The wild inconsistency of a team capable of defeating eventual Pac-12 champ Utah and also losing to Vanderbilt shows that the squad wasn’t all on the same page from start to finish.
Napier talked like he expected a lot of roster turnover last spring, but the floodgates never opened. It’s just as well, as there weren’t as many difference makers available as some speculated there’d be after spring sessions were over. Some were out there to be found — hello, Ricky Pearsall — but not nearly enough to stock a depleted roster. Napier would’ve had the tough choice to either go with a roster well below the 85 cap or take a bunch of warm bodies to keep the numbers up. The latter for sure isn’t his style.
Everyone always says guys should commit to a school and not the coaching staff, but in practice that’s hard. By now, the guys who committed to Mullen and staff first and foremost are either gone or have had a change of heart. This year’s edition will be Napier’s team, because anyone who doesn’t want to be part of Napier’s team is no longer in Gainesville.
The players who want to be there still need to gel on and off the field. Receivers, tight ends, and backs need to practice catching Graham Mertz’s passes. An offensive line replacing four starters, with at least two spots likely to go to transfers, needs to get a lot of reps to learn how to play with each other. Ohio State transfer Teradja Mitchell is meant to be the new Ventrell Miller, at least in terms of being the super experienced veteran linebacker, but the only Gator he’s ever shared a field with is the former Wisconsin Badger Mertz — and that was as an opponent.
The early returns are promising. Napier has given a couple interviews recently where he’s sounded optimistic about the culture progress this year. I’ve seen where some players are talking about it being positive too. Side note: thanks to NIL-sponsored events online and off, we hear a lot more from players than we used to, and it’s a welcome change.
They could still try to do team building stuff in the summer and fall, but there’s no substitute for working together in the full offseason plan. In the case of the high school recruits, getting into a college weight room with a college nutrition plan can make a major difference too.
UF has 27 new scholarship players doing it all, which is nearly a third of the roster. It’s unprecedented, and it’s hard to overstate the importance. If Florida has something of a breakthrough season, or at least significantly improves over last year, that number of 27 will be a big reason why.