On the February National Signing Day of 2018, Dan Mullen admitted that his first team was not going to be full up on scholarship players. “We’re not going to be at 85 next fall,” he said, “but that’s partly by design. We’re going to have a full year with this staff to go recruit. We weren’t going to take players who we weren’t sure would fit our program just to take a roster spot.”
UF officially hired Mullen on November 27, 2017. The first NSD was December 20, barely more than three weeks later. He largely used that time to shore up the commitments the team already had and pursue Emory Jones.
The Gators took 20 letters of intent, but by the time Mullen was talking about not getting to 85, the class was already at 19. Almost a month earlier, Florida’s medical staff discovered a heart condition that ended the career of December signee and early enrollee Randy Russell. In the summer of 2018, the class dropped to 18 after Justin Watkins was arrested for domestic battery and subsequently dismissed.
As far as this year goes, there was one more departure that was preordained. JUCO transfer Noah Banks arrived in Gainesville as a redshirt junior in 2018, so we knew he would be gone by the 2020 season even before his epilepsy and vertigo cut his career short.
Mullen’s transitional class has continued to take hits over time. Malik Langham entered the transfer portal last April after being buried on the depth chart during spring practice. Florida dismissed John Huggins shortly before the 2019 season began after what was not his first off-field issue. Chris Bleich oddly left the team in early November, and Lucas Krull elected to seek more playing time after the season ended.
That means there are only 13 players left from Mullen’s first signing class, and several are still real unknowns. Iverson Clement, Andrew Chatfield, David Reese, Dante Lang, and Griffin McDowell have all played sparingly. Reese missed 2019 to injury, and Lang I think has played the most of any of them as a specialty blocking tight end. UF could use some of these guys stepping up, especially Chatfield. Clement might replace some of Lamical Perine’s skill as a receiver from the running back spot, but I don’t know how well he can pass block.
We’ll see how it goes, but it doesn’t appear that Lang or McDowell will do a whole lot this fall. McDowell suffered a setback after missing 2019 spring practice following a scooter accident, but he’s not made any waves since. He did appear in every game in ’19, as did Lang, but I’ve not detected the first whisper of optimism that McDowell could win a starting job this year despite his position of center coming open. Lang is a good distance behind Kyle Pitts in the tight end pecking order, and Keon Zipperer figures to pass him up this year.
The 2018 class should be rising to prominence in 2020 with it being the players’ third year on campus. However, we can only feel confident about six of them being starters: Jacob Copeland, Richard Gouraige, Pitts, Amari Burney, Dameon Pierce, and Evan McPherson. Even then, McPherson is a specialist, and it’s unclear whether Burney will remain at linebacker or move back to star. Trey Dean has started a bunch of games, but his failed experiment at star puts his status in doubt. He might start if he’s willing to move to safety, but he won’t beat out Marco Wilson or Kaiir Elam if he wants to stay at outside corner.
All I can say after all of this is thank goodness for Mullen’s decision not to fill up the ’18 class and his ability to attract high-level transfers.
Last fall camp, 5-star DE/Buck Brenton Cox decided to make the jump from Georgia to Florida. Miami 5-star running back Lorenzo Lingard then decided to move to Gainesville shortly after the new year. Just recently, WR Justin Shorter and his 5-star pedigree left Penn State for UF.
It’s unclear how many of those guys will play this year. Cox definitely will be eligible after sitting out a transfer season in 2019. Lingard has a family illness case that he’ll make, while a lawsuit about player hazing at Penn State may turn out to be the key to Shorter getting his waiver approved.
If all three get to play, it’ll be a huge shot in the arm to the team. Cox already figured to replace Jonathan Greenard as the requisite terror off the edge. Lingard will make it so Pierce doesn’t have to do everything alone, while Shorter could add a playmaker to a receiver room that’s down four key players from a year ago. Both Lingard and Shorter are something of unknowns since injuries, and poor development coaching in Shorter’s case, have stunted their careers. If the recruiting services weren’t terribly off, they will be impact players whenever they become eligible.
I do wonder how things would’ve been different had those three somehow signed with Florida straight out of high school in 2018. Obviously the recruiting narrative would’ve been different had Mullen landed three 5-stars in his first class. I also wonder if having that kind of tailwind would lead him to take fewer academic risks with his ’19 class. Alas, that scenario wasn’t on the table at all. According to what I can find on recruiting sites, Florida was never really in the running for Cox or Lingard and didn’t seriously recruit the New Jersey native Shorter at all.
But, you never know with these things at the time, and sometimes serendipity takes over. For instance had any of the three 2019 non-qualifiers made it into school, or if Arjei Henderson had gone to JUCO instead of a 4-year FCS school, or if Wardrick Wilson didn’t have a federal visa issue preventing his enrollment, UF wouldn’t have had a free initial counter to use on Cox in 2019. The Gators wouldn’t have been able to take him until January, and I doubt he would go for that. He probably would’ve picked another school instead.
That said, is (probably) one year of Cox more valuable than multiple of Henderson, Wilson, Diwun Black, or Deyavie Hammond? It’s impossible to say. The current scuttlebutt on Wilson is that he may never get to play college football because of the visa thing, and Henderson and Hammond almost certainly would’ve redshirted last year. Black was the most likely of them to play as a true freshman, but for now, he’s saying all the right things that would indicate he’ll sign with UF again out of JUCO. Florida may yet get something out of him, and at the moment, the program doesn’t have anyone else at edge rusher near as good as Cox projects to be during this fall specifically.
All told with the benefit of hindsight, Mullen’s choice not to fill up the 2018 class looks like a good one. He was able to use the transfer portal to backfill three of the four empty spots with guys who signed elsewhere in 2018, and all of them are 5-stars to boot. He made some mistakes with academic risks in 2019, but he appears to be correcting that now in 2020. There are some steps forward and backward, but overall recruiting momentum is headed in the right direction.