It’s been a convention for about a decade now that coaches will have some kind of bat signal they put out on social media when they get a commit. The earliest one I can remember was Kevin Sumlin’s when he was at Texas A&M, and it’s now been a decade since he took the gig in College Station.
Coaches are not allowed to mention players by name due to NCAA recruiting rules, so guys will pick one thing and stick with it. Sumlin’s was a simple, plain-text “YESSIR!”, fitting for the way Twitter was in 2012. Commitment signals generally have become more elaborate over time, often tying into the school’s official marketing hashtag for the given class a commit is in.
Billy Napier appears to have picked one, and it’s appropriately simple for how not-flashy he seems to be as a person. His Twitter account has begun putting out tweets with a single character: the face wearing sunglasses emoji. His account has tweeted that five times: February 1st, 2nd, and 9th, followed by March 19th and 21st.
I only say “appears” because there haven’t been any actual announced commitments yet. Follow-up tweets from assistants and staff sure do make it sound like they have reeled in some big fish, but if you look at the UF 2023 class on any recruiting website, you’ll see only a single player: holdover Mullen commit Aaron Gates.
What’s going on then? I have a good guess.
Recruiting reporters from various places have at times hinted or outright said that UF has some number of silent commits, but the players want to make announcements on their own time schedules. I’m not giving you any proprietary information here, as these are things they’ve said publicly on Twitter.
A player may want to wait until the summer to make it official. His school may have an event planned for its rising seniors, and the guy might be waiting for that to announce with his teammates. He might have someone working on a commitment video or other media. He may want to do it on a specific date that has meaning to him. There are all kinds of reasons why a commit would want to stay silent for a time.
The upshot is that it makes it hard to be patient. It’s extra hard right now because so much of the ’23 class cleared out after Dan Mullen’s firing.
For all of his recruiting problems, Mullen had actually been assembling the bones of a very good 2023 class. He had the low 4-star Gates in the secondary with a couple of mid-to-high 4-stars in WR Raymond Cottrell and TE Mac Markaway. Cottrell flipped to Georgia the week after the South Carolina debacle in early November, and Markaway jumped ship shortly before Christmas. The latter just committed to LSU last week. Two others left the class in January and February, so it really feels like Napier is starting over with the 2023 class after almost completely nuking and starting over the ’22 class over the winter.
Hardly a day goes by without some story coming about about this blue chip player or that blue chip player having visited and loving the experience at Florida. If you’re going by visits, or just recruiting contact in general, Napier is making inroads with so many more high-caliber recruits than Mullen did that it’s truly amazing. The star power coming into Gainesville is something we’ve not seen in quite some time. Probably since the Muschamp days.
And yet, all that contact does need to convert into commitments at some point. It sure would be easier to trust the signals if Napier had been reeling in classes near the top of the SEC for a couple of years.
After all, Florida hasn’t been recruiting itself for a while now. People love to say that this program or that one recruits itself, but they clearly don’t. McElwain never had a true top ten class and Mullen only had one if you set aside non-qualifiers. Miami has been in the teens or twenties far more often than the top ten for a while, and USC’s Clay Helton finished 63rd in 2020 after signing just 12 players.
You’d still rather have your program be in Florida than in Nebraska in terms of locally available talent, but few recruits are dazzled by brand names anymore. They’re just so much more savvy than they used to be. Every major program has stepped up its branding efforts to the point that any recruit can feel proud to wear any logo because someone will whip up a graphic of them looking awesome in team gear.
I still have a hard time believing that Napier won’t bring in a terrific class. Too many people are saying too many good things about him to end up in the 11-15 kind of range that Mullen so often finished. Napier’s staff is also filled with too many proven recruiters not to land some big names.
The big question is whether all this effort will land UF in the top three or five or if it’ll be more like a solid 7th or 8th. The difference between the two of those is the difference between competing on Alabama’s and Georgia’s level every year and competing with them every few years when the Gators have a veteran-heavy team.
“But Clemson!” you say, referring to a recent national title winner who doesn’t land top 5 classes consistently. “But 2021!” I say, noting that the Tigers fell down into the teens once they didn’t have a future first round quarterback. No one can count on having those every year.
There is still plenty of time left in the 2023 cycle. Most of the highest-rated players haven’t committed yet, and Florida is picking up crystal balls (predictions of commitments) for a few top 100 players of late. It does feel like something special is happening.
But man, it sure would be nice if those silent commits started making noise.