Happy Easter to all of you who celebrate. May you find joy, peace, and renewal in this season whether you do or not.
Billy Napier’s rebuild of Florida football has been slower than anyone would’ve liked. We’ll debate forever whether that’s due to how deep the hole was when he arrived, his chosen pace of the process, or some both. I would vote for “both” right now but am still keeping an open mind.
Anyway, the thought occurred to me randomly today that we have seen a very slow rebuild at Florida eventually bear fruit. It was a bit hidden in that it was on only one side of the ball, but I could see some parallels to the present era.
The rebuild I’m referring to is the post-Muschamp offense. It is remarkable how many things in the Napier’s time here echo something from the time of one of his mentors having the top Gator job, but so it goes.
There were already some problems with the offensive talent pipeline in the late Urban Meyer days. The 2006 and 2007 classes were so good and so big, and so many players from the former class stuck around to try to go for the repeat in 2009, that the cracks weren’t visible until after Meyer left.
Be that as it may, Will Muschamp absolutely made things worse. He constantly burned through offensive assistants, ensuring there’d be no continuity. He’d go a couple of years of signing too few offensive linemen or wide receivers and then panic-sign a large number of them at once. Most then wouldn’t pan out because that’ll happen when you have to go for quantity over all else.
But, when you hire someone who’s not just a defensive guy but is generally hostile to the entire idea of offense, it’s going to be rough on that side of the ball.
Jim McElwain did a remarkable job for the pre-portal era of flipping the offensive roster quickly. By Week 1 in just his second year, most starters had never so much as practiced under Muschamp. By the time Mac’s second go-round in the SEC Championship Game occurred, even fewer were holdovers.
Looking at the 2016 SECCG depth chart, here are the McElwain players all over (lines on the depth chart in parenthesis):
QB: Austin Appleby, Feleipe Franks OR Kyle Trask (not listed: the injured Luke Del Rio)
RB: Jordan Scarlett, Lamical Perine, Jordan Cronkrite OR Mark Thompson
WR: Antonio Callaway (1), Tyrie Cleveland (1), Josh Hammond (2), Freddie Swain (3)
TE: Camrin Knight (3)
OL: Martez Ivey (1), T.J. McCoy (1), Fred Johnson (1), Jawaan Taylor (1), Tyler Jordan (2), Nick Buchanan (3), Richerd Desir-Jones (3)
I didn’t bother with line numbers at quarterback and running back because all of them were dudes that McElwain landed by one method or another. These 20 names represent 23.5% of the 85 scholarship cap number. That’s a lot of turnover in not a lot of time.
Now, I’m not saying we should go back and put Mac in the Ring of Honor for this work. He did at least try to revamp the roster, which is something.
Much of the work he did would eventually pay off under a different head coaching regime that was more aggressive at trying to score and more creative with play selection and player deployment:
QB: Feleipe Franks helmed a 35 PPG offense in 2018, Kyle Trask later became a Heisman finalist
RB: Jordan Scarlett (in 2018) and Lamical Perine (2018-19) were excellent backs
WR: Tyrie Cleveland, Josh Hammond, and Freddie Swain were key members of two of the deepest receiving corps Florida ever had in 2018-19
OL: Martez Ivey, Fred Johnson, Jawaan Taylor, Tyler Jordan, and Nick Buchanan composed the Week 1 starting lineup in 2018
Even Dan Mullen’s best offense (2020) leaned on some of McElwain’s holdovers. Trask started at quarterback. Malik Davis was second in rushing, fourth in receptions, and fifth in receiving yards. Kadarius Toney came 16 yards short of 1,000 receiving in only 11 games. Kemore Gamble was a regular part of the tight end rotation. The starting offensive line included Mac signees Stone Forsythe and Brett Heggie, plus Mac-era Texas transfer Jean Delance.
Were these dudes among the all-timers for the program? Trask aside, no, not really. Taylor was quite good for three years, I’ll say too.
However say what you want, but these dudes anchored some of the better Florida offenses outside of the Spurrier and Meyer tenures. And Mullen himself couldn’t get similar results out of his largely hand-picked offensive players in 2021.
Napier had turned over tons of the offense by last season too, though he had the help of the transfer portal and one-time transfer exemption. Zero Mullen quarterbacks or running backs remained. Only two of the top ten receiving targets were holdovers, former walk-on and Gator legacy Kahleil Jackson and ninth-place Marcus Burke and his six total catches. Only the offensive line — where three-of-five starters (Austin Barber, Richie Leonard, Kingsley Eguakun) were Mullen signees, as was the backup who spelled the oft injured starting center (Jake Slaughter) — had something of a strong tie to the past regime.
As with McElwain, Napier didn’t turn his quick flip into immediate smashing success. My article about how the future may actually be bright after one more season of building went over like a lead balloon, but with time to reflect on it, I still believe in that possibility.
The catch is, the work probably will have to pay off for Napier if it ever will. The portal giveth but it taketh away too.
But anyway, there was a fairly successful slow rebuild inside the Florida football program recently. It worked out fairly well for a few years before the guy who inherited it drove the bus back into the ditch. Done well enough, the slow rebuild can work. It’s just very frustrating to wait for it to get there.