Last week I wrote up a piece for the main GC site about starting lineups for UF head coaches’ third-year teams. It illustrates a few different things well.
For one thing, it shows how bad the decision to keep Will Muschamp past 2013 was. The 2014 class still ended up in the 247 Composite top ten because it had some high-end signees, but it was full of guys who ended up washing out for a number of reasons.
Teez Tabor was great as the top overall player, but the next four were Gerald Willis, Will Grier, Thomas Holley, and Treon Harris. Willis and Grier ended up starters elsewhere after the former was dismissed and the latter got popped for PEDs and transferred. Holley was a medical DQ, while Harris transferred largely to avoid being dismissed.
That was how that class went: some guys who panned out well like Tabor, David Sharpe, Duke Dawson, and (eventually) Taven Bryan, but a lot of transfers with too many of them under disciplinary pressure. Muschamp looked like a lame duck coach, and top talent without any issues tends not to sign for those in large numbers.
The real big thing for me as I put the piece together is appreciating how well Jim McElwain and his staff did at recruiting, all things considered.
They had to step into the void created by UF keeping Muschamp too long, and the transitional class in 2015 was the lowest-rated haul for Florida in the modern recruiting service era (since Rivals began its rankings in 2002). Even so, the bottom of that class was not entirely dead weight. The four lowest-rated players were Fred Johnson (started a bunch of games in multiple years), Nick Buchanan (started two years for Dan Mullen), Rayshad Jackson (led UNLV in tackles after grad transferring in 2019), and Luke Ancrum (rotation guy for UF).
Were these legends? No. Johnson and to an extent Buchanan played for lack of someone beating them out, Jackson saw about half a season of real contribution in Gainesville in 2018 before falling out of the rotation, and Ancrum never really challenged for a starting spot. However these were not what the very bottom of Muschamp classes (excluding specialists) tended to be, which were players who washed out and were never heard from again.
When The Athletic re-rated the 2016 classes nationally, Florida’s ended up third. I don’t like their methodology; it allows for mass re-ranking classes but loses a lot of nuance in the process. Nevertheless, McElwain’s first full class was better than the national rank of 12 it got in the Composite. Ironically this comes despite getting practically nothing from its top-rated player, Antonneous Clayton.
It had nine 4-stars and 16 3-stars. There are a few disappointments here and there, but the hit rate is remarkably high. The bottom ten non-specialists include Lamical Perine, Brett Heggie, Vosean Joseph, Jachai Polite, Jawaan Taylor, Stone Forsythe, and the lowest-rated of them all, Kyle Trask.
In my article I noted how few Muschamp holdovers were starters in Mac’s third year and how he had to turn over almost the entire offense by his second season. You can see in the ’16 class McElwain’s sense of urgency to get quick help because there were four JUCOs in the bunch. That quick help didn’t materialize outside of Eddy Piñeiro; Mark Thompson played a lot but didn’t excel, while injuries derailed Dre Massey and Joseph Putu didn’t pan out. Setting aside the disappointing JUCO players makes the high school recruit haul look that much better in terms of percentage of quality players.
Of course, a lot of those quality 2016 signees didn’t look that great under the guy who they signed for. Some like David Reese, Taylor, and Perine were obviously on their ways to good careers by the end of their sophomore seasons. Many others needed help.
Chauncey Gardner-Johnson was stuck playing out of position. Tyrie Cleveland was a deep ball specialists with little other discernible traits. Josh Hammond and Freddie Swain had potential but never seemed to catch more than two balls in a game. Joseph and Polite were great athletes who were out of control too much. Feleipe Franks looked like a train wreck after 2017.
A lot of McElwain signees never hit their ceilings until after Mullen and his staff came along. Nick Savage got them in better shape, the abundance of great teachers on the staff refined them, and Mullen and Todd Grantham put them to good use. Given how players seemed not to get much better under McElwain — the best ones were good from the start of their careers before much collegiate development had occurred — the 2016 and 2017 classes probably wouldn’t have turned out as good as they have without the coaching changes.
I think in a couple of years once every McElwain signee has cycled off the roster, there will be a case that his recruiting was underrated at the time. For as much complaining as there’s been about Mullen’s recruiting rankings, there was considerably more about McElwain’s.
Mac’s hit rate among transfers, both JUCO and four-year players, is the thing that wasn’t very good. In addition to the JUCO busts from 2016, his transfer list reads as follows: Luke Del Rio, Anthony Harrell, Mason Halter, Josh Grady, T.J. McCoy, Austin Appleby, Tommy Townsend, Malik Zaire, Marlon Dunlap, and Jean Delance.
Sure there are some starters in there, but the only ones who started because they affirmatively won the job and not for lack of better options were Townsend and to a lesser extent Del Rio (he initially lost his ’16 starting job to Franks in ’17, remember) and McCoy (who was judged to be too small to play center by the new staff). The group certainly pales in comparison to the transfers Mullen has brought in.
McElwain’s distinctive strength was in finding 3-stars who had high ceilings. He signed a lot of those, and it enabled Mullen to win 10+ games in both his first two seasons. More than half of the projected 2020 starters who were McElwain recruits are former 3-star guys.
But in making that recognition, we’ll also need to maintain perspective. No one wins SEC or national titles on the strength of surprisingly good 3-star players. Conditioning was still a disaster, practices didn’t involve drilling things with attention to detail, and the offense tailed off after the pregame scripts ran out. There’s a reason Mac is in the MAC and Mullen is in Gainesville.
We can acknowledge something McElwain did well that was underappreciated at the time without forgetting all the reasons why it was a good decision to replace him so quickly.