Last week, the Athletic’s recruiting podcast called Stars Matter spent some time going over Billy Napier’s recruiting success for the 2024 class. Since UF is currently on pace to have its best class since the Muschamp or Meyer days, which are getting to be quite a long time ago by recruiting standards, they thought it worth a little time to talk about how to contextualize how Napier’s doing.
Before going too far, let’s go over the class as it stands for those who don’t follow recruiting all that closely. The Gators are 11th in the 247 Sports Composite rankings, but every single team ahead of them has more commitments. This early in the cycle, teams with more commits tend to outrank those with fewer.
More tellingly for May is that Florida has an average player rank of 94.04. The only team ahead of UF with a higher average rank is Georgia at 94.44, which is fairly close to a tie. Alabama has an average rank of 95.42, but it only has six commitments yet. A smaller sample size makes more extreme results possible, so the Tide’s average is very likely to fall as it adds more players.
Getting elite talent has been a bugaboo for Florida ever since about the 2014 class, but the ’24 haul has it. A full half of the commits, four of the eight, are ranked in the national top 50. The jewel of the class is quarterback DJ Lagway, the No. 21 overall player and No. 3 signal caller. He’s showing up to nearly as many campus visits as any member of the actual UF program, as he’s made it his mission to be just as big a recruiter as the members of the staff. It’s paying off so far.
So, that’s the context for the discussion. It was also the first episode of the show after Florida got a commitment from 4-star receiver Izaiah Williams. He’s not a 4-star by much, but he has elite speed and an offer list that includes all the biggest programs from the southeast. He fits the profile of someone likely to rise through the rest of the cycle, in other words, and UF beat out a lot of competitors for his commitment.
Manny Navarro, the Athletic’s national recruiting writer and Miami beat writer, contended that the praise for Napier shouldn’t go too far. Navarro essentially contended that Billy is doing what the head coach at Florida should do. It’s the flagship university in a talent-rich state with three national titles. There’s no reason it should struggle to finish in the top half of the top ten.
Ari Wasserman, another of the Athletic’s recruitniks, did push back a bit by talking about how Florida’s only finished in the top ten of the Composite twice since 2015. A winding bit of discussion came around to the idea that maybe there are only four or five programs that should expect annual top ten finishes in the recruiting rankings — teams like USC, Texas, and Georgia, which are by far the top brands in talent-rich states — and everyone else is more contingent.
They definitely missed some things in their discussion, which I supposed is going to happen to national writers who don’t focus on one single team. UF’s recruiting slide began a year earlier in 2014, though the program squeaked into the top ten at No. 9 more off of quantity than quality. Also, one of the top ten finishes was 2019, but the class falls out of the top ten if you exclude the players who didn’t qualify and went to JUCO instead.
The 2014 date shouldn’t be a surprise. Muschamp’s recruiting was hurt by the 4-8 collapse of the 2013 season, and he was clearly a lame duck head coach. It’s hard to get a lot of elite players to sign when few who pay attention think you’ll be around more than one season.
And then, Florida hired a pair of head coaches who aren’t recruiting aces. I don’t think I’ve heard definitively about Jim McElwain as a recruiter. The story as I understand it is that he did personally work hard on recruiting, but he just isn’t a top tier closer like all the best recruiters are. He also didn’t have a lot to point to in order to re-energize recruiting after the Muschamp collapse other than, “I ran Alabama’s attacks when they won national titles with boring offense”. Mac also kept subpar recruiters around on his staff rather than replace them with real sharks.
Mullen did the same with assistants while also not putting in the full effort that’s required to compete in the SEC. He did a good job of helping turn some of McElwain’s 3-star finds into pro players, but Napier had to do a big roster overhaul that’s still not completely done to not only upgrade the talent but also the general level of work ethic on the team. That process is still ongoing.
The thing is, the state of Florida may be a big talent pool, but it is overfished. Everyone long since heard that you go to Florida to find speed, so every Power 5 program east of the Mississippi has assistants combing through the state to find it. It takes a practiced eye to find the fast guys who are also football players and not just fast guys. The head coach at Florida should have an advantage there by making deep relationships with high school coaches, but there also is a trap one could fall into of just evaluating speed instead of the whole package.
There also is the matter of there being three P5 programs in the state that all expect to compete for national titles. Texas kind of has this dynamic with Texas, Texas A&M, and then right across the border Oklahoma, but California does not with only USC being committed to high level ball.
It’s actually not super common to see all of Florida’s Big Three have recruiting aces at the same time. When Jimbo Fisher was duking it out with Meyer and later Muschamp, Miami was struggling through the Randy Shannon and Al Golden eras. Then Florida went with Mac and Mullen, and now FSU has Mike Norvell. Norvell may be good at the portal, but he has to be since I don’t think he’s a good enough high school recruiter to build a title winner.
However now, Florida has Napier and Miami has Mario Cristobal. The latter has many well documented faults as a coach, but he’s a knife fighter on the recruiting trail. His battles with Napier have been numerous and prominent.
I do agree that UF should be in the top ten every year in some sense. I also think it’s pretty clear that the program doesn’t “recruit itself”, as we once heard said. It takes a lot of time, effort, and skill to pull in that kind of class. And while Florida has a lot of talent within driving distance, there’s a lot of competition and also a lot of fool’s gold out there.
Napier should get top marks for his recruiting machine. It’d have even more impressive results if not for the advent of NIL and all that goes with it, which the coaches can’t by NCAA rule influence or control. An amateur-hour collective operation pulled the rug out from under Jaden Rashada and Napier still convinced him to sign an LOI after. The dude knows what he’s doing.
We’ll see how the 2024 class ends up, but if Napier keeps the average rating near where it is now while more than doubling the number of commitments, he should get all the laurels available.