Florida lost remarkably few players during the offseason leading up to the 2018 season for it being a coaching transitional period.
Three players transferred — McArthur Burnett, Andrew Mike, and Jake Allen — but none were going to play even minor roles on the team last year. One more, ’18 signee Justin Watkins, was dismissed for alleged violence against a woman. That was worrisome from a character evaluation standpoint, and the concern remains after 2019 signee Jalon Jones was shown the door for similar reasons.
Including two signees who didn’t qualify, Florida football is down eleven players across this offseason. That is not a small number. Here’s the thing, though: it doesn’t yet matter a lot for this year, and it may not matter down the road either.
Six players who left were going to play sparingly except maybe for special teams this year. TJ McCoy, Rayshad Jackson, and Kylan Johnson all grad transferred elsewhere to get something out of their final years of eligibility. Their scholarships were coming off the books this year anyway, and none was going to see the field much. Their departures don’t matter so much except, again, for special teams.
The other three of those six were Antonneous Clayton, Malik Langham, and Daquon Green. The euphemism for Clayton is that the light never came on for him, and he even redshirted last year to take some time to get up to speed. That light still hadn’t turned on in the spring when he fell to the bottom of the depth chart, It’s unlikely UF would’ve gotten much out of him this year, and it’s far from certain it would next year.
Langham likewise was behind a lot of players and wasn’t going to contribute much this year. Reports from practice didn’t make it sound like he was pushing the older players on the interior of the defensive line, who themselves aren’t exactly the most impressive bunch the Gators have ever had. It was only the spring of his second year on campus, but it sounded like he wasn’t likely to fulfill his 4-star recruiting ranking in the near future.
Green got a few nice reports from beat writers in 2018, and the veteran-heavy wide receiving corps was not going let the younger receivers get too many touches. Still, the fact Green ended up at Murray State suggests he too was not going to look like the 4-star he was rated out of high school on the field in college.
Jalon Jones, who I mentioned above, was not going to play at quarterback for years. Feleipe Franks still has two years of eligibility, and Emory Jones is next in line. As long as Emory is content to wait his turn behind Franks and Dan Mullen can work his magic on Anthony Richardson, the team will hardly notice that Jalon is gone.
Brian Edwards is the latest to transfer, and he was a discipline case even if the charges ended up dropped. I don’t know if anyone at Florida pushed him before he jumped, but it didn’t take long after his legal situation was settled for him to announce his decision to leave. He would have been a regular special teams player and might’ve even seen the field as a second stringer, but he was beaten out by one 2019 signee in the spring. He very well could’ve been beaten out by one or two more in the fall.
Chris Steele, that ’19 signee who passed up Edwards, is the one who really hurts. There’s no way around it, even if Kaiir Elam and Jaydon Hill (the other two who might’ve surpassed Edwards) pan out.
As for the non-qualifiers, Florida is not hurting for numbers at those positions. Deyavie Hammond was one of seven offensive linemen UF signed in 2019, and most of them, like Hammond, were interior guys. Two of the three redshirt freshmen on the OL (Chris Bleich and Griffin McDowell) are also interior guys. As long as a few of the seven true or redshirt freshmen interior linemen become real contributors — and Bleich is already on the starting line this year — Florida will be fine without him.
Diwun Black was the other not to qualify, and he does hurt a little more given how highly he was rated. UF’s official page for the class has him tabbed as a linebacker, and he probably is more in the versatile outside linebacker category of Amari Burney than the hand-in-the-dirt Buck linebackers.
Florida has Burney for at least two more years, though, and the younger David Reese (who will miss this year to injury) is a similar kind of player. They’ve got up to two more years of Ventrell Miller for that spot as well. By the time Black is coming out of JUCO, Florida would be in the situation of really needing him. Given how close he seemed to be with Mullen, the Gators have a good shot of getting Black if all goes well for him in the JUCO ranks.
I don’t like to be the kind of person who tries to redirect attention when things are not going well with the program. If there are problems, I want to identify them properly because I want to see the world as it truly is.
People have and will talk about these losses as hurting “depth”, and it does so far as the practice squad goes. However for the most part, depth matters most in terms of the starters and guys who will become starters. Quality career backups are important for helping prevent freshman from being thrown to the wolves before they’re ready, but they seldom make the difference between winning championships and not.
Steele is the only for-sure future starter lost this offseason. Black projected to be one eventually and might yet still be one. It’s highly unusual for this much attrition at once to be anything but a huge problem, but the roster has upgraded enough in the past couple of years that it largely won’t be.