Chris Steele’s reasons for transferring don’t really matter

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If you have Twitter and follow the Florida football program even tangentially, you undoubtedly have watched the saga of Chris Steele’s transfer play out this past week.

The intrigue ratcheted up late last week as reports – likely coming from the Steele camp – indicated that his reasons for transferring were tied to feeling like the Florida staff didn’t take care of him when he requested a room change to get away from QB Jalon Jones.

Following up those reports, twitter sleuths have unearthed tweets from Steele’s camp that indicate that they were not as upset with Mullen as they may have presented and that Steele was still hanging out with Jones well past when he was supposed to have asked for another room.

So did the staff tick off Steele and push him away? Or did Steele use the Jones allegations as a convenient excuse to bail? Well, we know what some of the Florida players, including Trevon Grimes, think.

https://twitter.com/Trevongrimes8/status/1127719729320353792

In my initial reaction to the saga, I noted it was a bad look for the staff but that we only had one side of the story. But perhaps the question I should have been asking was, does the story even matter?

Homesickness

The Gators just lost the 42nd ranked recruit in the country and a player who was going to get major playing time in 2019. The fact that they didn’t get production from such a player isn’t all that unusual. Players ranked this high flame out all the time.

The fact that he didn’t ever attend a fall camp is really, really unusual. I may be missing someone, but I can’t find another example of a top-300 recruit who enrolled early and didn’t make it to the fall that didn’t involve disciplinary issues (note: multiple readers pointed out Bru McCoy, a 5-star recruit transferred from USC to Texas. His offensive coordinator (Kliff Kingsbury) left after NSD to coach the Arizona Cardinals facilitating that transfer).

One reason that has been given for Steele’s departure is that he was homesick. That seems like it could be a reasonable explanation given the information we have on-hand. It’s also an explanation that is much more Florida-friendly than some others.

But unfortunately, homesickness still is an issue because it was entirely predictable. This was Bill Sikes’ take on California recruiting on this site back in July (note: Bill has an entire section on California recruiting in his article that is excellent).

The transfer of (2010 recruit Josh) Shaw illustrates the start-to-finish opportunity cost of chasing California/west-coast recruits. It’s not just about allocating more resources to get their commitment. Even if they pick UF, you immediately  start playing defense against programs who have a compelling distance pitch. Even if they do end up signing with your program, you have to keep the players engaged and productive thousands of miles away from their families. Historically, it’s been a costly, low-yield endeavor for Florida.

The opportunity cost has been even more than that in this case. Not only did Florida spend the resources in California to recruit Steele. They ended up with Mullen flying out to California this week to re-recruit him. Instead of doing that, he could have been out recruiting some other elite players to help build the program, or visiting some of the 2021 recruits who decommitted.

The dragging of the program into the mud by whatever the heck happened between Steele and the staff is just an awful side effect. Regardless of whether the worst-case portions of that narrative are true or not, Steele’s departure is still a bad outcome.

Okay smart guy, what would you do then?

So it really sucks when someone just offers criticism without offering a solution. And since I’m someone who likes looking at data, there are some suggestions you can make by looking at one of the Gators most hated rivals: Georgia.

If we look at a map of Georgia’s 2019 recruiting class, here’s what it looks like. The blue dot is Athens and the red dots are the locations of all of Georgia’s commits.

Locations of signees for Georgia’s 2019 recruiting class (Will Miles/Read and Reaction)

Obviously, Georgia focuses heavily on the southeast and Georgia. What you see though is that the Bulldogs extend into Alabama and Florida quite a bit. But those forays into neighboring states were strategic.

Georgia signed five players from Florida, four of whom were in the top 189 nationally, three in the top 89 and the number one overall prospect. The Bulldogs also signed two players from Alabama, both of whom were in the top-26 nationally.

What this suggests is that when Kirby Smart goes for a player in neighboring states, he goes after true blue-chip guys.

Compare that to when he goes further away from Athens. D’Wan Mathis (Oak Park, MI) and Xavier Truss (Warwick, RI) are the two recruits furthest from Georgia’s campus. They are good players (ranked 311 and 214, respectively) but they are not foundational players for a class.

Essentially though, Smart’s strategy seems to be (at least for 2019) to go after elite guys in nearby locations and expand for good players in areas he doesn’t typically recruit. This does two things: First, the top-end of the class isn’t contingent upon a player from 1,000 miles away. Second, he should be able to make inroads at schools in those locations to allow him to recruit top-shelf guys should they be available.

Now compare Georgia’s map to Florida’s.

Locations of signees for Florida’s 2019 recruiting class (Will Miles/Read and Reaction)

Remember, this is a recruiting class that ranked 9th nationally, only seven spots behind Georgia. Yet, the entire eastern side of Georgia has been locked down by other schools, as has most of Alabama. The four recruits who come from Georgia and Alabama have an average national ranking of 259.2.

Those are really good players, but those rankings pale in comparison to Georgia’s players from Florida and Alabama (average national ranking of 156.9). The same thing applies to Alabama if you look at the Tide’s recruits from Georgia and Florida in 2019, as they have an average national ranking of 80.4.

Now, you might rightly point out that Florida has a ton of talent, so some of those players are going to go elsewhere. The problem is the top-end players are going to schools other than Florida.

In 2019, there were 37 players from the state of Florida ranked in the top-300 recruits. The Gators got commitments from two players ranked in the top-100, two players ranked 101-200 and four players ranked 201-300.

Both Georgia and Alabama got more top-100 recruits from the state of Florida (3) than Florida did.

So is it a fair question to ask whether focusing on Chris Steele (and other West Coast targets) dilutes the focus near home? Or perhaps put a different way, would it be better to focus on building relationships, even for lower ranked players, at high schools in areas where Georgia dominates in order to be able to get in there for higher rated recruits in the future?

If you look at the mean and median distances of the 2019 classes for Alabama, Georgia and Florida, it does give us something to consider.

Mean and median distance of recruits for Alabama, Georgia and Florida for the 2019 recruiting cycle. (Will Miles/Read and Reaction)

If you’ve heard any of the recruiting discussion on Gators Breakdown between Dave and I, you’ve often heard us talk about drawing a circle around Gainesville and not letting elite recruits out of that circle. What the above chart indicates is that Florida’s circle is a lot smaller than Georgia’s or Alabama’s.

So were I advising Mullen and Co. on what to do, the focus would be on expanding that circle by 100 miles, not by 2000. Even with Steele included in the calculation, the Gators recruiting footprint is incredibly Florida-centric. That would be okay if all of those players were top-100 guys, but that just isn’t the case right now.

So you either lock down the state or you start poaching from Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi. Or you keep getting beat in the recruiting rankings.

Takeaway

Florida’s going to be okay, even with Steele’s departure. I said as much before any of the ugliness came with his entering the transfer portal.

I’ll still be excited for 2019. Steele hurts but Jones wasn’t going to play. If you were excited before you should still be.

— Will Miles (@WillMilesSEC) May 9, 2019

But for a staff that’s been behind Georgia, Alabama and LSU in the rankings for two straight years, this is a black eye that wasn’t needed.

And the black eye isn’t whatever narrative you want to believe. It’s the fact that a really good player left the program and it wasn’t because the program told him to leave.

Mullen said it himself when he took a shot at Georgia earlier this offseason.

I’d think we did a poor job recruiting if guys were coming in and then immediately walking out the door because it was something different than what they thought it would be and we lied to them during recruiting, or we sold them on a dream that wasn’t true. – Dan Mullen

That quote came on the heels of Justin Fields transferring from Georgia to Ohio State. It was clear that Mullen was making a distinction between programs that just recruit bodies and programs that build relationships.

But Florida just had a top-flight recruit walk out the door because the campus and program were, for whatever reason, something different than what he thought it would be. Since that definition was what Mullen (not I) set as the standard for doing a “poor job recruiting” it seems reasonable to show some level of concern.

Whenever I’m critical of Mullen’s recruiting, I’m told that his evaluations are better than other coaches. Mullen himself talks about how they don’t go by recruiting service evaluations but the evaluations of the staff.

I think that’s an issue because the evaluations from those services typically predict performance, both for a team and for individual players. But I also think it’s an issue because part of the evaluation process has to be the program’s ability to put an infrastructure around someone to help them succeed. That means that if you do decide to recruit California, that you put the proper support around the player to ensure he doesn’t get homesick or has the roommate he wants.

Lots of people were thrilled that Florida was able to pull in a top-10 recruiting class in the 2019 cycle. Well after spring practice, that class would now be rated 13th (7th in the SEC) without Jones and Steele. That is still a really good group of players, and Mullen may prove that he’s able to win big because of his coaching or evaluation capabilities.

But with Steele’s departure, that’s now more of an uphill battle than it was a week ago.

And it’s the same hill no matter why Steele decided to leave.

Featured image used via Creative Commons license courtesy Thomas Hawk