State of Recruiting: Is Florida destined to be more like Clemson or Michigan?

For all the success Florida has had on the field the past two seasons – and there’s been a lot of it – there is one thing that divides the fan base.

Recruiting.

The de-commitment of WR/RB Brashard Smith from the Gators on Friday should be a non-story. He’s not a 5-star, can’t miss recruit (he’s ranked 356th nationally). He was the eighth highest rated commit (out of 13) that Florida had. And if he was pushed out later because Mullen found a better recruit, fans wouldn’t have batted an eye.

The reason it isn’t a non-story has nothing to do with Smith. It has to do with Trey Sanders, Demarkcus Bowman and Avantae Williams. It has to do with the fact that Georgia is a recruiting dynamo that doesn’t seem to be slowing down.

And it has to do with the fear that while 10-3 and 11-2 seasons are nice, the Gators Standard – and let’s be clear, that standard is national championships – is likely going to be out of reach until the coaches are able to target and land multiple elite-level classes.

And so that’s where the angst comes from. All fans want what is best for the program, there just is real concern from both sides.

The recruitniks are certain that Georgia is going to win and win big if Florida can’t get their act together in a big way on the trail. The player development supporters are certain that the recruitniks are going to run Mullen out of town before he has a chance to build a proven winner.

There are two other programs that have recruited at what would be considered sub-standard for a consistent champion: Clemson and Michigan. While Clemson was able to build up to multiple championships and cast aside the recruiting giant in its conference (Florida State), Michigan hasn’t been able to get by Ohio State and even seems to be moving in the opposite direction.

Florida fans are staring at both of those possibilities, with Georgia the behemoth standing in the way in the East. So the question is really pretty simple: is Florida destined to be more like Clemson? Or more like Michigan?

Current State of Recruiting

It’s Groundhog Day for Florida fans at this point in recruiting and we’re all Bill Murray.

We know by now the level that a Mullen-led Florida program will recruit at. He’s brought in classes ranked 14th, 9th and 9th in his first three seasons in Gainesville. The 247Sports average player ratings for each class have been 90.75, 91.06 and 90.70.

With the de-commitment of Smith on Friday, what’s the Gators 247Sports average playing rating now in early May? 90.72.

Even more, last year at this point, Mullen had 10 commitments with an average player ranking of 282.4 and a 247Sports rating of 91.33. This year, the average player ranking is 289.1.

Again, this shouldn’t surprise us if we paid any attention to Mullen’s track record at Mississippi State.

Certainly there’s a lot more variability in his recruiting at Mississippi State than there has been at Florida thus far, but that isn’t a slow build. He basically established a level of recruiting in his first season and maintained that throughout. He certainly “showed it on the field” as well, as Mississippi State had two nine-win seasons and a 10-win season, but that didn’t translate into significantly more success on the recruiting trail.

Now he’s doing the exact same thing at Florida.

The Gators have gone 10-3 and 11-2, winning most of the games that they should. They have had functional offenses and defenses, the strength program is no longer Planet Fitness and the recruiting is significantly better than it was under Jim McElwain.

The winning has definitely increased Florida’s visibility with recruits, but thus far, it hasn’t really translated into an overall tick-up in the numbers. It may be that we never see that uptick.

So the question then is, will Mullen be able to win big with the players he has brought in?

Clemson and Michigan Comparison

If you’ve followed Florida recruiting at all recently, you’ve likely heard a fan cite Clemson as an example of what Mullen is building at Florida.

I have some real issues with that example, not the least of which is that the Tigers play in what my friend Bill Sikes has dubbed the Almost Competitive Conference.

But there’s another team you have to cite if you’re going to point to Clemson as a potential outcome: the Michigan Wolverines.

In the six years prior to its national championship appearance in 2015, Clemson had an average national recruiting ranking of 16.2. Michigan was at 15.7. More than that, both teams’ major competition (as far as recruiting goes) had average class ranks of 5.3 (Florida State) and 5.7 (Ohio State).

So why was Clemson able to overcome a Florida State program that won a national championship in 2013 but Michigan has been unable to overcome its Ohio State counterpart that won its last championship in 2014?

One word: Quarterback.

Here’s a list of the players who took the majority of the snaps at QB for Michigan and Ohio State from 2015-2019 as well as their career passer ratings. Ohio State has not only had more talent every year, but they’ve had the better QB every year as well. This is particularly true when you factor in running, as every single player on Ohio State’s list had more running ability than Michigan.

So what about Clemson and Florida State?

The 6-7 2010 season – which almost got Dabo Swinney fired – included the Kyle Parker experiment. And while Cole Stoudt got the most snaps in 2014, that was only because Deshaun Watson tore his ACL. Other than that, Clemson had a high-level QB at the helm in Watson or Tajh Boyd

When facing a decent QB (E.J. Manuel and Everett Golson), Clemson was able to get the ‘Noles. They weren’t able to get them during the Jameis Winston era, even when Winston was suspended for his infamous shouting incident.*

*I mean, Winston was dressed on the sideline pretending he was going to play, so maybe that psyched Clemson out?

Boyd was a 5-star recruit. Watson was a really high 4-star (ranked 42nd nationally). O’Korn, Speight and Rudock were all 3-star recruits. Harbaugh finally got his 5-star recruit in Patterson, an Ole Miss transfer. But Patterson was just above average rather than great, and the Wolverines also ran up against a buzz-saw of first-round picks in Columbus (Haskins, Burrow and Fields).

I think you can laud Swinney for bringing in Boyd and Watson and you can certainly criticize Harbaugh for not being able to identify (or develop) a truly elite signal-caller, but I think this shows that if you have an elite QB you can close a significant talent gap.

Value of QBs in the SEC

The same trend is observed if you look at high-level programs in the SEC.

You can make the SEC Championship Game if you have less than elite recruiting. But winning it without top classes has been difficult in the past decade.

Just looking at the recruiting rankings the four years’ prior of the teams who won and lost the SEC Championship Game shows this correlation. Obviously, having Alabama in these numbers does skew it a little bit since the Tide are almost always first in recruiting, but they are also winning the conference because of it.

In fact, only once in the last decade has a team with a worse recruiting profile won the game: 2011 LSU. Those Tigers beat Georgia with a national recruiting average of 7.8 to the Bulldogs 7.3, so it was pretty close. The difference was that LSU caught Aaron Murray in his worst season at Georgia (QB rating of 146.4) while somehow getting the best out of Jarrett Lee (152.0).

More interesting to me is the QB passer rating of the winners. We often think of Alabama as being a defensive team with a bunch of game managers behind center until recently, but that isn’t really true.

But Blake Sims had a QB rating of 157.9 in 2014. A.J. McCarron had a career QB rating of 162.5. Even Jake Coker had a QB rating of 147.0 in 2015 leading the Tide to the championship.

And if we look at years when Alabama wasn’t able to make the championship game, it was QB play that tripped them up against teams that had less talent. Cam Newton lit up the Tide in the Iron Bowl in 2010. McCarron went 16-28 for 199 yards and a pick against LSU in 2011 (prior to torching them in the championship game). Jarrett Stidham dominated Jalen Hurts for Auburn in 2017. And the Burrow/Tagovailoa battle last year was fun to watch, but clearly was won by Burrow.

Again, I think the message is pretty clear. The way to close the talent gap is to have elite QB play.

Takeaway

This is important for Florida because the Gators are facing a significant talent gap versus Georgia.

After going 8-4 against Georgia from 2005 to 2016, Florida has now dropped three straight to the Bulldogs. Dan Mullen is 0-2 against Georgia, and despite only losing by a touchdown last season, that game wasn’t really that close.

I think most fans (even Georgia ones) are convinced Mullen is better on game days. The problem is that Florida hasn’t out-recruited the Bulldogs since 2013 (based on 247Sports team rankings). And if you look at four-year moving averages of the recruiting rankings, it becomes pretty easy to see why Georgia has won the last three tilts.

From 2008 to 2014, Florida had slightly more talented teams. It wasn’t a ton, but it was enough to tilt the odds in the Gators direction, allowing them to go 4-3 in that timespan, but with an average score of 30-20. The talent level was roughly equal in 2015 but Georgia took the lead and continued widening the talent gap from 2016 until now. That’s a big reason why the Gators are 1-3 in the last four meetings with an average score of 15-28.

The Gators come into 2020 with a national recruiting average of 10.7 compared to 1.3 for Georgia. The past three years, Jake Fromm has been the better QB coming into the game and has shown it on the field. Combine that with the talent gap and the games haven’t been close.

But that changes this year. Jamie Newman has a lot of physical skills, but there are significant questions about whether he is going to be able to lead them where Georgia did not. Those questions are even more prominent with Georgia having to replace nine starters on offense and break in new offensive coordinator Todd Monken without any spring practice.

Florida has Kyle Trask coming back in 2020. Trask had an good year in 2019, with a passer rating of 156.1 and reasons to believe he has what it takes to turn it up a notch or two. That certainly is better than the rating of 145.3 that Newman put up last season.

But Trask’s good year is also why some in the fan base are clamoring to see what Emory Jones can do. If Mullen is going to recruit at the level that he is currently recruiting at, he is going to have to get special QB play, not just adequate or even good QB play.

But that’s really the problem with comparing him to Dabo Swinney and Clemson. Swinney brought in two top-flight QBs who kept Clemson afload when the overall talent was lacking.

Mullen has brought in QBs with national rankings of 85th (E. Jones), 306th (J. Jones, dismissed), 201st (Richardson) and 175th (Del Rio). Meanwhile, Georgia is bringing in QB Brock Vandagriff next year, the 12th ranked recruit.

Unfortunately, that story sounds a lot more like the Michigan story than the Clemson one.

The Gator Gang Gets the Groceries

Last year while we were on a family stroll, I asked my then 10-year-old daughter Amelia if she would be interested in writing a book with me. It was really just a throwaway comment; an idea just tossed out there during the walk, but never expecting it to actually materialize (mostly because of my laziness).

But the next afternoon when I got back from work, she already had a sketch of her characters. She then painstakingly wrote the story and put up with me as we went through a computer crashing, outsourcing the final illustrations and loading it up on Amazon.

But the book is finally published and available for purchase.

It tells the story of three gators – whose personalities are based on her and her two younger brothers – and how they fail individually but are able to work together to dodge a bulldog from Georgia, a coon hound from Tennessee and a Tiger from Louisiana.

She started writing the story prior to any of the coronavirus craziness that has gripped our world recently, but I love that we’re releasing the book right in the middle of the pandemic because nothing would please her more than to impact others to work together when it is easier to blame and judge others.

There’s something really special about seeing your child’s drive to succeed. Her mother and I are proud of her not because of this finished product, but because she had the bravery to tell her story and put it out there for her father’s audience.

We’d be honored if you’d buy a copy to support her. I assure you, she’s a better writer than I am.

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