When should Gators fans start to panic about the 2023 recruiting class?

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If you’ve been paying any attention at all to this site, you know that the “bump” – or second – recruiting class is the key for SEC coaches. The idea is that you get to recruit during your first offseason with a completely blank slate since you haven’t played any games yet. This is the true measure of a coach’s ability to recruit.

Bill Sikes did an excellent job showcasing what SEC Championship-worthy coaches do during their bump classes in an article back in 2018. The conclusions were the following:

• An increase of 8.2 spots in the national rankings
• An increase of 2.3 spots in the conference rankings
• An average of 2.3 5-star recruits
• An average national ranking of 4.7
• An average conference ranking of 2.3
• An average of 16.8 blue chip (4 and 5-star recruits) in the class

If Napier is going to follow that blueprint, there is some work to do. His current 2023 recruiting class is ranked 53rd nationally, and 13th in the SEC. There is only one commit (Aaron Gates, 276th national rank) and he committed to the program (August of 2021) before Napier took over.

Combine that with all of the high-level official visitors on campus, the emoji tweets, the “Why not Florida” tweets yet no commitments and the natural question is whether fans should be worried that all of the positive signs aren’t turning into players committing to the Gators?

Now, I am the guy who in April of 2018 titled a column the exact same way about Dan Mullen’s 2019 recruiting class. Mullen was way behind and it seemed obvious that he wasn’t going to hit a bunch of the metrics that Bill outlined above. So we should be just as concerned about Napier, right?

Well, I’m not sure that’s the case.

The Mullen Standard

Dan Mullen came to town talking about the Gator Standard. Nowhere did he fall short of that standard more than on the recruiting trail.

The reason I wrote that article about his 2019 recruiting class in April of 2018 wasn’t because he didn’t have any commits. It was that he did have commits, just not up to what was necessary to pull in a top class.

The recruits he had committed to the program at that time were ranked 365th, 400th, 438th, 571st, 728th, 783rd and 946th nationally. It wasn’t until Ty’Ron Hopper committed in late April that the Gators had anyone in the top-300, let alone the top-100.

The issue with having those players committed was that their average player rating was 87.2. That increased to 88.8 with Hopper’s addition, but that average player rating is still a class that ends up in the teens nationally. What that meant was that Mullen was going to have to hit on every single top-tier target on his board to bring the class up to where it needed to be (somewhere in the 92-93 range).

Instead, what we saw in April was a seven-man class with an average player rating of 88.8, which turned into a 13-man class in September with an average player rating of 89.6, which turned into a 21-man class after Early Signing Day with an average player rating of 89.9, which turned into a final 24-man class with an average player rating of 90.9.

In many ways, the 9th place finish for the Gators in that class was a great job by Mullen. But that finish was a bit of smoke and mirrors considering Diwun Black, Deyavie Hammond, Arjei Henderson and Wardrick Wilson didn’t come to campus (Black has since made it and is a great story, but it is telling that he’s about to contribute at a time when Mullen is no longer around). Combine that with Christopher Steele transferring to USC amidst the controversial dismissal of Jalon Jones and a large part of the core of the class was gone before it ever got started.

You might say that disciplinary reasons for players leaving or players not qualifying (or not getting their Visas) was an evaluation problem, not a ranking problem. In some ways, you would be correct. But I tend to think that those two things are interrelated: that having a lower ranking meant Florida had to reach for some players who might not qualify. Those players were also available because other schools decided to bet on surer things.

Regardless, the result was that Mullen had a deep hole to dig himself out of in April, and even though he was able to sign some good players, wasn’t able to dig himself out of that hole where the class could weather some attrition.

The same exact thing happened to Mullen’s predecessor, Jim McElwain. Mac got an early commitment from Chauncey Gardner-Johnson in 2016 which boosted his average player rating to 90.3 (for 3 commits) in April, still below where you want to be. That ranking dropped to 87.9 by September 1 and 88.8 by National Signing Day.

So both McElwain and Mullen weren’t exactly fast starters. Of course, that begs the question of whether you have to be a fast starter to pull in a top-tier recruiting class?

The Championship Model

There have been two big-time coaches in the SEC over the past two decades: Urban Meyer and Nick Saban. We might have to include Kirby Smart in that group soon (ugh) depending on how things proceed over the next few years. So if you’re going to evaluate coaches who have won championships amid rock-star level recruiting, those are the three you need to look at.

So what do we see about the timing of their bump classes if we look closer? And does that clarify why Florida has struggled on the recruiting trail with its last two coaches? Yes, yes it does.

Bump class comparisons over time for Nick Saban, Kirby Smart, Urban Meyer, Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain and Dan Mullen. (Will Miles/Read and Reaction)

The first thing you notice from the chart is that except for Urban Meyer in 2006, most of these classes were half-way done by the time September 1 rolled around. That’s significant because it gives us a solid clue about when we should be evaluating a class (and potentially panicking about what we see).

Even more interesting to me is the change (or lack thereof) in the average player rating from September to National Signing Day. Even though Saban got 14 more commits over that time, his average player rating barely moved (0.0006 points). Kirby’s dropped slightly, but the recruiting was elite in September and after February. Meyer finished ahead of Muschamp, but Muschamp actually wasn’t too far behind the standard set by his predecessor.

And then came McElwain and Mullen.

I’ve said repeatedly that Dan Mullen left the Florida program in a better state than McElwain did. I still believe that, and will say so even after the inevitable roster issues that will pop up this season due to some of his recruiting shortcomings. The reason is simple: McElwain’s bump class didn’t meet any of the key metrics that Bill outlined above. There weren’t any 5-star recruits, there were only 9 blue chippers and he finished sixth in the conference.

Mullen wasn’t way better, but he was better. He had 17 blue-chip commits. He didn’t get any 5-star commits and the class was only fifth in the SEC, but he did have 13 top-300 players compared to McElwain’s seven.

But the thing you see if you look at the table up above is that there really wasn’t much change from September 1 to January 1 to National Signing Day. Mullen did have a flurry to ensure his class was better than McElwain’s, but there really wasn’t any way to improve his class to be on-par with Urban Meyer or even Will Muschamp.

What I think this means is that we don’t need to be concerned about the national ranking that Florida has on the recruiting sites right now. Instead, I think we need to be concerned with the quality of player that Napier takes if those players don’t meet the recruiting profile of a championship contender.

For example, the top-4 teams in the SEC had average player ratings of 94.91 (Texas A&M), 95.19 (Alabama), 92.79 (Georgia) and 91.41 (LSU) last season. That means that Florida needs to be targeting a player rating of somewhere between 92 and 93 to get into that top-3 conference ranking necessary for championship coaches.

If we take a closer look at the teams above on a month-by-month basis, we see some trends that tell us when we should be concerned, or elated.

What you’ll notice when the data is graphed this way is that there is a lot more noise early on. Even the mighty Nick Saban had a significant dip in his average player rating in April and May of his bump class. Of course, Saban only had five commits in May of 2007 and lifted his rating up by August. Urban Meyer, Will Muschamp and Kirby Smart had no such dips, as their average player rating was pretty uniform across the board of their bump class, regardless of the timing.

What this suggests is that my initial article about Mullen in April was probably misguided. He still had a path to follow the Saban model, and had you looked at McElwain, Mullen and Saban in April of their bump classes, you might have chosen McElwain as the best recruiter (LOL).

But had you looked on September 1, you wouldn’t have thought that at all. At that point, the separation between the high-level recruiters and the middling recruiters is clear. What that means is you know whether you’re getting a championship recruiting class by the time that coach’s first kickoff rolls around.

Takeaway

Championship recruiting doesn’t guarantee a championship. If that were true, then Texas and Florida State would be in a lot better shape than they are and Will Muschamp would be roaming the sidelines in Gainesville with a whole heap of trophies.

But the data does suggest that championship recruiting is a prerequisite for anyone who doesn’t have Joe Burrow or Cam Newton at quarterback. Georgia certainly doesn’t win last year with Stetson Bennett at QB without a transcendent defense.

That means that we should be paying really close attention to what Billy Napier is doing on the recruiting trail, but that we should also be showing some patience at this point. Florida currently has a fairly blank slate in the class, so it can be somewhat frustrating. But that blank slate is probably a good thing in the long run.

Running back Treyaun Webb – a Gator legacy – looks like a lock after a visit this weekend. Add him to the class, and Napier now has an average player rating of 92.9. Add a guy like A.J. Harris, the cornerback from Phenix City, Alabama and that skyrockets up to 94.9.

Napier isn’t going to hit on everyone, and perhaps won’t even hit on those two. But there’s a bigger point here that I’m trying to make.

If you took Mullen’s recruiting class in May 2018 for the 2019 cycle (Ty’Ron Hopper, Jalon Jones, Dionte Marks, Ja’markis Weston, Trent Whittemore, Ethan White and Wardrick Wilson) and added players of Harris’, Webb’s and Aaron Gates’ quality, you’d have an average player rating of 90.7……or pretty much exactly where Mullen finished that class.

I know it can be frustrating to not have a whole list of commits. But Napier is likely going to have 12 or 13 commits by the time the games kick off in the fall. I suspect at a minimum he’s going to add 4 or 5 in the next couple of months, as most of the classes I looked at were somewhere between 6-10 commits by the middle of the summer.

But I don’t think the larger point is the number of recruits or even getting 5-stars to commit early to get momentum going. From the looks of the charts I’ve shown above, momentum and having other commits pushing for additional recruits doesn’t seem to matter all that much.

What does make a difference is whether a staff knows how to sell before they ever show any kind of results on the field. I say that because clearly the foundations of these championship bump classes are set early (by September 1). Your new staff is either excellent at recruiting early and continues on through early signing day and national signing day or they end up stumbling through the summer with lower rankings and having to scramble at the finish line.

Neither you nor I know whether Napier is going to be the former or the latter. The hope is that with all of the sunglass emojis and social media chatter and how every recruit seems to talk about how this staff is different pays off, and in a big way.

The data says that this is the make-or-break recruiting class for Napier. He’s setting the stage for what’s to come, either good or bad. That means nobody is more concerned about this recruiting class than me.

But the data also says that it’s not fair to evaluate Napier on the fact that his commitment list is small at this time. In fact, we should probably be thankful that it is small rather than filled with guys who make him play catch-up.

Time will tell whether Napier can get the job done in a way his two predecessors have not. But two things are clear: first, there’s no need to panic yet.

And second, knowing whether the program is on a championship trajectory is just five short months away.