Is Florida stagnant?

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“This is a Dan Mullen Recruiting class.”

I made that statement on last week’s episode of Gators Breakdown and a few fans reached out to say I was being unfair. Their contention was that I was putting too much emphasis on the Jaden Rashada saga and that Napier has made overall improvements even if recruiting isn’t where we want it to be.

Perhaps the most interesting criticism I received was that I was being purposefully negative “for clicks.” That amuses me for two reasons. First, experience has taught me that you definitively don’t get clicks by being negative about the program. Check out any of the mainstream Gator publications and you’ll figure out really quickly that they error on the side of being positive.

But second, I hope that Napier really has made overall improvements in recruiting. I am a Florida alum and fan and I want the program to thrive. The problem is that when I look at the numbers, I don’t see any substantial improvement to justify that hope. And since this website isn’t close to my main source of income, I’m incentivized to tell you the truth rather than what generates clicks.

If you’re lost in the woods, a map doesn’t help you if you have no idea where you are. First you have to determine where you are so that you can determine a path to get out. So let’s take a look and find out where we are on the map before deciding to move forward.

The Sikes Standard

One of the pieces published on this site that I’m most proud of – and reference the most – wasn’t written by me. Back in 2018, colleague Bill Sikes looked at SEC coaches and what it took in their second, or “bump”, recruiting class to eventually win the conference. What he found was 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-chips (4 or 5-star recruits)

That was the reason that I was perceived as negative when it came to Mullen’s second recruiting class. I gave it a solid ‘B’, but also stated that Kirby was going to have to keep calling ill-advised fake punts if Mullen couldn’t raise his recruiting to an ‘A’ level. Now that Kirby is sniffing out fake punts and calling timeouts prior in playoff games, that’s the level Florida needs.

But it isn’t what Florida is getting with Napier. In fact, Florida hasn’t gotten that in a while, which we see if we look at Florida’s last three coaches and their bump classes compared against the Sikes Standard.

So tell me again how this recruiting class is different than Mullen’s?

Yes, there is a higher player rating overall (91.87 vs. 90.56), but the national ranking is worse (13th to 9th), as is the conference ranking (6th to 5th). They both have the exact same number of blue chip recruits and fail to reach the standard everywhere else. And because just about every blue chip player out there signed in December, there isn’t much room to move anywhere but down by making additions prior to the February signing day.

There is more green in the Jim McElwain column, but that’s because his transition class was so poor. This is now essentially three straight Florida coaches with very similar results.

Grade Inflation

But there’s something else to consider here as well. When Bill was putting together his research, a blue-chip recruit was essentially a top-300 player. Consider that in 2007, Mike Pouncey was the 279th overall player in the country, but was considered a 3-star (i.e. non blue-chip) prospect.

This grade inflation has continued over the years for two reasons. First, I do think high school players are getting better as time goes on. But the other reason is that because it’s exciting to announce that you’ve signed a 4-star player and since a guy ranked 400th has about the same chance of succeeding as a guy ranked 300th, there’s little incentive not to extend out those rankings.

But the result is that “blue-chip” in 2023 doesn’t mean the same thing as in 2005, or even 2020. The past four years, the lowest blue-chip in the 247Sports composite has had the following national ranking:

• 2020 – 373
• 2021 – 400
• 2022 – 426
• 2023 – 438

What this really means to me is that you need to pick a defined bin of players (i.e. top-100 or top-300) for comparisons rather than just using the term “blue-chip” because that term means different things in different years.

I’m not going to go back over every SEC Championship coach in that time, but I do think it is instructive to make the comparison of Napier and Mullen’s first two recruiting classes because we know that Mullen’s classes weren’t enough.

We’ll get to attrition in a minute, but on raw numbers on national signing day, Mullen beat Napier in every single category, whether it is top-100 players, top-300 players, number of commits, national ranking, conference ranking or average player ranking.

The only feather Napier has in his cap is that his 2023 recruiting class has a higher player rating than Mullen’s 2019 bump class, but Mullen had a better transition class, by far.

But what about attrition?

The minute you show a table like that, people get very upset because that 2019 Mullen class was boosted by Diwun Black (151st overall player), Deyavie Hammond (242) and Wardrick Wilson (372), none of whom made it to campus. Additionally, Jalon Jones (306) and Chris Steele (42) never made it to fall camp either.

All of that is true, of course. But you have to admit that it does feel a little bit like déjà vu with the departure of Jaden Rashada from this 2023 class. A California kid who commits but then doesn’t make it to fall camp is a familiar saga in Gainesville, just this time it’s at the most important position on the field and has a weird NIL controversy attached.

But let’s give this the best possible spin for Napier and Co. and look at his recruiting versus Mullen’s in the first two seasons without those five players.

The loss of those five would have dropped Mullen’s transition class to 16^th, but even with that, Mullen still ends up with a higher average player rating, a higher national rank, a higher conference ranking, more top-100 players and an equal number of players ranked between 100-300 in both of their first two classes. The only place that Napier wins is in total number of commits, but averaging 20 players per class really isn’t something to write home about.

You can argue that Napier’s bump class is slightly better than Mullen’s and I think you’re probably right. And given the success of Kamari Wilson, Shemar James and Trevor Etienne, it may just be that Napier is a better judge of talent overall.

But it’s difficult to make that determination at this point. Kyle Pitts (2018 class) started out slow, but turned into an absolute monster. Dameon Pierce made a similar impact (69 rush, 424 yards) to Etienne (118 for 719) in his freshman season. Richard Gouraige made 42 starts, including manning left tackle for the past two seasons.

Where we can make a determination at this point though is that while Napier has taken a different approach than Mullen, he hasn’t substantially upgraded the talent level of the roster over his two recruiting cycles thus far. That just doesn’t show up in the data.

Expectations

Of course, this has been in the cards for a while now.

I’ve written repeatedly about how the average player rating that you have heading into the season (end of August) usually plays out by the time national signing day comes (i.e. you sign more players, but rarely do you see a distinct bump in player quality). Below is the graph I showed when I wrote about it this past August.

This pretty much tells the story, as there is a lot of volatility in the average player rating prior to August but then the lines pretty much straighten out. Florida was at an average player rating of 91.86 heading into its season and stands at 91.87 right now.

Yes, the loss of Rashada does impact that (down from 92.12), but that difference is minimal. Rashada’s commitment was more significant because of his position on the field and how much Florida has struggled there than for the numerical addition to the class.

If it’s true that the quality of early commits portends where a class ends up, then that’s great news early on for Florida’s 2024 class. While the Gators only have three commits thus far, two of them are top-30 players (Myles Graham and DJ Lagway) and the third (RB Chauncey Bowens) is a top-300 player.

Certainly the class needs to be filled out, but Lagway and Graham are already ranked higher than any Napier recruits have been to this point. And Lagway is the QB that Gators fans hope will turn around the program in a big way (and is the only way the Gators win big with the 2022-2023 level of recruiting).

But that’s the thing about expectations. They don’t get any lighter now that we’ve gotten two recruiting classes in. The expectation at Florida is to win, and Napier is going to have to do that soon while also picking up things on the recruiting front.

I had sky high expectations for the 2023 class because the state of Florida was loaded.

Had Napier been able to get 25 players that he wanted within 150 miles of Gainesville, the class would have consisted of three 5-star players, seven top-100 players, and 10 players rated between 101-300. The average player rating would have been 93.17 (4th nationally) and generated 298 points (also 4th).

Essentially, he would have met the Sikes Standard easily.

Instead, Florida’s highest ranked recruit from the state is the 22nd best prospect (Aidan Mizell, 96th overall). There are seven 5-star recruits in the 2024 class from the state. Florida isn’t currently listed as a favorite for any of those seven.

If we’re talking about expectations and recruiting, that needs to change.

Takeaway

I actually went into this article thinking that the folks criticizing me were correct. I was being slightly hyperbolic when I called the 2023 class a “Mullen Class” because I have seen progress from the initial transition class to this one.

But the problem isn’t that Jaden Rashada is no longer in the fold. The problem is that the best way to evaluate recruiting is by evaluating a class, or classes, as a whole. When doing that for the first two years of the Dan Mullen and Billy Napier eras, you can’t escape the fact that the talent level in the program has not gone up.

I want to be clear that this doesn’t mean that Napier is doomed or that Florida will never beat Georgia. Florida was very good in the first three years of the Mullen era and beat Georgia as recently as 2020. But if the goal of the program is to consistently compete with Georgia and Alabama, that isn’t going to happen based on what’s been accomplished so far in the Napier era any better than it did during the Mullen one.

And yes, Napier could use the transfer portal to rectify that situation. But you could say the same thing about Mullen, who hit with Van Jefferson, Trevon Grimes, Adam Shuler and Jonathan Greenard through the portal.

The problem with Mullen’s strategy was actually at QB. If you’re not going to recruit at a high level overall, you’d better bring in a bunch of QBs and have one pan out. Mullen got lucky and caught lightning in a bottle with Kyle Trask. But even though he signed at least one QB in every class that he brought in (Emory Jones in 2018, Jalon Jones in 2019, Anthony Richardson in 2020 and Carlos Del Rio-Wilson and Jalen Kitna in 2021), none of them became stars.

That’s really the issue with Graham Mertz coming in as a transfer. He might be a perfectly serviceable QB in Billy Napier’s offense. But serviceable only works when you’re Kelly Bryant with a stacked Clemson defense.

Florida needs a star at the position. Whether that’s Mertz, Max Brown, Jack Miller or eventually D.J. Lagway, Napier has to hit.

Because the numbers say that the talent level in Gainesville right now is at the exact same level as it was under Dan Mullen.