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Billy Napier cooking on the recruiting trail

Billy Napier’s team struggled on Saturday against Georgia, but Napier won the bye week before the game when defensive end prospect L.J. McCray committed to the Gators.

Depending on what metric you use, McCray is either a really good prospect or a truly elite one. Three of the four recruiting services have him rated 6th, 8th and 23rd overall in the country. Only Rivals has him ranked much lower at 250th overall.

But regardless of McCray’s ranking, his addition has positioned Napier with exactly what he needs to deliver in the 2024 recruiting class. Using the 247Sports Composite, which averages all four rankings services, that class is currently ranked third overall, but the thing to note is that it’s a strong third place.

The above chart illustrates the average player rating for each of the top-25 classes in the country. What we see is that Georgia and Ohio State are on a platform by themselves and that there’s a plateau from the 6th ranked team to the 13th or 14th ranked teams. The good news for Napier is that Florida’s average player rating is about the same amount higher than that plateau than it is from the Buckeyes and the Bulldogs, meaning the Gators have essentially cemented themselves a top-5 recruiting class pretty much no matter what happens from here on out.

But Florida still has some major pieces left on the recruiting board.

Offensive tackle Jordan Seaton (16th rated overall prospect) was at the Vanderbilt game right next to QB commit D.J. Lagway. Lagway’s also been after Ohio State commit Jeremiah Smith this season as well. With Florida State commit Charles Lester III taking an official visit in December and players like Xavier Mincey (S, 80th overall) and Jamari Howard (CB, 123rd overall) still on the board, Florida could be setting themselves up for a monster finish.

If Napier were able to fill out the class with all five of those players, the Gators average player rating would jump to 93.59, or higher than where Georgia is right now (93.54). It would also give the Gators the same number of commits (27) as the Bulldogs have, pushing their 247Sports points total up to 315.3, again higher than Georgia (314.5).

Do I expect Florida to catch the Bulldogs? No, I don’t. But beating Georgia by one point in the overall recruiting rankings isn’t really the point. Instead, it’s far more important to me that they have a chance to catch them and that we’re talking about nuances between the quality of the two classes.

. Last year we were talking about Florida keeping pace with Texas A&M, South Carolina and Tennessee. This year, the Gators are currently in front of Alabama and within shouting distance of Georgia and Ohio State. That’s a ton of progress for Billy Napier from 2023 to 2024.

Certainly, it appears that the staff has gotten a better handle on NIL and how to leverage that to their advantage. Additionally, after focusing on out-of-state prospects for most of the cycle (Lagway and safety Xavier Filsaime are from Texas), filling out this class with McCray, Seaton and Mincey would give the Gators 5 of the top 15 players from the state of Florida. Add Smith and Lester to the fold and we’re talking 7 out of 15.

I think those last two are unlikely. But there are only 15 top-100 players in the state of Florida in this cycle. If he can pull in McCray, Seaton and Mincey, Napier will have gotten commitments from 33 percent of those players. In 2022 and 2023, Napier got commitments from exactly one player in each cycle who fit that description.

That’s why I titled this article the way that I did. Last year’s class had a lower average player rating (91.41), lower numbers (22 commits, including Juco players) and three top-100 players. This year the number of top-100 players is already at nine.

In other words, this is a class that as it currently stands is good enough to be a building block that helps Florida compete for SEC titles in a couple of years, even if Napier doesn’t add anyone else. But there are also two important points to add to that.

First, flips are a relatively rare commodity as a percentage of an entire class. As much as I’d like to see Lester or Smith flip, it’s probably unlikely. But that goes both ways for the Gators as it is also unlikely that a whole bunch of players decide to look elsewhere who are already committed, regardless of whether Florida struggles in the second half of the season.

Second, there’s still a chance for Napier to add more talent and cement this as one of those classes we look back at and see six or seven guys who are impact players drafted highly into the NFL. Bill Sikes wrote here previously about the number of All-SEC players necessary to win an SEC title and a class like this one can provide nearly all of them if it hits just right.

None of this is a guarantee. Napier still has to finish off this class by holding on to his current commitments and adding new, impressive ones. He then has to do what he hasn’t been able to do thus far, which is to get the incoming talent to perform at an All-SEC level across the board.

But some perspective perhaps is also helpful. Last year, I was writing about who Napier had to close on to make the class acceptable. This year, I’m writing about who he has to close on to make this class transcendent.

For anyone who follows this stuff closely, that’s a huge difference.