Early signing day 2025
With a three-game winning streak and D.J. Lagway at quarterback, Billy Napier had built up a ton of momentum heading into Early Signing Day.
Florida stood at 11th overall in the 247Sports Composite rankings, poised to jet into the top-10 – and perhaps even the top-5 – if a few 5-star commits fell their way. Instead, Napier looked on as 5-star wide receivers Jaime Ffrench committed to Texas, Dallas Wilson committed to Oregon and offensive lineman Solomon Thomas committed to LSU.
The result is that when the smoke cleared, Florida’s class still stood at 11th in the country, 15th if we rank teams based on average player quality. Perhaps more importantly, that stands at 8th in the SEC, or 10th if we rank based on average player quality.
That’s where a lot of Billy Napier’s recruiting classes have ended up at Florida. It’s also – perhaps not coincidently – exactly where Florida ended up ranked in the SEC after the 2024 season on the field.
There is a lot to like about the players that have been added. But the high profile misses mean that from a expected value perspective, Florida has once again fallen short of the teams that it needs to beat.
That doesn’t preclude them from a path to the playoff or perhaps even an SEC title. But it does mean that D.J. Lagway is going to deserve that statue – perhaps more than any other QB out front – if they’re able to achieve it.
The Numbers
While the old signing day isn’t until February, for all intents and purposes, the 2025 class is complete. There are a few stragglers out there, but the vast, vast majority of 2025 prospects have signed with their prospective schools, meaning any movement for classes is going to be at the margins. That means we can evaluate these as complete classes against each other at this point and against classes in the past.
Florida ended up with 23 commits and an average player rating of 90.64. This was aided by the additions of top-100 safeties Hylton Stubbs (Miami flip) and Lagonza Hayward (Tennessee flip) on or close to signing day.
I like dividing up classes into bins of top-60 (Zone 1), 61-200 (Zone 2) and 201-600 (Zone 3) to try and determine the numbers of players who are probably going to be drafted from a class. The reason is that if you look historically at teams that win championships, you probably need around 15-18 players around an elite QB who are going to be drafted. Here’s where Napier’s classes at Florida stand using that metric.
What we see is that Billy Napier’s recruiting classes the last three years are all very similar. The average player ratings in 2023 and 2024 were actually higher, but the middle of the class for 2025 is strong, meaning that this is the second-most draftable players that he’s had projected in a class. If we combine that column, we end up with 13.5 players, falling short of the 15-18 needed to win big.
We can see that if we look at some of the past classes. Guys like Ja’Keem Jackson (55th) and Kelby Collins (42nd) or Kamari Wilson (44th) and Chris McClellan (113th) haven’t worked out despite being at the top of the recruiting board, while players like Tre Wilson (105th), T.J. Searcy (275th) and Jaden Robinson (405th) have become valuable contributors.
It’s not that those players weren’t deserving of their rankings. It’s that every ranking has a probability of success and the probability drops off significantly as you go from a top-10 ranked player to a player ranked 50th. In other words, D.J. Lagway was an important recruit because his probability of success was high, and now we’ve seen that on the field.
At the end of the day, Billy Napier’s first four classes have an average player rating of 90.57. In the four classes prior (which does include his transition class), Dan Mullen achieved an average player rating of 90.69.
We can talk about attrition and some of those players Mullen signed never making it to Gainesville, but it’s also clear just from the short list that I detailed above, not all of Napier’s commits are panning out either. The reality is that if we look at the numbers, there isn’t much of a difference in high school talent being brought into Gainesville.
The Competitors
If you’ve read my stuff for any length of time, you’ve hopefully become convinced that it isn’t just national recruiting that matters, but how you compare to your in-conference competitors that truly matters. That is fundamentally why a 10th place national recruiting finish for Michigan is so much different than a 10th place national finish for Florida.
Back in 2019 when I ran these numbers, the average national recruiting ranking of the 3rd team in each conference was the following: 6.3 for the SEC, 18.3 for the Big Ten, 17.0 for the Pac-12, 31.5 for the Big-12 and 18.3 for the ACC. The SEC had double the teams in the top-10 of the recruiting rankings (4.0) than its closest competitor (Big Ten, 2.0).
The conferences have certainly changed since then and I suspect that the Big Ten will be far higher with some of its additions, but the fact remains that the SEC is the most competitive conference in the country when it comes to recruiting. And perhaps just as relevant for Florida, the conference is getting better at it.
If we look at the average recruiting rankings of the second team in the SEC from 2011-2025 compared to Florida’s average player rating, we can see why the Gators have struggled in the conference over the past few seasons.
What we see is that back in 2011-2013, Florida was regularly competing to be one of the top-2 teams in the conference. Then when Jim McElwain took over in 2014, Florida dipped below the top-2 and has never recovered. Part of that is that the Gators have stayed relatively stagnant on the recruiting trail. But the other part is that you can see that the average player rating for the second best team in the conference has gone up during that time.
Note that these numbers don’t include Oklahoma or Texas (even for 2024 and 2025), but their addition pushes Florida down even further. That’s just the reality of the SEC where the best are getting better and Napier’s class rankings are on-par with those of Dan Mullen.
Takeaway
All is not lost in Gainesville. Napier closed very well in this class to get it up to 11th overall. But as I wrote after Scott Stricklin’s vote of confidence, the recruiting class being ranked in the 50’s was always a mirage. At that time, the class ranked 18th in average player rating. Napier deserves credit for bumping that up to 15th, but the jump from 50th in points to 11th isn’t that high once you start bringing in a higher volume of recruits.
There may be a lesson here, which is something else I detailed in that article: last year when Florida had a bunch of players flip away from its class, those were players ranked mostly 60th or higher (7 of 8). This year, Napier flipped a bunch of players, but they were all ranked 60th or higher.
Some may criticize Napier for “not closing” on Wilson, Ffrench or Thomas, but the reality is that getting those guys to flip was going to be a huge ask. That wasn’t something that happened a ton last year and other than the godfather offer Michigan made for QB Bryce Underwood, I don’t think we saw a ton of flipping at the 5-star level this year either.
The good news is that the transfer portal exists. While Florida has fallen short of the draftable number of players necessary to win a championship with its high school recruiting, they can hopefully fill that out by being aggressive with the portal. That probably fits Napier’s timeline a little bit better anyway as many of the players in this class won’t be ready to really contribute at an All-SEC level until 2027, which will be a year after D.J. Lagway enters the NFL.
We’ve seen that this staff has a pretty keen eye there just this year, as the additions of Chimere Dike, Elijhah Badger, Brendan Crenshaw-Dickson, Trikweze Bridges and Pup Howard significantly supplemented the team’s performance in 2024.
But anyone telling you that Billy Napier improved recruiting with his finish this year is selling you something. This class is in-line with the classes before them. It’s also in-line with the classes that Dan Mullen had before him. In a world where you don’t have a star QB, that isn’t good enough to win the conference or make the playoff. But in a world where you do have that star QB, he can offset some of those deficiencies.
The more talent Florida can hoard from the portal over the next two years, the better off they’ll be. Napier doesn’t have time to develop high school kids at this point. Yes, high school recruiting is important, but very few of the kids he signed on Wednesday are going to determine his fate. I’m not sure a ton of the players he brings in through the portal will do that either.
In a world where you’re consistently ranked 8-10 in the conference in recruiting, and a significant step below your rivals, there’s really only one way to thread that needle: you need one of the best QBs in the conference.
Luckily, Napier hit that nail right on the head.