Worried about Florida’s recruiting? Here’s why you shouldn’t be.

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With the recent decommitments of QB Nick Evers (ranked 156th nationally) and wide receiver Jayden Gibson (ranked 149th nationally), Florida’s 2022 recruiting class is now ranked 77th in the country and has only seven commits.

I’m going to say this is a disaster, right? After all, I’m the guy who wrote in April of 2018 that it was time to sound the alarms on Dan Mullen’s recruiting, so clearly this is a catastrophe?

Well (in my best Lee Corso voice), not so fast my friend.

There is a major difference between a transition class (where I praised Mullen for his recruiting performance) and a second-year (or “bump”) class. When I wrote that article in 2018, Mullen had already signed his transition class. It was the 2019 class that had me worried.

And while I wish Evers and Gibson hadn’t decommitted, I don’t think you can evaluate Napier’s ability to succeed based on his ability to close with those two, or any of Dan Mullen’s recruits. The reality is that Napier’s track record at Louisiana suggests this class is going to be relatively lackluster.

After taking over the Ragin’ Cajuns, Napier had a recruiting class ranked 105th nationally and 5th in the Sun Belt Conference. That was pretty close to where his predecessor had recruited overall (98th and 4th). It wasn’t until his second class that Napier improved the national ranking significantly (77th) and began dominating the conference (first three straight years).

And therein lies the rub. Florida fans aren’t notoriously patient. But when it comes to the transition class, they really should be. It turns out that they just aren’t that important when you look at the long-term trajectory of a program.

Transition class history

Bill Sikes did a great job earlier this year of putting together a study of how many All-SEC players you need on your roster to win the SEC Championship. For those who didn’t click to the article (you should), the answer is a minimum of 6, but an ideal of just under 9.

Florida just finished the 2021 season with zero All-SEC players. That’s where Napier is starting.

But what if we looked at recent SEC Championship coaches? What does their history with recruiting tell us about the importance of transition and bump classes?

Over the last 15 years, there have been six coaches who have won SEC Championships. Gus Malzahn finished first in his first season. Urban Meyer, Gene Chizik, and Kirby Smart finished first in their second seasons. Nick Saban and Ed Orgeron were late bloomers, not winning the SEC until their third season in charge (if we don’t count Orgeron taking over as interim in 2016).

Nobody has won it after their third season since Tommy Tuberville in 2004 and before that Phil Fulmer in 1997. Basically, you either win fast or you don’t win.

So what about those coaches’ recruiting.

Urban Meyer’s transition class in 2005 ranked 12th nationally and had 2 top-100 players and 15 top-300 players. Of those recruits though, only Ryan Stamper was able to achieve All-SEC status.

But Meyer’s bump class ranked 2nd nationally and produced 13 All-SEC seasons, three each from Tim Tebow and Brandon Spikes, two from Percy Harvin, Brandon James and Jermaine Cunningham and one from Riley Cooper. It’s actually 14 if you include Ryan Smith, a transfer from Utah.

The moral of the story: the foundation of Florida’s run under Meyer was built by the 2006 class, not the 2005 one.

And that’s not just true of Meyer. Nick Saban took over at Alabama and had a transition class in 2007 also ranked 12th nationally. That class produced two All-SEC performers in Rolando McClain and William Vlachos.

But Saban’s 2008 class was incredible, with 8 All-SEC players, 6 of whom were All-Americans. Those players include such household names as Julio Jones, Mark Barron, Courtney Upshaw, Mark Ingram, Barrett Jones, Marcell Dareus, Dont’a Hightower, and Terrance Cody.

Again, the foundation for the Tide’s success was Saban’s bump class, not his transition class.

The same is true for Chizik at Auburn, as his 2009 transition class (ranked 23rd) produced two All-SEC players while his 2010 bump class produced five All-Sec players, including Cam Newton and Michael Dyer.

Kirby Smart’s transition class in 2016 at Georgia (ranked 6th overall) had three All-SEC performers (Mecole Hardman, Tyler Clark and Ben Cleveland). His 2017 bump class (ranked 3rd) had six All-SEC players, four of whom earned the honor twice.

The story is the same, over and over. All of these teams (except…cough…Georgia) won the national championship. And every single one of them was built based on the talent on hand prior to the transition and the talent in the bump class.

Evaluating transition recruiting

What this says to me is that the transition recruiting class is much more about the process in place to bring in players who will buy into the system than it is the overall ranking.

That’s a weird statement for someone like me who believes in the recruiting rankings as strongly as I do, but it’s where the data takes me. The reality is that the 2022 class is going to produce perhaps 2-4 NFL-level players for Billy Napier. Expecting anything more than that is probably unfair.

I do think though that we can evaluate Napier in relation to the other coaches who’ve come before him.

This lays it out pretty well. All the former Florida coaches were able to finish somewhere between 10-14 nationally except for Jim McElwain. All of them had more than 9 total top-300 players except McElwain. It seems like McElwain should be considered the outlier. The average number of commits in these classes was 19.6.

Currently, Florida has one top-100 player and one player ranked 201-300. Clearly there’s work for Napier to do. But it also isn’t going to take very much for Florida to fly up the board.

While the Gators do currently rank 77th nationally, their average player rating (87.65) has the Gators ranked 25th overall. So basically, if Napier fills out his class with players of the exact same quality that he has in the class right now, that’s where the Gators will end up.

But that’s not all that likely to happen. Napier should be able to fill this class with players more talented than those already committed. Maybe he pulls a couple of 5-star recruits his way, especially with the hiring of cornerbacks coach Corey Raymond. But even if he doesn’t, an average level of recruiting would be bringing in a transition class of 20 players with the remaining players having an overall player rating of around 90.

Mullen’s 2018 transition class had an average rating of 90.75. Given the disarray that was the 2022 class under Mullen even before he was fired, combined with the effects of early signing day, I think that would be a pretty good haul if Napier could match that.

The 5-3 Theory

But there’s the added wrinkle with this transition class that none of the previous coaches had to deal with, at least not to the level that it exists today: the transfer portal. I think the portal might change the way you’d want to approach a transition class.

I wrote an article earlier this season with an idea of how I’d fix recruiting were I Dan Mullen called the 5-3 theory.

The idea was that players rated 300-600 (Zone 3 players) end up drafted just as often (and at similar rounds) as those ranked 61-299 (Zone 2 players). However, players ranked 1-60 (Zone 1) players get drafted at almost three times the rate.

So instead of focusing on blue-chip, top-300 guys, my suggestion would be to focus resources heavily on Zone 1 players. Then, bring in a bunch of guys in the Zone 3 range. This does two things.

First, it allows you to focus your energy on the truly elite difference makers who are likely to be All-SEC performers. History tells us that the transition class is only going to give you a couple of those guys, so make sure you hit on the sure things.

But the other thing it allows you to do is build depth with guys who are bought in to what you’re trying to do. These are the types of guys who will be capable, but not stars. They’ll be the guys who are willing to wait two or three years to get their chance. And these are the guys who won’t immediately enter the transfer portal when things don’t go their way because they decided they were in it for the long haul when they decided to commit.

I’m always amused when people talk about Jim McElwain’s eye for talent given his sub-elite recruiting. The reality is that he didn’t hit on his 5-stars (Martez Ivey and CeCe Jefferson were good, but not true stars). Antonio Callaway (ranked 341) and Jabari Zuniga (ranked 636) were the best players from his transition class.

But when you look at his bump (2016) class, the issue isn’t the hits. Florida got production out of Tyrie Cleveland (34), Chauncey Gardner-Johnson (42), Freddie Swain (127) and Joshua Hammond (165), but the majority of the production came from Jeremiah Moon (307), David Reese (414), Rick Wells (467), Lamical Perine (493), Brett Heggie (547), Vosean Joseph (643), Jachai Polite (741), Stone Forsythe (976) and Kyle Trask (2123).

That’s a good deal of talent and production. But aside from Gardner-Johnson, it is mostly players who waited to make their mark until later in their careers. It’s exactly what you’d expect from draftable players in that Zone 3 range.

But there aren’t a whole lot of All-SEC performers in there. Only Polite, Reese and Trask achieved that level. When you compare that to the bump classes described above, you start to understand why some of those programs were able to build sustainably while Florida has not been able to achieve sustainable success.

Evaluating Napier

So how and when do we evaluate Napier? Again, thanks to Bill Sikes, I have data to help us with that decision. Bill wrote a great piece back in 2018 detailing what a coach needs to achieve in his “bump” recruiting class to be considered SEC Champion material.

The list is pretty comprehensive for SEC Championship coaches since 2005.

• An increase of 8.2 spots in the national rankings
• An increase 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) in the class

Jim McElwain came up short in every category above except for the national and conference ranking increases (though his 2015 class was ranked historically low for Florida, so that was relatively low-hanging fruit). Dan Mullen came up short in every category above except for that he had 17 blue chip recruits in his 2019 class.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that neither of those guys were able to achieve what Florida fans expect?

Napier will spend the next few weeks (and hopefully months) piecing together his transition class for 2022. But after that transition class is in, that’s when things really get interesting.

The thing to note about bump classes is that they occur almost exclusively before the coach ever sets foot on the field. With early signing day in December, almost all of the relationship building for the 2023 class is going to occur from February to September of 2022.

I’ve looked at this before and set August 1 as the date where you essentially know where a class is going to end up. That’s even more true now that the early signing day has become such a significant part of the recruiting landscape.

What that means is that we’ll know whether Napier is building a program that is ready to compete for a SEC Championship from a recruiting perspective before he ever coaches a game. I’ll call for patience when Evers or Gibson decommit. I’ll call for patience if the transition class is somewhere between 10-20 nationally.

But I’m not going to call for patience if he isn’t measuring up to historical metrics that have shown to be necessary for the bump class.

And Bill’s data is from 2018. There’s reason to believe that things are even more recruiting-centric in the SEC since he looked up those numbers.

In 2019, I looked at recruiting classes from 2014-2018 and tracked the conference roster talent ranking versus the winning percentage for all Power-5 teams. You can see that analysis below.

What you see is that across the Power-5 leagues, teams that finish in the top-3 of the conference from a recruiting perspective win somewhere between 65-75 percent of their games. That drops to 55 percent for teams ranked 4-8. Basically, you have to be top-3 in the conference to hope to compete.

So what does this mean for teams in the SEC?

Well, the third ranked SEC team has had a national recruiting ranking of 4th the past three cycles and the SEC occupies the top-3 spots in the national rankings for the 2022 cycle currently. That means it isn’t good enough to get a top-10 class. It might not even be good enough to get a top-5 class. You’re going to be somewhere in the 4-8 slot on that chart above if you do that.

No, the bump class really has to be top-3 if you want to be taken seriously as a contender in the best conference in the country. And we’ll know how close Napier is to that before he ever coaches a game.

Takeaway

It’s clear that recruiting is necessary to win big and win consistently in both the SEC and college football.

But it is also clear that multiple national powers have built themselves up with transition classes that most people would suggest are disappointing when compared to the rest of the SEC. The reality is that cobbling together a transition class is difficult, and you never end up getting as much as you’d like out of that class when you look back at it, even with successful programs.

So yes, you should be disappointed when Nick Evers decides to go somewhere else. But you should couch that disappointment in the reality that Billy Napier is going through a transition that requires some time to build.

That doesn’t mean that Gators fans should have endless patience though. If he’s going to build a consistent winner in the SEC, he really needs to win the SEC by either his second or third season in Gainesville. He might be able to win one after that, but if it takes longer than three years, then he hasn’t built the consistent program that Scott Stricklin has promised.

There aren’t any excuses anymore. The indoor practice facility is built. The football-only facility is nearly complete. Napier negotiated exactly what he thought he needed from a monetary standpoint for his assistant coaches and off-field staff. At the end of the day, the Florida administration has (finally) held up its end of the bargain and armed the head coach with exactly what he needs to be successful.

So if he’s not successful, that’s on Napier. But that does require some degree of patience. I’m not suggesting that we give Napier years and years. I’m suggesting we pay less attention to the transition class and more to the bump class. I’m suggesting we allow him to build his staff and weed out the recruits who aren’t going to buy in. Basically, I’m suggesting we give him until August 1, 2022.

But at that point, either we’re competing with the big boys, or the gloves come off.