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Adapt or Die

It may seem like a long time ago, but on October 21 – just 60 days before early signing day – I wrote an article lauding Billy Napier’s recruiting.

The reason was that he had just secured the commitment of Edge rusher L.J. McCray to further strengthen Florida’s standing as the third ranked class in the country. That put Florida within spitting distance of Georgia and Ohio State while sporting nine top-100 players. Even if Napier didn’t add anyone else from that point on, it was a class we would be able to point to as one of the building blocks towards championship rosters.

Historically, classes haven’t changed all that much after September. Players are added and dropped, but typically the average player rating stays at the same general level. But things have clearly changed in the NIL era and Florida felt the brunt of it during 2024 Early Signing Day, falling all the way to 16th in the 247Sports Composite rankings by the time the day was over.

There were flips all over the place and Florida wasn’t the only program to feel it. You could see the palpable relief on Ohio State coach Ryan Day’s face when the number one overall recruit, Jeremiah Smith, was confirmed to be in his class. And Lane Kiffin – in true Kiffin style – tweeted this out in the middle of all of the craziness.

pic.twitter.com/PlMSOZTJLh

— Lane Kiffin (@Lane_Kiffin) December 20, 2023

I couldn’t think of a better way to summarize what happened in Gainesville. It appears that Napier and his staff did not foresee the late push that a handful of the Gators’ commits would receive. It also appears that they didn’t appreciate the impact that removing Sean Spencer and Corey Raymond prior to early signing day would have. The result was that the class was ravaged with flips from eight players – seven on the defensive side of the ball – six of whom rank in the top-150 of the 247Sports Composite rankings.

There are a lot of good players in this class. Some of them have a chance to be elite. But some of the guys who flipped have that chance as well, and given what this Florida team has looked like over the past two seasons and Napier’s clear emphasis on high school recruiting, the results on Wednesday are a clear blow to that plan.

Adapt or die. That’s the way of the world for college football coaches and programs in 2023. Billy Napier just found out the hard way.

The Good

Not all is lost with this particular class, but that’s because of one man: D.J. Lagway.

The 5-star QB from Willis, TX absolutely lit things up in his final high school season, throwing for 4600 yards and 58 TDs while rushing for 957 yards at a 9.7 yards per rush clip. The result was an average of 11.1 yards per touch over his entire senior year combined with a completion percentage of 72.1.

Perhaps more than just the stats is what Lagway represents. The QB position at Florida used to be a factory. From Shane Matthews to Danny Wuerffel to Rex Grossman to Chris Leak to Tim Tebow, QB just wasn’t an area where Gators fans had to worry too much about. But that’s changed over the last decade where Kyle Trask is the only guy to put together a truly great season, and that was after rotting on the bench for a couple of years behind other guys.

Instead, we’ve been treated to the play of John Brantley, Jeff Driskel, Treon Harris, Luke Del Rio, Austin Appleby, Feleipe Franks and Emory Jones over the past decade. Some of these guys have been pretty good. Some have not. But none of them outside of Trask have been transformative.

We all watched as LSU became completely unstoppable this season with Jayden Daniels at the QB position. LSU really couldn’t run the ball all that well outside of Daniels, yet still the Tigers had the number one offense in the country by a pretty wide margin. Even with a defense just about as bad as the Gators, LSU was able to go 9-3 and be competitive in every game. It reminded me of Florida’s 2020 season with Trask at the helm, including the fact that Daniels won’t be back at LSU next season.

That was the disappointing part of that 2020 season for Florida. The Gators wasted Trask’s (and Kyle Pitts and Kadarius Toney) elite performance by having a defense that gave up 41 points to Texas A&M, 37 points to LSU (and a shoe toss), 52 points to Alabama and 55 points to Oklahoma. And once that season was over, they couldn’t recapture the magic.

Florida still has an abominable defense, but that should be getting better through transfer portal additions, this recruiting class and additions to come from the transfer portal. And they now have a QB with whom that defense can grow over the next three seasons.

We should pay really close attention to LSU next year. With Daniels gone, they’re going to have to rely on their defense way more than they did this year. I’m doubtful that they’re going to be any different than Florida when Emory Jones took over.

Because that’s the thing when you don’t recruit like the Georgia’s and Alabama’s of the world. You have to catch lightning in a bottle at QB and time that up with at least a functional defense. Florida couldn’t do it in 2020. LSU couldn’t do it in 2023. The Gators get multiple seasons to do it with D.J. Lagway, if he can turn into that kind of player.

The Flips

Beyond Lagway, the story of this class were the flips away from Florida. Here’s the list of players (and their composite national ranking) who’ve flipped just since I wrote that article about McCray.

• Xavier Filsaime, S, 30
• Adarius Hayes, LB, 73
• Amaris Williams, DL, 79
• Jamonte Waller, Edge, 82
• Wardell Mack, CB, 130
• Nasir Johnson, DL, 143
• Izaiah Williams, WR, 327
• Kendall Jackson, DL, 407

That’s a 5-star player, four players in the top-82 of the rankings, with all eight players being considered blue-chip (4 or 5-star rated) quality. Right now using 247Sports composite rankings, Florida stands at 258.4 points, an average player rating of 91.31 and an average player rating of 414. If you remove the top-8 players from that class and plug in the eight players who flipped, you get a point total of 252.5, an average player rating of 90.94 and an average player rating of 430.

That says that Florida lost players over the past two months who were nearly equivalent in quality to the top-8 guys in its class, including D.J. Lagway and L.J. McCray. There’s no way to spin that. Instead, you have to call it what it is: a bloodbath.

The reason isn’t necessarily one player. Amaris Williams may not work out at Auburn. Nasir Johnson may not work out at Georgia. Kendall Jackson may not work out at Miami. But at least one of those guys is going to be a difference-maker on the defensive line for one of those teams. We just can’t be sure which one it’s going to be and so stacking talent at each position becomes critical.

The only places where Florida stacked blue-chip talent in this class was at linebacker, wide receiver and running back. Myles Graham and Aaron Chiles are both top-100 linebackers who are going to contribute early to the Gators. They’re going to need to given what happened at the position after Shemar James went down with an injury last season.

Jarrae Hawkins and Tawaski Abrams provide the same promise at wide receiver, as they’ll be competing with prized 2023 recruits Andy Jean and Aiden Mizell to join Trey Wilson as standouts at the position.

And true to Billy Napier’s philosophy, he was able to bring in two blue-chip running backs with the flip of Jaden Baugh in addition to Kahnen Daniels. Daniels has seen a meteoric rise in the rankings over the past few months and there’s a lot to be excited about with both of these players.

But that’s it for the stacking. If this class is going to deliver at edge rusher, it’s on McCray. If it’s going to deliver at tight end, that’s on Amir Jackson. The only blue-chip offensive lineman is OT prospect Fletcher Westphal. And the only blue-chip defensive line prospect is Brien Taylor, a Juco transfer who needs to produce right away. And of course, Lagway has to be special.

Each individual flip likely has a reason that is explainable. But the cumulative effect of the flips is that it puts Florida on a razor’s edge when it comes to performance. Napier has to hit on a bunch of these guys in a big way or there’s going to be holes in the roster when the Gators hit the field. That’s just the way it works.

Takeaway

Billy Napier was brought to Gainesville to fix recruiting. Through three cycles, he has not done that.

In those three cycles, Napier has signed 61 players with a cumulative average player rating of 90.51. Dan Mullen’s four recruiting classes at Florida had average player ratings of 90.75, 90.77, 90.74 and 90.51. Mullen went 10-3 in 2018 but that season was teetering on the edge after a loss to Missouri and down against South Carolina at home. And after a lackluster opener against the Hurricanes, Florida was down to Kentucky in 2019 when Feleipe Franks was injured and Kyle Trask took over.

The conclusion we should draw isn’t that you can’t win big games with this level of recruiting. It’s that you have to get Kyle Trask-level play at the QB position to win big games with this level of recruiting.

People tend to not like it when I compare Mullen’s recruiting to Napier’s. They suggest that is dishonest because of all of the guys who never made it to campus with Mullen’s recruiting classes and the attrition that he experienced. That would actually be a fair criticism if Napier hadn’t experienced similar levels of attrition with his first class.

Florida has 13 Napier-recruited players who have entered the transfer portal this fall. With the 2024 class nearly complete, Napier has signed 61 guys. That means there are only 48 traditionally-recruited (high school or Juco) players on the roster from the three recruiting cycles we’ve seen thus far.

Some Gators fans were tweeting lists to me of the Georgia players who had entered the portal wondering why I wasn’t commenting on that given their high levels of attrition, but that just isn’t a sane comparison to make. The reason is that over the same three-year period, Georgia has signed 84 total players. Even if we ignore the fact that 14 of those players have been 5-stars (to Florida’s two), the reality is that Georgia is bringing in more than 100 signees every four cycles. That means that they need to have attrition to get down to the 85-scholarship limit. It is a necessary step to remove players to enable them to sign a class like they did on Wednesday.

Other programs are in the same situation. That means that the challenge now becomes identifying which players entered the transfer portal because they were blocked by an elite player or because they desire a bigger NIL payday, and which players entered the transfer portal because they didn’t have the work ethic or the ability to break through at a fellow blue-blood program.

Because of the low number of signees and the high level of attrition, Florida has scholarships to offer. That means that Billy Napier can make his roster better through the portal in a way that some other programs may not be able to. That hasn’t been something that he has expressed great interest in doing thus far, but at this point, it’s the only way to paper over the holes long enough that he’ll get to see what D.J. Lagway can do.

It’s time to adapt, or it’s time to die. Lane Kiffin knows it. A bunch of other coaches in college football just figured that out on Wednesday if they hadn’t already.

Perhaps nobody more so than Billy Napier.