Opportunity awaits if Napier can master NIL, recruiting, portal

“Yesterday’s love was like a warm summer breeze, but just like the weather ya’ changed” – from the Dennis Yost and the Classic IV hit “Stormy”

When it comes to college football and recruiting, yesterday’s rules are that warm summer breeze. The combination of NIL (name, image and likeness) and the transfer portal have changed everything just like that, and while coaches adapt to the changes, they beg for rules that make sense because, as some have aptly described it, what we have now is the wild, wild west.

What we have now is a situation that is all but out of control and no leadership to reel it all in.

“Yeah, most coaches would tell you it’s like going to play pick-up basketball and no one explains the rules before the game,” Billy Napier says. Whether it’s dealing with high school kids, experienced players who have placed their name in the NCAA transfer portal or the dreaded decisions that have to be made about what kids on the roster you want to keep or offer a gentle nudge out the door, there is no handy dandy flip card that fits in the wallet entitled “Recruiting for Dummies.”

When Napier speaks about it, his entire demeanor changes because each day is like a cruise through uncharted waters. There is very little in the way of rules, plenty in the way of assumptions.

“I think most coaches would say, hey, look, let’s create some balance, the terms of opportunity, parity,” Napier said. “I do think you’re going to see it become a little top heavy.”

But this is what Florida’s football coach and every coach in Division I has to deal with on a daily basis. We might call it a fluid situation but that’s downplaying the numerous speed bumps and potholes that makes this anything but a smooth journey.

There was a time and not all that long ago, when coaches knew what they were dealing with. They had 85 scholarships. If a kid transferred out or transferred in, he sat for a year before he was eligible to play. There was national signing day the first Tuesday in February. There were recruiting weekends during the season and in the weeks prior to signing day. There dead periods in the summer and in December that allowed coaches to somewhat catch their breaths before rejoining the sprint to the finish line.

That was before there was an early signing period and new rules for official visits. Just when everyone was adapting to both a December and February signing day, along came the transfer portal and as if that wasn’t enough to daze and confuse everyone, NIL came along to further change the way rosters are built.

And then the transfer rules changed so that first time transfers could move on to a new school without having to sit along with generous waiver rules that bore a resemblance to that old saying of throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks and what doesn’t.

“The portal opens up and NIL starts a new era, just completely changes the game,” Napier said, actually simplifying what he has to deal with. “ All those things that maybe were a part of your recruiting strategy , this has shifted the landscape in a huge fashion.”

The 85 scholarship rules hasn’t changed although it’s long past due for refinement. Altering the scholarship numbers is complicated because of the dreaded Title IX rules designed to offer a measure of parity for women’s sports. The 85 scholarship limit was never designed for a transfer portal that has created free agency or NIL, which has kids transferring from School A to School B because of money.

Dealing with the potential for wholesale changes to rosters has forced coaches to do what was more or less unthinkable 10 years ago. No coach wants to admit it, but every year decisions have to be made about which kids are keepers and which ones have to be encouraged to leave the program on their own volition.

There was a time when coaches knew they had time to develop players, but money and pressure from boosters changed that. There was once the standard 5-year contract that gave a coach five years to build a roster with and win with his own players.

Five years is three nowadays. In the case of Auburn – see Bryan Harsin, fired after 21 games – it isn’t even two years.

Billy Napier knows his clock started ticking last December when he took the Florida job. One reason UF athletic director Scott Stricklin was so enamored with Napier, who went 40-12 in four years at Louisiana, was his plan to deal with roster management in an era where you make up the rules as you go along.

In the days and weeks after he was hired, Napier had to deal with several players transferring out, several transferring in (O’Cyrus Torrence, Montrell Johnson, Kamryn Waites, Jalen Kimber, Jack Miller III and Ricky Pearsall) and recruiting high school kids. That got him to the 85-man roster he began the 2022 season with, but eight games in, he’s lost three scholarship players (Josh Braun, Marco Ortiz and Kamar Wilcoxson) who will be placing their name in the portal and he’s dismissed a player (Brenton Cox Jr.)

So, he’s down to 81 on scholarship and he has three remaining on the roster whose eligibility will end when the season concludes. That leaves 78 on the roster. There are 22 high school recruits committed and all indications are there will be another five or six – maybe more – who are signed.

If Napier held at the 22 high school recruits he has committed, he would be 15 over the scholarship limit. More will be signed and then there will be incoming transfers. Maybe 15 or more. If the combination of high school recruits and transfers totals 120, that means 35 players on the current roster will have to either graduate, retire from football or else leave the program via the transfer portal for the University of Florida to be at the NCAA imposed 85-scholarship limit.

Some of the high school recruits will be good enough to play and contribute as true freshmen. Transfers, for the most part, will be expected to plug and play from the day they arrive on campus. Napier was on the Alabama staff with Lane Kiffin (now Ole Miss HBC) and Mel Tucker (now Michigan State HBC). The 21 transfers Kiffin brought in have helped Ole Miss to a No. 11 ranking and the possibility of a second consecutive 10-win season. Tucker brought in 20 transfers to Michigan State a year ago to help the Spartans get to a New Year’s Six bowl.

High school recruits plus transfers – both incoming and outgoing – mean drastic changes to the way Napier approaches roster management.

“I don’t think there’s any question about that,” Napier said Wednesday. “I got asked about that today. Every team’s got its own little math problem relative to the 85-scholarship limit and the walk-on roster that you have. Initials (counters) are no longer a part of that so it’s kind of like a new world we’re living in. You’re going to have a certain level of attrition because there’s opportunity to add players to your team, right?

“So, I think the right combination of freshmen and transfer players at each position group on our team is different. Sometimes you got an immediate need much like in the NFL and you go to free agency and acquire an impact player, a more experienced player, a veteran player.”

The only differences are, unlike the NFL, you can’t bring in a new player via transfer during the season and you can’t trade players with another school. Unlike the NFL, there are no salaries, no contracts with guaranteed money or signing bonuses.

“This is much like the draft and free agency,” Napier said. “The issue here is that there’s no contract for any player in the league and there’s no salary for each team so you got a really strange dynamic here and I think we’re looking for some uniformity here.”

Fingers of blame have to be pointed at the NCAA for the lack of uniformity. The debacle that is roster management has everything to do with the NCAA never taking into consideration that it would lose the Austin case when it reached the Supreme Court. Based on its dismal record fighting in the courts, the NCAA should have been ready with a Plan B the moment the Supreme Court essentially made NIL legal, but there were none.

So we live in a world that begs for rules, yet there are none. There have been efforts to bring Congressional oversight to NIL but do we really want the government to take over college football? That’s exactly what will happen if Congress takes on NIL. First it will be regulation of NIL deals. Next we’ll have players declared as employees whose scholarships may be declared as income and therefore taxed. If players are employees, then coaches will be able to hire and fire them. Will there be a salary cap as there are with professional sports? Will players unionize? Rather than recruiting will we go to a draft? Will players be traded?

Maybe it sounds silly to talk about these things, but most of us never foresaw anything like the current debacle. Coaches certainly didn’t and when they measure the current situation, they shake their heads in wonder and ask what can be done to reel it all in.

“I’ve said this before at one point and still it’s almost like living in a land with no laws relative to what can you do, what can’t you do,” Napier said.

NIL money does affect the way coaches recruit. At Alabama, for example, Heisman Trophy quarterback Bryce Young reportedly made more than $2 million off NIL deals last year. Nick Saban, Lane Kiffin and others have pointed fingers at Texas A&M and Jimbo Fisher. Fisher gets huffy and defensive when the subject of NIL money and last year’s No. 1-ranked recruiting class is mentioned but a lot of well-informed people say the Aggies spent generously to bring in all those stud recruits.

For the University of Florida to compete, NIL will have to be part of the recruiting equation whether that’s to land a top recruiting class, bring in experienced transfers who are ready to start from day one or re-recruit players on the current roster to keep them from leaving via the portal.

Already numerous Gators are getting NIL money. Anthony Richardson recently added a deal with Gatorade to the several NIL deals he already has in place. There will have to be more deals like that in the future, but Napier believes it will happen.

“I think it is a strength, truth be known,” Napier said, reeling off numbers such as the University of Florida’s 470,000 living alumni and a state with a growing population that exceeds 21 million. “I think the Gator fan base in particular in this state are right up there with some NFL franchises. So very capable in that area and our guys are benefitting from that and I think that will continue to grow as there’s more awareness.”

Growth and awareness are necessary, but so is coming up with resources. Like it or not, we are in an era where only the strong survive and the strongest will not only have a plan in place but the resources to back it up. If Napier has the resources then every expectation is that he will succeed in a very big way.