Thoughts of the Day: Florida Football

July 31, 2023

A few thoughts to jump start your Monday morning:

Top to bottom of the roster, Billy Napier is working with more talent and fewer holes in the roster than the one he inherited in December of 2021. He’s added 17 transfers from the portal since taking over, filling some gaps with experience while young recruits grow up. The transfers will have to play well for the Gators this season. There are experienced starters returning such as Kingsley Eguakun, set to begin his third year at center, and corner Jason Marshall Jr., another third-year guy.

Florida has 22 very good football players but so does everybody else in the Southeastern Conference. The average teams have 33 good ones and the teams that win nine or more have a solid two-deep. Championship level teams have another 10-20 quality players ready to plug and play.

Where will the Gators stack up this year in terms of depth? That will largely determine if Florida is that mediocre team predicted by the media and Las Vegas oddsmakers or one capable of posting the first winning season since 2020. Here is what Napier had to say about depth Sunday morning when he spoke to the media on Florida’s first day of fall camp:

“I do think there's parts of our team where we're going to have young players playing, but I think they're talented. I think there's areas of our team where injuries are important, but I also think we've added some experience. I think we've added some awareness, some maturity. We've added some veteran players I think that make our team better. In the two deep, I think when we get done with this thing, there's going to be a ton of competition going into this camp, but I do anticipate as we approach that first game, we're going to have young players that are going to be out there. The positive thing about that is we've had those players since January, and I think with the amount of work that we do, our year-round plan to get those guys I think will give us a better opportunity to work with some of those young players.”

DC Austin Armstrong on improving the third down defense

“One, I think the key to being good on third down is being good on first and second down. One of the hardest things to do in football for an offense is in known passing situations, which is usually like 3rd-and-6 plus, to drop back, block people and complete a pass. It really takes an offense, 11 people working on one accord to do that. It’s pretty significant. Then defensively you’ve got to create those situations on first and second down where you’re in manageable situations on the defense where you really have the advantage.”

OL coach Rob Sale on left tackle Austin Barber’s toughness

“Yeah, it showed up on his high school tape if you go back and watch it. That’s just the way he plays. He finishes. That’s constantly the standard that we want to set in the room, finish on every single play. He’s a good player for us and going to be a great player for us.”

Strength coach Mark Hocke on how the culture has changed since last year

“I think there was some resistance. I think we’ve overcome that. I think we’re all on the same page, and much more working as a team and kind of pulling in the same direction.”

The Gators and Phil Steele

Phil Steele, whose preseason magazine is filled with more information – some of it useful, a lot of it the kind that makes you ask who’s interested – puts the Gators at No. 28 in his power poll, but not in his preseason top 40 because the Gators face the toughest schedule in the entire nation. Steele rates the Gators 109th in terms of experience.

Steele has the Gators finishing fifth in the SEC East. Here is his predicted finish for the SEC: East: 1. Georgia; 2. Tennessee; 3. South Carolina; 4. Kentucky; 5. FLORIDA; 6. Missouri; 7. Vanderbilt. West: 1. Alabama; 2. LSU; 3. Texas A&M; 4. Ole Miss; 5. Arkansas; 6. Auburn; 7. Mississippi State

Here are some of Steele’s rankings when it comes to Gators.

Draft eligible players by position: Graham Mertz, QB, 65; Montrell Johnson Jr., RB, 11; Cam Carroll, RB, 58; Ricky Pearsall, WR, 45; Dante Zanders, TE, 54; Keon Zipperer, FB, 13; Kingsley Eguakun, C, 27; Princely Umanmielen, DE, 8; Cam Jackson, DT, 76; Teradja Mitchell, ILB, 59; Jason Marshall Jr., CB, 20; Jaydon Hill, CB, 52; Jeremy Crawshaw, P, 4

UF units nationally: RB 16; WR/TE 18; OL 42; DL 55; LB 56; DB 39; ST 17

UF units SEC: QB 13; RB 5; WR/TE 6; OL 9; DL 8; LB 11; DB 9; ST 3

SEC football/basketball

Alabama: ESPN’s Adam Rittenburg predicts Notre Dame transfer Tyler Buchner will be the starting QB game one.

Arkansas: Keyon Menifield, who averaged 10 points and 3.1 rebounds per game as a freshman at Washington last season, will take a non-scholarship redshirt season at Arkansas for 2023-24.

Auburn: Former Northwestern offensive lineman Dylan Senda is transferring to Auburn. He was the second highest ranked recruit in Northwestern’s 2023 recruiting class. Because he entered the transfer portal within 30 days of the firing of head coach Pat Fitzgerald, Senda will be immediately eligible … The wife of former Auburn long snapper Robert Shriver has been arrested along with two men in The Bahamas for plotting to kill Shriver. Wife Lindsay Shriver (36), her 28-year-old lover and a 29-year-old accomplice will be held in The Bahamas pending their court appearance on October 5.

Georgia: Defensive lineman Tyrion Ingram-Dawkins is just the latest Bulldog to run afoul of the law. Ingram-Dawkins was arrested last week on a warrant for failure to show up in court and on the same day ticketed for driving 90 in a 70-mile zone. That’s at least 313 traffic citations since Kirby Smart became the Georgia head coach.

Kentucky: New basketball assistant Chuck Martin will make $350,000 this season, $375,000 next season.

Missouri: Defensive back Isaac Thomas, a 4-star recruit, will miss the entire preseason after suffering what has been determined as a significant lower body injury. His status beyond August has yet to be determined.

Ole Miss: Ole Miss got a Sunday night commitment from Miami transfer corner Chris Graves, a former 4-star recruit from 2022 who was ranked the No. 15 corner in the nation. The Rebels also landed former 4-star linebacker T.J. Dudley, who was a member of Clemson’s 2022 recruiting class … Lane Kiffin has added 25 players through the transfer portal to his 2023 roster.

Tennessee: The Vols will play D1AA East Tennessee State September 6, 2025. The play for pay game will earn ETSU a $575,000 payday for its bus trip down I-75 from Johnson City.

Texas A&M: Jimbo Fisher says NIL needs some regulating. “I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” Fisher said over the weekend. “I think it needs to be regulated and controlled so that all the rules are the same.”

Vanderbilt: Deputy athletic director Tommy McClelland has been named athletic director at Rice. McClelland spent three years at Vanderbilt after a stint as the AD at Louisiana Tech.

As the expansion stomach turns …

The choice to leave the Pac-12 was a no-brainer for Colorado. Take the Big 12 and its $31.7 million per year media deal and let everyone else sweat out another George Kliavkoff promise in the Pac-12. Colorado to the Big 12 is a done deal because Fox and ESPN agreed to pay a full $31.7 million in media money, the same amount Arizona, Arizona State and Utah are guaranteed if they decide to bolt the Pac-12.

It's not so simple for Arizona and Arizona State. Instinctively, they have to know that Kliavkoff won’t come through with a deal worth $31.7 million but it was the then Pac-10 that rescued them from obscurity back in 1978, turning them into members of what was one of the real power conferences in the country. Loyalty says stay. Their bank accounts are saying something else.

Utah, which was in the Mountain West until the Pac-12 came calling, is also loyal and wants to remain but if Arizona and Arizona State leave, it will also leave although it doesn’t relish the thought of being in the same league with BYU, which is 40 miles down the road from Salt Lake.

San Diego State, which thought it was going to get an invitation from the Pac-12 but didn’t, committed to stay in the Mountain West, but now that Colorado is departed, it figures to be the logical successor, but there’s a catch. No media deal for the Pac-12 and a now $34 million alimony payment to the Mountain West. SDSU doesn’t have a spare $34 million kicking around. San Diego State would also like to be considered for the 14thspot in the now 13-team Big 12, but as a Group of Five member it would only get $20 million per year. That is more than it makes in the MWC ($6.7 per year), but it would still need to find $34 million to pay the alimony.

UNLV would also love to join either the Pac-12 or the Big 12. It probably has a better chance of forking over a $34 million ransom payment to leave the Mountain West than San Diego State. A pre-emptive move by the Big 12 would be a mini-dagger in the Big 12’s heart since Las Vegas is where the Pac-12 plays its basketball tournament.

Meanwhile, the Big 12 is talking to UConn about becoming the 14th school in the league. UConn has won five NCAA basketball championships so it would instantly make the already best basketball league in the country even better, plus it would bring along its 11-time NCAA champ women’s team to a rather strong league that includes perennial power Baylor. UConn doesn’t move the football needle at all but it’s not all that far from Cincinnati and West Virginia. There is a teensy matter of $30 million to leave the Big East, a staggering amount for a school that backstrokes in red ink on a daily basis.

Big 12 commish Brett Yormark, who has made Kliavkoff seem like a bigger buffoon than he already is, has one other option at his disposal – Washington and Oregon. They’ve been vetted already. For a throw-in, he could add Oregon State. Will the threat of adding the three schools in the north of the Pac-12 be enough to force Arizona, Arizona State and Utah off the fence?

What we have going on right now is a game of chicken. Somebody is going to blink, probably this week.

So why not Boise State?

Considering its success over an extended period of time, it would seem logical that Boise State would be on somebody’s expansion radar but that hasn’t been the case. The Pac-12 just lost Colorado but there is no one pushing for Boise as the replacement. Stewart Mandel of The Athletic pointed out the reason the phone doesn’t ring at Boise State and it has everything to do with academics. Mandel points out that in the US News and World Report rankings, Boise State was in the 331-440 tier. Washington State, the worst academic school in the Pac-12 has a 212 ranking while West Virginia, the bottom feeder in the Big 12, is No. 234.

ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT: Pay close attention to what is going on at The Ewe this week. Billionaire booster John Ruiz is under federal civil and criminal investigations and the lawsuits keep on coming. The stock in Ruiz’s company Life Wallet, which traded at $10 a share a year ago, was trading for less than $0.25 on Friday.

It is Ruiz with all his NIL deals that have kept Miami relevant even though its ACC media money is only a fraction of what SEC schools make. QB Tyler Van Dyke is on the payroll as was Isaiah Wong, who led The Ewe’s basketball team to the Final Four. The women’s program is on NCAA probation for some shady NIL dealing.

Ruiz talked a big game and had folks believing he could even do some sort of deal that could get a stadium on or near campus, but the collapse of his empire is going to have devastating effects on the Miami athletic program.