2025 Class

Yes, it is second tier for the Gators, but, it does serve to keep the talent level high enough to compete with anyone. Coaching will have to take it from here. If only we had McElwains dog still on the roster. Anyone know if it has any eligibility left?

 

Changing someone's mind may well be one of the most difficult things to accomplish in all of existence.

 

No matter how much our offers were, these teams that got them would have told the respective player we will top anything Florida comes up with.

 

Context is needed here. Coach started out on the hot seat before the season began. Full support dried up after the first game. Fans began lining up for a new head coach all season and were not quiet about it. Calls for Billy’s head most of the season. (To be honest, I was one of the pack who had given up on Billy and wanted a new direction). All this has to had a negative effect on recruitment. To go from the 52 to top 10 is a huge achievement. Let’s see what happens when Napier has full confidence plus some wind at his back next year.

 

I guess you all are being repelled by the term 'elite'.

There is an upper class of recruiting.....Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, etc. We are not in it.

That doesn't mean our class is bad in any way. We made a remarkable comeback considering where we were earlier in the season.

 

Come out of the gate winning the first 6 or more might get us a top 5 class..

 

I respectfully disagree.

Let’s look at this objectively. According to a major ratings service, one of the schools you mentioned has a blue chip ratio of 69.23% and another a ratio of 69.56%. I’ll let you guess which one you called elite and which you said was not…

Case closed. Your subjective view does not align with empirical evidence.

 

Elite classes are now defined by the sum total of the ESD high school class, the incoming transfer class, the outgoing transfers, and, to a much smaller degree, NSD. Today is only one piece of the pie. Pretty tasty one, too.

 

I don’t think having a top 5 class separates you that much from 6-15 classes. Vandy beat Bama, Mich beat OSU, GT should have beat Ga. Hell we should have beat them had we not lost our QB. Talented guys just it in for themselves will wreck a locker room. I trust we got some talented and good guys that will gel. We saw it at the end of the year with our current team, they came together when they could have just quit.

 

Onis Konanbanny has moved his signing to NSD.

 

Look I like to practice fantastical thinking every now and then too. Whether they have a bunch of FA's that bail for the next bidder is immaterial when those programs are winning championships and making it to the playoffs regularly.

 

Hopefully we can get ourselves into that top 5 range and you all can say how it's not really any better than 6-15.

 

Go back the last 10-15 years and tell me the playoff participants and then look up their recruiting. I can assure you that you'll find most regularly in the top 10 with most being in the 5. Being in the 10-16 range will not cut it.

Whether we like it or not, the overall recruiting rankings do not lie and it shows up on the field. Its up the Gators to get back to the level where they are competitive against the top teams and that is done by over-performing your recruiting rank rather than under-performing it (a wheelbarrow full of greenbacks is also helpful).

 

Yes, I was commenting on their home cooked "Baghdad Bob" propaganda for their rankings, which has been going on for years, if you have noticed. Dorothy dot com used to rail all of our commitments in their star ratings just to damage our rankings. I was just commenting on how Rivals has not changed,...I.... I think they have a high input to the Rivals rankings. Just shows how laughable that program is.......
AND, I just watched a video of late where one of their "homers" was talking about the flag incident. Showing how disrespectful of a program we are for creating up their end zone turf AND then showing a clip of last year's victory for them in The Swamp and showing how they "respectfully" cut up our end zone with scissors, as it was gamesmanship. The guy actually said "respectfully" as the players cut up our endzone....... What a freaking joke of rationality, or their lack of.
GO GATORS!!!!

 

Elite, no, not in an era when every Tom, Dick, and Harry are in the FBS level. Being in the top 5 is elite, but even better is consistently being in the Top 10 with occasional Top 5 classes sprinkled in and I don't mean 1 in a decade (Muschamp, I believe was our last Top 5 class and that one was terribly unbalanced since he left us without enough Olinemen to have a Spring game).

 

The problem didn't begin this Fall. It began at the end of Fall 2023 with a 5 game losing streak. Most classes are pretty well set going into the beginning of a season with just a handful final tweaks and flip flops to make. Ours was somewhere outside the asteroid belt because recruits have been in show-me mode since 2023. Well Billy showed 'em enough that a bunch that loved UF decided that coaching staff would still be around and signed.

Its not enough, though, unless Napier and his team continue its upward momentum. 7-5 next year won't cut it to pull a top-ten class.

 

How do you determine where the upper class ends? I mean Oregon can say they are elite and uga is second tier.
Backing out the specialists uf has an average star rating right there with bama and uga. The class differences are negligible

 

In 2024, UF finished #7 when the classes were ranked using the HS players and the portal players combined.

Given the HS class is a consensus #10 and it isn't over until NSD, it looks like another top 10 finish. UF's players are good enough to beat anyone, quality athletes.

 

To your point, you don’t even have to back out our specialists to have a higher blue chip ratio than Ohio State, a school he called elite. Take out our specialists and their specialists and I guess that top 5 team becomes second tier? Facts don’t fit his narrative, so he will continue to ignore them and move the goal post to have the opportunity to diminish our success.

 

Not repelled by the word, more frustrated at both the difficulty of defining it as well as consensus among people that desire it. Like I said Wanne15 has a criteria: "Elite = Top 4 for at least a decade." That is a pretty quantifiable thing...until you get into the sources of the ratings for "top 4". Certainly the farther from #1 the worse, but there's no objective basis except an "average of averages" and an economist would blanch at such a thing.