South FLA HS coaches weigh in on recruiting

The Army has no excuses in the state of Florida. Somebody should be out shaking hands. I’m sure they’ve got it covered.

 

My back in the day reference is just to point out that UF can recruit South Florida with success and for some reason school's not located in Florida have had more recent success in South Florida which we all know has a ton of talent. Two coaches have had ultimate success at UF in Spurrier and Meyer and both pulled players from South Florida.

 

Here is a link to the article that should get you behind the paywall to read the article.

https://archive.li/oZF2j

It is worth reading. I would not get wrapped around two throw away comments from two coaches about UF, as they are not at traditional powerhouses that you need to maintain recruiting relationships with and it is a very small point of the article. Read it just to understand how much the portal and ESD have changed recruiting. It does a good job explaining why recruiting classes are 85% full by August 1st. It also talked about some kids having to wait until May to get a sign-able LOI because schools have to wait until after spring practice to know who left after spring practice and what spots they could not address through the portal.

 

Meh.

It’s a two way street. Doesn’t Napier hold seminars just for HS coaches each year? I bet UF would even cover travel expenses to it. That would be a good place to start developing relationships to have UF make some time to visit their schools.

 

Tell those coaches we busy raiding south Louisiana...

 

the reason schools have success in south Florida with top rated players has been tied to large bags to players, families, coaches, and handlers. NIL may change that somewhat but there is still cash getting tossed around under the table down here to get kids to just visit schools or paying them to NOT visit schools. You still need a bag man network set up to recruit the big dogs in south Florida.

 

UF doesn't need South Florida to be successful.

I looked at the 96', 06' and 08' championship rosters and other than Major Wright from Aquinas and Lawrence Wright, not really any/many key pieces that were from South Florida. Are there great players there? Undeniably.

Is it far away enough (and highly contested by other programs) that the yield versus spend on recruiting down there nets out that Billy feels that energy is better spent elsewhere? This article is a clear answer on how Billy sees this: will target a few key guys every cycle but won't expend the resources to just have coaches in Miami around the clock.

I played for Tim Harris. He's a pragmatist and straight shooter. Booker T puts out some good players (including Antonio Callaway) and currently have a four star legacy on their roster (Ben Hanks Jr.) so maybe he has a point that he wished he felt UF's presence a bit more around his program.

Otherwise none of this is shocking.

 

If UF got, and this is all hypothetical and illogical, say 33-50% of the best players we wanted from the areas of Jax, Orlando, Tampa, West Coast (Ft Myers, Sarasota) and mid state (Polk, Lake, etc) we would have a loaded roster.

Back years ago, as in the days of the Tom McEwen Blue Chip List, there were only about 40-50 Div 1 true prospects in FL with few being linemen. Most were skill players. Not anymore.

The Miami/Ft L/ Muck area has always produced players, but it has never been our "back yard" dating back to Tucker Frederickson (Aub), Elvis Peacock (Okla), Buster Rhymes (Okla), etc. We miss more that we hit down there.

 

This all sounds very accurate to me, and I would add that other regions in our state are starting to accumulate good amounts of talent like south Florida has in the past. South Florida does not have a Monopoly on talent that they used to have 20/30 years ago. Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville all are starting to catch up... and in some ways have equal amounts of talent.

The talent pool is starting to spread out all across our great state of Florida. The days of getting 85% to 90% of all your talent from south Florida alone are long gone.

 

ShebyGT350 said:
"Back years ago, as in the days of the Tom McEwen Blue Chip List, there were only about 40-50 Div 1 true prospects in FL with few being linemen. Most were skill players. Not anymore."
Gosh, Shelby...that was a blast from the past!
Remember this?
"...two eggs, over easy, bacon with two slices of buttered toast and chilled orange juice..."

 

Or a tampon

 

I was trying to be somewhat polite lol

 

Agreed. And not for nothing, but there's a slight migration trend northward among the Black population in Miami/South Florida, especially when you incorporate the full Dade County. The numbers aren't alarming yet (from 474k to 457k over the ten years from roughly 2010 to 2020). But in that same span Broward County's Black population has INCREASED from 457k to 555k).

Some of that is people drifting into Broward County from Dade and a good bit of it is people settling in Broward rather than Dade to begin with. I graduated from Miami Northwestern in 1998 and the enrollment at that time was somewhere around 3k kids.

Right now that same school has an enrollment of 1500.

Booker T Washington, where my old coach Ice Harris coaches, was at 1800 enrollment in 2003 and now is at roughly 1000 students.

Schools like Dr. Phillips, Apopa and Mainland by comparison have seen minimal to modest decreases in enrollment over that same time (with the first two maintaining enrollments over 4000 students at roughly 33% Black).

Black kids aren't the only prep football players in the state of Florida but for recruiting purposes they make up better than 90 to 95% of the blue chippers here. If you follow the population shifts, some of this begins to make even more sense

 

And yet it’s men doing the whining

 

Interesting stuff. Aside from potential socio- economic variables, how much of the current decreased enrollment in the aforementioned schools could be attributed to post-covid online diploma options? Are virtual students still "enrolled" at a particular school or simply a general diploma program from the Dept of Ed. I know of many high schoolers who opted not to go back to conventional school (when they reopened) and just finish online.

 

Based on what those coaches are saying over the last ten years or so the following players might not have been offered by UF since they were viewed as development players and the coaching staff would be looking for a portal player:

• Bryan Cox, Jr
• Jawaan Taylor
  
• Jabri Zuniga
  
• Taven Bryant
  
• Vosean Joseph
  
• Ventrell Miller

These are all players that were three stars that did not have other offers from multiple P5 programs that UF ended up signing. I'm not saying they definitely would not be offered but they fit the profile of players that these coaches are saying use to be able to get into a P5 program but are now going to G5 and Div II schools. Coaching staffs feel that they can better address the needs these kids use to fill through the portal and they would rather have one or two years of a 22 or 23 years old player that has been in a college program for a while than a high school player that needs time to develop. I left out Kyle Trask because I think Mac was signing him regardless but he also fit the profile.

That was the interesting point of the article to me. The old "Diamond in Rough" type development players are going to be fewer and fewer moving forward since programs are going to be taking portal transfers over them.

 

Great point.

Regards enrollment though these trends were in place LONG before Covid.

You can find all the data on enrollment at this great little website linked repeatedly below:

Miami Northwestern Senior High School



Here's Apopka by comparison --

And Dr. Phillips --

To show that Northwestern is not an outlier, here's Miami Central --

To take it one step farther, let's go North to Broward County where I stated in my earlier post the Black population has increased by nearly 20% over the past decade. The (Ft. Lauderdale) Dillard Panthers enrollment during this same stretch --

NOTE if you don't click the links: essentially all five schools hit a dip in enrollment around 2008 but Central and Northwestern do not recover. Dillard is the only one to show significant enrollment gains.

The economic downturn that begins trending in 06' and SMASHES everyone to bits in 08' just seems to have had permanent effect the more depressed and farther south the schools are.

Maybe... the problems these coaches are scratching at isn't just down to a lack on interest by these coaching staffs. Of the top 50 Florida prep players in the 24' Class, only 6 are from Miami (including number 50, though, to be fair, number 51 is as well if we're including Aquinas and, bit of trivia, a JACKED Cane legacy in Willis McGahee IV who somehow plays linebacker and not RB)

Only 2 are in the top 20 at numbers 10 and 20 (Jamari Howard at 10 and Chance Robinson at 20). IMG skews those stats for sure but still... Billy is reading the tea leaves here!

 

Boom

 

out of 22 commitments for 2024, 6 are from Florida and 1 from South Florida????

 

With schools like IMG in Bradenton there’s no need to focus so much effort in South Florida like before. IMG will find those kids and put them on academic scholarship so it’s much easier to focus on IMG then spending resources in the south Florida area. When Spurrier and Urban coached there was no IMG. Times have changed