For all you naysayers, who berated our coaching staff most of the year:

Can we get a Champion of Life trophy, like the Vols, also?

 

Funny how 20/20 hindsight makes everyone a genius. Credit where credit is due on the turnaround. Somehow you knew after getting waxed by Miami and aTm that this turnaround was in the cards.
Very happy we have positive momentum for next season and that recruiting has recovered very nicely since early in the season.

 

I think everyone is excited and hopeful about how the season ended, but we finished 7-5 and 7th in the league in recruiting. So we are a long way from victory laps over Billy’s long term success.

 

This is why the season should be looked at like a marathon and not a sprint.
As a player you look at it as one game at a time. As fans,.some look at one game and determine the whole season. It's understandable that some's Premature assumptions on how season will end preclude them from seeing the actual possibilities of how it can play out.

 

What is the points difference between 7th and 3rd of our conference in recruiting? Serious question. And of those classes how many are rated higher because they have more commits. How many filled their needs at important positions and created talented depth at those that were lacking. Some times landing a highly rated player can inflate the class points ranking but might not solve an issue at a position or two that were in need. Aside from being short some experience at some postions that we'll add via the portal we did well addressing our needs. Safety, WR, LB, DB, Edge, OT, DL. We got some highly rated players at those positions.

 

Let me add some love for the forgotten guys too. In that recruiting points total includes the #1 Kicker, #1 longsnapper and a kohls 5 star combo kicker who we signed as our punter. Importance of a great special teams can not be understated.

 

I tend to look at average ranking per recruit on 247 as the best single indicator, anything more than a point difference tends to show up on the field. 5 of the SEC teams ahead of us were more than a point up on us. UGA and UTx were 2.5 or so. So we aren’t narrowing the talent gap. Yea we have some good pieces. But as an example to the premise in the OP, UGA lost their starting QB mid game too in the SEC championship game. And they still found a way to win, because they had enough talent around him to cover it. Had they lost Stockton they had another 4 star recruit behind him. We didn’t.

And no. I’m not saying we are going to suck or demanding we fire Napier, just that some of the exuberance at seasons end was based on where we finished relative to where we were, and not who we compete against. We might have the right pieces for a run next year, we will see. But if we do it’s largely predicated on one guy, and that’s not a recipe for long term success. Ask Orgeron, Czizik, Norvell etc.
I think we all hope that the last few months were the start of a real turnaround, but we are still a good ways from saying yeah, we are truly back.
Jmo.
Jmo.

 

When coach, in his 3rd year repeatedly puts out effusive praise of his team and then follows up a terrible opening performance at home against a team that was in similar disarray 3 years prior there is a problem. When he follows that up with another abysmal performance at home against a first year coach and backup qb with no improvement in sight then fans are going to expect accountability. It's not as if we lost two close ones in well played games. I'm not one of the negative ones. I went from full support to off the train after the aTm game and am back on board with cautious optimism until Napier fields a well coached team to start the season.

Gloating at this point is just as extreme of a reaction as the ones that dont acknowledge the recent improvement at all. The truth lies somewhere in the middle.

 

You bet the over?

 

When our veteran QB went down our true freshman QB came in and played very well. When he went down our third QB, a redshirt freshman with less than Georgia’s redshirt #2 QB and managed the team to 10 points against a pretty good defense. Granted he had a rough go at Texas but, Jaxon Dart had a less than memorable game against us: it happens in football.
I’m of the opinion our final result on recruiting this year was absolutely awesome considering where we were mid season.
I’m excited about our future and am hoping we win the most important game of the season: the next game. That just happens to be against a pretty good Tulane team on 12/20.

 

If you could only pick one scenario, I’d rather finish strong after a poor start than the opposite. I want to say UK started fairly well and then collapsed. (too lazy to verify)

 

Some guys cry about plays, players, refs and coaches during the first quarter of the game. There's no crying in football.

 

Glad to see we still have a few Gator fans on left on Gator Country. Many have been runoff. We are fewer than ever, but proud.

 

I’d say anyone taking the time to consistently post on GC is fan.

 

the big difference in the top recruiting classes (in the top 5)is in elite talent, and usually NFL talent. Some “experts” look at two categories - top 30 kids and top 100 kids. This is because the top 30 kids have like a 50% chance of getting drafted and top 100 is like 20%. Everyone rated higher than 100 is like less than 5-10% chance of being drafted. (Those are not the exact numbers…using those as examples but the numbers are pretty distant from top 30 to top 100 to everyone else.

those teams with the top 30 kids makes the biggest difference. This year, our class had 0. The third rated SEC class, Georgia, had 3. (Georgia had 4 31-100 while Florida had 3).

it is those super star potential top 1-30 that have the highest odds/percentages of working out as major contributors. Florida had 2 of those in our last class - Lagway and McCray. Lagway has already worked out. McCray seems likely to as well.

Until Michigan last year, no team had won a national title in 20 years without having at least 1 recruiting class ranked in the top 5 over the prior 4 year period. Remains to be seen if that trend continues with a larger playoff field.

you really need both elite recruiting AND good coaching to win it all. Getting a top 5 class by itself doesn’t guarantee anything.

 

Yes, you were consistently supportive all season . . . more than most, including me. I think antny1 said it very well a couple posts above though.

Like Tilly pointed-out in his thread . . . Coach Napier is the first Florida coach in history to defeat a Buzz Thread!

I will take my serving for dinner tonight:



Now to much more critical things: You do know the source for your thread is a UcheaT site, right? I don't think the vollies get past OSU and, if they somehow do, there's Oregon next. Self-declared "SEC's best hope" when they didn't even make the SECCG is SO UcheaT. LOL!

 

I, too, am happy for the unexpected turnaround. But, bro, it was not after a "few games." The demands you speak of started pouring in after 28 games worth of performance to consider. Napier was on thin ice with everyone but Stricklin after two seasons that fell well short of expectations, then the team came out against Miami as if it hadn't practiced since November 2023. The aTm game was against a first-year head coach with a backup QB in our house, and again we looked like we had not even practiced. So get as smarmy as you want. With the data we had in hand last September, cutting bait looked like the right move.