The Gators’ hiring of new head coach Billy Napier and the swarm of staffers that have followed him to The Swamp signaled the beginning of a recruiting focus for the team that never materialized under former head coach Dan Mullen. Their big showing on national early signing day was an excellent start, but Napier came into the Florida program behind the eight-ball. He inherited a team with a hemorrhaging depth chart and little in the way of leads on the recruiting front.
The men and women Napier as brought with him to Florida’s staff are largely composed of his most trusted Louisiana staffers and recruiting experts poached from other schools. With their combined efforts, the Gators have generated a lot of news on the recruiting trail in recent weeks. The period immediately after early national signing day is one fraught with intense recruitment battles of players many have not looked into much before, proving plenty of opportunity for interesting storylines.
We’ve done our best to keep up with it all here at Gators Wire, but we can’t reasonably write a story for every shred of information that has been dropped in the recent whirlwind of activity. I did my best to round up a list of the most interesting and pertinent list of players who the Gators have been interacting with on the recruiting warpath.
Here’s a look at a few of the team’s current targets. For each player, I provided a link for further reading, but many are behind a paywall.