Tag: Major Wright

Talking with 5 former Gators about their NFL draft-day experiences

Pat Dooley catches up with five former Gator greats and talks with them about their draft-day experiences.

For both NFL and college fans, Thursday night is a national day of importance.

College fans want to see their players drafted because it helps with recruiting and validates their belief in those players when they were wearing the uniform.

For NFL fans, they know the NFL draft can change a franchise — for the better or the bust.

Of course, then there are the actual players. They want their time in the sun to come as quickly as possible, celebrate it and then start playing football for a living.

(Although the way NIL is going, it’s getting harder to differentiate between college and pro players).

It won’t be a big draft for the Gators, which is one reason Florida has a new coach. But we wanted to give you a look at five guys (five players, not the burger chain) and what the draft days were like for some former players.

In-state recruiting key for Florida’s growing momentum

That class formed the basis for much of the team’s dominance 2008-09, leading to a national championship and SEC title in the former season.

Despite earning double-digit wins in each of his first two seasons at the helm of the Florida football program, coach Dan Mullen has received criticism for his recruiting success (or lack thereof). The Gators have landed top-10 recruiting classes in 2019 and 2020, but those classes weren’t elite in terms of the rest of the SEC, falling fifth and sixth, respectively.

But in the last week, Mullen received pledges from a pair of Miami prospects and teammates at Palmetto High School — five-star cornerback Jason Marshall and four-star safety Corey Collier. Those two additions became the highest-rated prospects in the class on the 247Sports Composite, and they bumped UF’s class up to the No. 6 spot in the nation.

A major reason for Florida’s success in this recruiting cycle is its ability to keep top Floridian prospects in-state. Nineteen players in the 2021 class hail from the state, the most since Urban Meyer’s 2007 class.

That class featured Sunshine State prospects like the Pouncey twins, Major Wright, Ahmad Black and Chris Rainey. It formed the basis for much of the team’s dominance in 2008 and 2009, leading to a national championship and SEC title in the former season.

Recruiting the state is much harder than it was a decade ago, as top out-of-state programs like Alabama, Clemson, Georgia and LSU all have made in-roads at high schools throughout the state. If Mullen begins to retain state talent at similar rates to what Meyer did in the late 2000s, it would bode well for the future of the UF program, which is still searching for its first conference title since 2008.

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