(Photo credit: Florida Gators)
It seemed as though Billy Napier didn’t want to wait until the offseason to begin the process of rebuilding the roster in his image.
This week alone, Brenton Cox and Kamar Wilcoxson have departed from the program in a pair of moves that Napier himself hinted was coming. The pair joined offensive lineman Josh Braun in departing from the team in mid-season. And more attrition may still be coming.
Meanwhile, current Florida Gators commits such as TJ Searcy, Marcus Stokes, and Roderick Kearney have each taken the iniative to reaffirm their commitments to the Gators. That’s going to help ensure that Napier has more guys that he wants in his program, to be in his program, in the years to come- but it doesn’t do a thing to help this team. And that’s not a bad thing, either.
All of this creates some “rep vacuums” these next four weeks. In both practices and games these next four weeks, new players will have their chances to impress. At Cox’s now-vacated JACK position, that’s Antwaun Powell-Ryland Jr., Lloyd Summerall III, aand David Reese. Wilcoxson and Braun weren’t exactly competing for playing time when they departed, but now the secondary and the offensive line just got one body thinner.
But the situation is deeper than the Florida Gators just filling three spots at various ladder-rungs on the depth chart for four weeks. As a team, Florida will be losing a slew of seniors at the conclusion of the season; even with that plus more expected attrition, there will still be a number of guys from this year’s team left over next year.
That means these next four games are a chance to truly buy into a culture. Who wants to be here? Who can not only make plays on the field, but prove their worth as leaders in the locker room?
It’s almost as if this final month of the season is a special sort of bowl season. After all, the Florida Gators will be in exactly the same spot with the CFP whether they finish 4-8 or 8-4; wholly irrelevant. Not considered. That also goes for the SEC East race, and it even goes for the New Year’s Six Bowls. Whatever hopes for the New Year’s Six that Florida had vanished with Georgia’s 42-20 win last weekend.
So instead of shooting for the sorts of goals that lie on the table every August, or even for recalibrated, reduced expectations, the Florida Gators need to worry about one thing: getting better as a program.
Why Trey Dean continues to play over Kamari Wilson is a mystery that would perplex Aristotle- yes, he played well against Georgia, and he absolutely deserves credit for that, but you’d like to have seen a true freshman with at least two more years ahead of him be the one to make those strides and put it together in that Georgia game as opposed to a fifth year senior- but what matters now is that Wilson is at least worked into the rotation so that he has some meaningful experience for next season.
Anthony Richardson is not by any means a lock to return in 2023, but that seems like by far the more likely scenario; you’d like to see him put together a few performances in a row where he reads the field well, hits his receivers in stride, and looks confident as a runner in the open field.
Montrell Johnson and Trevor Etienne will be back in 2023, and they’ve already had very good seasons; these next four games present a chance for them to upgrade the descriptions of their respective seasons from “very good” to “great.”
And so on.
One thing that should help is that the level of competition drops off a bit, at least for the next three games. Texas A&M, South Carolina and Vanderbilt have had trouble scoring all year long, which bodes well for the Florida defense. If the Gators can figure some things out and look a little bit better the next three weeks, then their challenge will be appropriately upgraded in the season finale, when they have to face a mobile quarterback in Jordan Travis and what appears to be a slightly improved FSU squad in Tallahassee. (And if they can’t figure things out and get any better in their next three games, well, then they kind of deserve whatever happens to them in Tallahassee.)
This season still has a chance to be remembered as a positive one for Billy Napier and his Florida Gators. Yes, of course, subsequent seasons will be what ultimately makes or breaks Napier’s tenure in Gainesville, but just because future seasons are more meaningful and telling than this one doesn’t mean you can just throw the rest of this season away. These four games still matter. They still count.
The seniors who won’t be back next year- guys like Amari Burney, Trey Dean, O’Cyrus Torrence, and Ventrell Miller- still have a stake in the game here. And I’m not even talking about pride. They can be remembered as the seniors who poured the concrete and laid the foundation by being good teammates who do what they’re supposed to do both on and off the field. They can go down in Gator lore as the pilots of another “November to Remember” in Napier’s first season- and if Napier turns out to be the coach many of us thought he could be, this November to Remember would usurp the 1973 edition of that moniker in the history books.
As for the players who will be returning? This is their shot to not only help engineer that November to Remember for Florida Gators archival purposes, but to set themselves up as leaders heading into spring ball. And then come spring, they’ll have their chances to help mentor the freshmen and instill Napier’s values in them through the mouthpieces of peers, not authority figures.
How this season ends, and the point amidst the #jOURney at which Napier’s much more critical second season begins, is up to the guys in that locker room. There’s still fate to be decided, and they control that fate. And it all starts tomorrow against an Aggies team that hasn’t won a game since September.
