Two leaders of the Gators football program are coming back. (Photo credit: Jeff Swinger, USA Today)
What’s sure to be a long and eventful offseason for the Gators football program is already off to an eventful start. And as most fans likely figured, the 2024 Gators football team will look very, very different.
Most noteworthy was the pair of Gators football players who announced that they’d be back in 2024. QB Graham Mertz, who passed for almost 3,000 yards in about ten and a half games, is set to return for a redshirt season in 2024. Also returning is disruptive defensive lineman Cam Jackson, who accumulated 32 tackles and deflected a pair of passes for incompletions.
Both of them will bid farewell to some of their understudies. Mertz’s backup, Max Brown, announced his intention to hit the transfer portal after playing admirably well against Missouri and respectably against a top five team in FSU. Joining him in doing so was defensive lineman Will Norman, a highly touted four-star recruit but who wasn’t a factor on the field in the fall.
Also declaring their plans of entering the transfer portal were a pair of wide receivers: Caleb Douglas, who pulled in 21 passes for 302 yards and three touchdowns, and Thai Bowman, who caught seven passes for 138 yards in 2022 but seldom even saw the field in 2023.
Then there’s the curious case of Kamarei Wilson. Once a high four-star prospect coming out of high school, Wilson played sparingly in 2022 as a true freshman before completely vanishing from the Florida depth chart in 2023. Rumors of him leaving the program swirled all year, and then at the same time as Norman was reported to be leaving, it was finally reported by Matt Zenitz of On3 that Wilson would hit the portal too. Except: Wilson’s father, Terrence, vehemently denied that report in a reply to Zenitz’ tweet. So, TBD on that one.
Last but not least, there’s the issue with current running back Trevor Etienne. Whispers-turned-murmurs are indeed true. He is legitimately considering transferring. Now, of course that doesn’t mean anything, because nothing is a done deal until it is- and sometimes not even then (see the case of Amaris Mims looking to leave Georgia). But that situation remains in limbo as the calendar flips from November to December.
There are a lot more decisions still to be made from a lot more Gators football players, so stay tuned for that.
