(Photo via Florida Gators)
College football has flipped 180 degrees. And in terms of how that affects the Florida Gators, Trevor Etienne’s transfer to rival Georgia might just be a canary in a coal mine.
To any fans of the Florida Gators who still believe that college football should be about the love of your logo, loyalty to your teammates, and pride, it is with great sadness and regret that I hereby inform you that those days are done. They’re dead, buried deep in the ground, and they’re never coming back to life. The thermonuclear fission reaction that just detonated over the sport is not reversible; the damage is permanent. The amateur athletics apocalypse has happened. We now live in this post-apocalyptic world, with no alternative NIL-less dimension to jump to.
While college athletes still have lives outside of their sport, within the context of their sport, they are little more than paid mercenaries now. They’re businessmen who make business decisions based on what is best for them. Growing up a fan of a certain team or wanting to play close to home? Mere afterthoughts of the cross-benefit analysis now for recruits and their families. Relationships with coaches and prospective teammates? Reduced to tertiary consideration within the recruiting process.
For today’s college football prospect, it’s all about any of three main factors: NIL, development for the NFL, and a desire to win. Every now and then, for the rare brilliant student-athlete like Richard Sherman, Joey Slackman, or Myron Rolle, academics could be thrown into the mix as a fourth main criteria, but for the overwhelming majority of prospects, it’s all about the first three, in some order. Different recruits will weigh those three criteria differently, but it’s primarily about NIL, NFL, and winning to varying degrees.
Those three criteria go hand in hand. If you have your NIL game rolling like a well-oiled machine, you’ll naturally sign a lot of top players. Sign a lot of top players, and unless your coaching staff is incompetent, you’ll win a lot of games. Sign a lot of top players and have a competent coaching staff, and your program will produce a lot of NFL talent. So to be very clear, it all starts with NIL, as that helps a lot of other pieces fall into place.
Florida’s NIL situation could certainly be improved in a number of fashions– not the least of which would be the school promoting Florida Victorious every chance they get (which, yes, is legal, as long as the school itself does not explicitly pay the players)– but that’s not the issue at hand here. At least, not directly.
But that’s a discussion for another day.
The issue at hand is that in today’s era of college football– and again, whether you like it or not does not matter, because this is just the way it is– you have to not only recruit players to sign with your school, but then re-recruit them to stay each year. Once the NCAA approved instant eligibility for all transfers, it was only a matter of time before players figured out they could shop around for better deals after each season. Sure enough, the transfer portal is now constantly flooded with players looking to do just that.
And while this would be unfathomable a quarter of a century ago, players are now transferring to rival schools left and right.
Now, players transferring to rival schools is not an entirely new phenomenon. It doesn’t exactly happen every day, but it does happen. Florida has taken two transfers from Georgia in the last four years alone (Brenton Cox and Jalen Kimber), and Georgia lost receiver Jermaine Burton to Alabama just a couple of years ago.
That’s not something unique to football, by the way. It happens in college baseball too– and it happens in the Sunshine State quite a bit. Former Florida pitcher Nolan Crisp transferred to Georgia in 2020, shortstop Jordan Carrion transferred from Florida to FSU in 2021, and his fellow infielder Cory Acton transferred to rival Georgia in 2022. Elsewhere in the state, slugger Alex Toral left Miami and joined rival FSU a couple of years ago.
Even before the instant-eligibility transfer era of the portal, while uncommon, it was not altogether unheard of altogether in college football. Offensive lineman Justin Boren transferred from Michigan to Ohio State in 2009. Running back Corey Grant transferred from Alabama to Auburn in 2011. Safety Tray Matthews transferred from Georgia to Auburn in 2014. Running back Tavien Feaster transferred from Clemson to South Carolina in 2019.
And if you want to go way back, quarterback Brock Berlin transferred from Florida to Miami in 2002. We all know what happened next. No point reliving that; we’ve got enough trauma to deal with as Gator fans right now.
But anyway, those things happening were rare exceptions, and there were legitimate reasons for them. Berlin was buried behind Rex Grossman on the depth chart at Florida, and wanted to play. Boren hated new Michigan coach Rich Rodriguez and wanted revenge on him. Grant redshirted as a freshman at Alabama and was clearly not going to see the field ahead of Trent Richardson, retroactively felt deceived along the recruiting journey, and like Boren, developed a grudge. Matthews was outright thrown off the team after being arrested for theft.
Only the case of Tavien Feaster even somewhat compares to Etienne’s case. Feaster wanted to be more than just a rotational back at Clemson, Dabo Swinney wouldn’t promise that, Will Muschamp did, and thus, he made a business decision. That, as confirmed by both sources and basic logic, was a piece of the puzzle with Etienne. An ancillary piece, but a piece nonetheless.
But never before in the history of college football has such a dynamic and provably productive player transferred to an arch rival school because his current-turned-former team wasn’t good enough for his standards.
Etienne was seeing plenty of touches at Florida. Oh, sure, not as many touches as he would have liked, but he still touched the ball 131 times in twelve games– an average of 10.92 touches per game– but there was no arguing that he was a valuable piece of the Gators’ offense. Anyone can argue that they should have played more, but Etienne put up a healthy 753 yards on those 131 carries. Not exactly a backup. That part could have been solved in the Gators’ desperate efforts to keep him for 2024.
No, the main reason Etienne left Florida for Georgia is because he wanted to win something while he was in college, and he simply didn’t trust the Florida staff to make that happen.
The point here isn’t to throw shade at Etienne. Debates about his greed, his lack of loyalty, whether his mom and brother are shady and assisted with tampering efforts by Georgia, or whether Georgia simply took it upon themselves to tamper are all moot. The reality is, being upset about that is a textbook example of crying over spilled milk.
Because Etienne won’t be the last star player of a mediocre team to transfer to a far superior rival team. No, it’s going to keep happening again, and again, and again. And it’s going to happen with increased frequency. The toothpaste is out of the tube now; you can’t put it back. You can only clean up the mess and buy a new tube.
Translation: the Florida program can’t get Etienne back, but they can stop the next player who breaks out as a freshman and/or sophomore for the Gators from transferring to Georgia by controlling what they can control. To everyone reading this, be honest with yourself when I ask this strictly hypothetical question: would it shock you if true freshman LJ McCray has an excellent freshman season for Florida, but the Gators go 7-5 (or worse) and then he transfers to Georgia– even if Billy Napier isn’t fired at season’s end? No, there’s no smoke of him transferring as of this publication, but the Gators risk exactly this scenario playing out over and over again if they don’t turn things around on the field.
And by that, I mean winning. And not seven or eight games, mind you, I mean ten or eleven each season. Sure, that’s a pretty lofty aspiration given that Florida has just suffered three losing seasons in a row, but that’s where the Gators have to be if they want to patch up that leak, i.e. that reason for players to leave.
Billy Napier, to be blunt, has not done a lot of things to inspire confidence that he will guide the Florida Gators to that ten-win mark even once. The laundry list of in-game coaching blunders Napier and specific assistants were responsible for– you know, things that Napier was supposedly “evaluating” this offseason– has not resulted in a change in the special teams department, the coaching situation on the offensive line, or with the play-calling duties as of the final day of January 2024. Those three issues directly cost the Gators five of their seven losses last year, and with no change seeming imminent, Napier seems content to stick with both ineffective offensive line coaches and an intern running the special teams.
There’s been some speculation that Billy Napier is simply waiting until his assistants’ contracts expire to make a change, but that’s even worse. Napier has never indicated interest in showing urgency, nor has he ever appeared to even understand the very concept. This offseason is his last chance to learn it, at least on Florida’s payroll, because whether he or his pseudo-oafish, boujee athletic director Scott Stricklin care to admit this or not, he’s squarely on the hot seat right now. By failing to show an ability to make this change, and understand that moves need to be made more quickly, Napier is effectively signing his own execution warrant– and it’s going to be death by a thousand paper cuts.
But let’s say, purely hypothetically, that Billy Napier is fired after 2024. That still doesn’t fix the issue.
The next Florida Gators coach is going to take over the Gator football team at a time where A) the program is likely on probation among other recruiting sanctions and B) every other school in the nation declares open season on the Florida roster due to both the coaching change and the aforementioned likely sanctions. Just look at what happened with Alabama when Nick Saban left. Napier’s successor is going to have an even bigger mess to deal with than Napier had.
To be clear, this isn’t meant to say that Florida is screwed forever. College football is cyclical. What goes up must come down. No success is forever, and no failure is fatal. Some day, Florida will be on top of college football again, and Georgia and FSU will be irrelevant on a national scale. I mean, who reading this piece thought in the fall of 2009 that FSU would field a national championship team and the Gators would be 4-8 just four years later?
But for that to happen, things need to change. Athletic director Scott Stricklin needs to be ejected from Alachua County, and unless a switch flips inside of Napier’s head, he very well might need to go, too. Then, President Ben Sasse needs to get the next AD hire right, and that new AD, in turn, will need to get the next football coach hire right.
Until and unless all that happens, though– and even for a year or two after they happen– sit back, watch the results roll in, and prepare yourself for more players who flash star potential for a year or two in Gainesville to leave for rival programs that already have the winning part figured out.
And maybe one day, when different leadership rules the Florida Gator football program, we as Gator fans can enjoy the other shoe dropping, and Florida getting some revenge by importing some star Georgia Bulldogs or Florida State Seminoles.
