Florida Football: Defections part of the process for Billy Napier and Gators

Football, like a lot of things in life, is a zero-sum game. For Florida football to win, the other team has to lose. For someone to get snaps, someone else has to sit on the bench. For a coach to be fired, there needs to be someone better to replace him (though that’s easy to do when you are dead last in the country).

Following the loss to LSU, the Florida Gators have seen a player de-commit from the program and another player announce he’s heading to the transfer portal. While not ideal, players leaving the program are all part of the process for Billy Napier.

Florida Football: Up, up, and away

On Sunday, Gators’ commit Creed Whittemore, the brother of current Florida football wide receiver Trent Whittemore, announced that he was backing off his commitment to the Gators and pledged his allegiance to Mississippi State.

Yesterday, backup offensive lineman Josh Braun announced that he would be stepping away from the program to preserve his redshirt and that he would transfer at the end of the season.

These two aren’t the first to step away from Napier’s program and they won’t be the last. We remember the saga of Emory Jones, with the graphic during the Gasparilla Bowl saying he was transferring after the game, then sticking around for a couple of days into Spring camp, then actually transferring to Arizona State. Ty’ron Hopper and Mohamoud Diabate both left Florida football, only to wind up playing the Gators on their new teams this season.

Unfortunately, with the transfer portal and guys “committing” earlier than ever, defections are going to happen. In Whittemore’s case, he wasn’t too happy that his brother hasn’t seen the field as much as he would like. If Trent announced at the season’s end he was leaving, no one would bat an eye.

The same goes for Braun. He’s leaving simply because he wasn’t playing.

This is not exclusive to Florida and is not a reason for concern. Coaches across all of college football are frustrated with the portal because it makes it very hard to build depth in a program. Coaches sacrifice months of their lives to convince 17 and 18-year-old prospects to attend their school, only for those players to leave one or two years later if they aren’t getting snaps and aren’t willing to wait.

If a guy like Shemar James or Kamari Wilson announced they were leaving, then the alarm bells should be ringing. Those are guys that are playing and are getting increased playing time. And for as good of a recruiting class as Florida football is building for 2023, it is very heavy on defensive backs. Don’t be surprised if a couple of the lower-rated guys start looking around at other schools because they know they will be buried on Napier’s depth chart.

But when backups announce they would like to take their talents elsewhere, that’s just the circle of life in college football in 2022.

Keep up with all things Florida football with Hail Florida Hail.