For the second straight year, Florida Football's recruiting class has collapsed

Florida Football is coming off a 48-20 victory over Kentucky. While we here at Hail Florida Hail have written our fair share of critiques the past couple of days, most of the headlines coming out of the game from those writing about the Gators have been positive.

Perhaps sensing there should be no positive feeling allowed in Gainesville for the 2024 campaign, the Gators lost another commitment on Monday, and their already thin class of 2025 has virtually become nonexistent.

Florida Football: Open It Up

Joseph Mbatchou originally committed to the Gators back on July 31. He was seen as a project for the Gators, as this fall is his first formal season of playing football. But at 6'5" and 275 pounds with a basketball background, he was seen as a high-upside project worth taking a chance on.

Plenty of other schools have hoped on board since July, including Alabama, Auburn, Michigan, Tennessee, Texas, and USC. As a result, Mbatchou announced today he is opening his commitment back up and will take a string of official visits in November, with Florida still being one of them.

As with any decommit, the problem is never with any one recruit opting to take their talents elsewhere. When a string of recruits opt to take their talents elsewhere, questions need to be asked.

Florida has had Demetres Samuel, Josiah Abdullah, Peyton Joseph, and Joshua Moore all back off their commitment, in addition to Mbatchou.

The end result is that Florida is currently ranked 51st in the 247 Team Rankings. Stanford, Iowa, Boston College, and Minnesota are among the programs that right now have a higher-rated recruiting class than Florida for 2025.

Deja Vu

This film played out last season too. Following their win over South Carolina, Florida gained the commitment of LJ McCray during their bye week and, at the time, had the 3rd ranked class in the country.

As we know, five straight losses and the shuffling of the defensive staff led to a string of decommitments that dropped Florida out of the top 20. With a couple of late adds, Florida was able to claw back and wind up with the 13th-ranked class.

But for all the literature about Dan Mullen and his recruiting efforts, and we have written plenty of that, he still never wound up with a class outside the top 20 and did sneak into the top 10 a couple of times. The entire point of Napier and a pivotal cog to his building a Georgia or Alabama-like machine is that his plan called for having top-five recruiting classes every year.

Billy Napier has the 51st ranked class in the country, and about the only reason it is even that high is because of some highly rated legacy prospects like Vernell Brown III.

So whether Napier somehow has DJ Lagway drag him to a six or seven-win season and somehow manages to get another year in Gainesville, or he gets the axe after losing four straight games coming out of the bye week, Florida's foundation is in real danger of decaying to the point that even the transfer portal can't save it in a couple of years when 2025 guys would be needed.