If the current reporting is accurate, Florida is a distant third in the Jalen Brewster Sweepstakes. The five-star defensive lineman from Texas had taken a visit to Gainesville earlier in the month, but the current buzz floating around is that Brewster will ultimately decide between Texas Tech, the school is currently committed, and LSU.
In a vacuum, losing out on Brewster isn’t the end of the world, and there are legit arguments to be made why Florida’s approach in recruiting is perfectly fine. Outside of the vacuum, losing out on Brewster would be a continuation of a trend that has been all too familiar since NIL became the way of the land.
Florida is fading in the Jalen Brewster Sweepstakes
One of the debates that has been a hot topic over the past few years is whether Florida’s administration is actually serious about winning on the field or if their endgame is simply to field teams competitive enough to appease Gator fans while turning as large a profit as possible.
We here at Hail Florida Hail have not been shy at times at pointing out the posturing of Florida’s current administration and its attempt to act like one of the big boys at the table until its time for the actual check itself to come due.
It’s also not unfair to point out that writing blank checks by itself can only get a team so far, and teams with a superior foundational base are still going to be the ones that thrive in the long term.
And so it brings us to Brewster and whether his recruitment is just a recurring story that will keep happening in Gainesville as time marches on. Given the current landscape, the simple answer is yes, but the deeper answer is a bit more complicated.
Talent costs money
The difficulty every team faces in the current era is how much to invest in recruiting versus the transfer portal. As dominant as guys like Brewster are on film, they are, at the end of the day, still just a high school junior, and there is no guarantee of them thriving in college. LJ McCray was in the same boat that Brewster is in, and Florida had to fend off last-minute suitors. Florida fans are waiting for McCray to have his breakout moment with the Gators.
But Florida also didn’t go after many of the big-ticket players in the transfer portal this past cycle. The only player that 247 had ranked in the top 75 among transfer portal players that Florida landed was Eric Singleton Jr.
So does this mean that Florida is broke?
No, not at all. The Gators still have a top-five recruiting class without Brewster or Easton Royal, and did land five-star Maxwell Hiller. Florida also retained everyone on the roster it actually wanted to retain rather than losing them to the transfer portal, which is a win within itself.
But while Florida does have Hiller, ten other programs have at least two five-star commited for the class of 2027. As the last two playoffs have proven, a team either needs the surgical precision of Indiana or it needs the cache of talent of Ohio State to make a run all the way to the national title. If Florida’s ultimate goal is to once again be the last team standing, and not just be content with 8-4 or 9-3, then the Gators will need to figure out which of those two categories it will fall into.
And as it stands, option B doesn’t look like an option.
Is option A going to be the way? Only time will tell.
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