The NFL Draft has come to a close, and the Gators finished with seven players drafted, one in each round. It’s the first time in program history that Florida has had someone drafted in each round of the draft, and Florida finished tied for the 10th most players drafted in the 2026 draft.
It’s also the final draft class to come from the Billy Napier Era, and it’s a final reminder of the talent Napier had to work with, no matter how hard he tried to paint the picture differently.
Florida gets seven players drafted in the 2026
One of the things Napier mused about a couple of weeks ago in his puff piece with USA Today was some of the injuries that Florida had suffered during his time with the Gators that prevented Florida from achieving its full potential. There is a minor hint of truth to that, but it doesn’t fully explain why the Billy Napier Era ended sub .500.
Because one of the other common retorts from the era was that he just didn’t have the “talent” to compete and we just had to wait until he got "his guys," and while that may ring true against a team like Georgia, the NFL Draft over the last four years would tell you he had more than enough talent to have never finished a season ranked.
With the seven draft picks from this past weekend, the Gators had 21 players drafted directly from Florida during the past four years when Napier was in town. That’s the 12th most of any program over the last four years and the 5th most in the SEC.
Mind you, those 21 players don’t include Gators who transferred, like Trevor Etienne, Caleb Douglas, Princely Umanmielen, or Chris McClellan.
Georgia leads the way with 39 players drafted in this same span, so again, it makes sense why Florida might lag behind the elites. But 12th place on this list is only one spot behind Notre Dame and two spots behind Miami, programs that both made it to the national title game the last two years. And Florida is ahead of schools like Ole Miss, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas A&M, all programs that figured out how to make the playoffs the last two seasons, while the Gators never finished with more than eight wins.
It’s all a reminder not to let anyone convince you otherwise that Napier didn’t have talent in Gainesville to work with. The talent was there, Napier just didn’t know how to use it.
Add us as a preferred source on Google