Hayes Fawcett's "Over Florida" obsession borders on football fan fiction

We here at Hail Florida Hail try our best to stay out of silly media wars. Everyone in the media has a role to play, and we want to be respectful to everyone involved, whether they cover Florida Football or are just a national voice in the sport.

However, there are some with a national platform who appear to love gravitating towards the Gators when they need content engagement. As Limp Bizkit once said, sometimes, somethings turn into dumb things. And that's when you put your foot down.

Florida Football: Over Florida

If you aren't familiar with Hayes Fawcett, he is a recruiting liaison for On3's national site. And we want to state upfront that the following is not meant to reflect the work the local On3 reporters for the Gators do, as they do a fair and honest job.

Fawcett is most notable for being the guy who tweets out commitments for almost every ranked recruit in the country and does so with a stylized graphic. A large number of current Gators have gone through Fawcett to make their own commitment announcement.

But last summer, fans started picking up on this trend that Fawcett has: a large number of commitments were picking their school "Over Florida." It didn't matter if it was a prospect Billy Napier hadn't actually spoken to in weeks; Fawcett was claiming that all these prospects had Florida as a finalist.

It's a weird way to drive engagement, for the most part, but we all have to do what we have to do. But over the weekend, the "Over Florida" trend reached levels of absurdity.

Kennan Britt, brother of former Auburn and current Tampa Bay Buccanneers linebacker K.J. Britt, announced his commitment to South Carolina over the weekend. The 2026 four-star EDGE had Auburn, UCF, and Arkansas listed on his On3 RPM prediction model.

But in the graphic Fawcett tweeted, he claimed that Britt chose South Carolina "over Oregon and Florida."

Wait what?

Florida did offer Britt on June 18, but as Graham Hall of Swamp247 points out, Britt dropped his "Top Five" three weeks ago, and Florida wasn't among the finalists.

The common retort is, "Well, he is just posting what the kids are telling him to say." If that's the case, then why bother having an RPM model if it's going to be that wildly inaccurate?

And in the end, are posts like this mostly semantics? 100%. It does not change the fact that Florida's 2025 recruiting class needs a strong finish, or it risks being a trainwreck.

However, as On3 continues to enter the recruiting space and aims to become the top recruiting source in the country, there are times when it is essential to protect the Florida Gator brand.

Because cycling back to Limp Bizkit: It's all about the he says, she says, (nonsense). I think you better quit lettin' (stuff) slip.

You'll gain more credibility that way.