Florida had one NFL Draft pick in 2024, but it was a first round selection in Ricky Pearsall. This year, the Gators had no one taken in the first three rounds but still ended up with a healthy seven guys taken.

Those events are unusual enough, but UF in this draft really showed how times have changed with how talent moves work in the last few years. Let’s look at some specific history to put this in context.

I am today looking specifically at drafts that happened after a head coach’s third season. The 2025 draft, after all, was the one after Billy Napier’s third campaign.

It can be a difficult time to get a lot of picks for a school. The draft-eligible players have generally been signees from the head coach’s transitional class or holdovers from the old head coach’s final class or two. However transitional classes are typically small and not that highly rated, as I’ve gone over plenty of times in the past. Also even in the pre-free transfer era, it was common for a lot of transfer attrition when head coaches turn over. Plus if the former coach was obviously headed towards a firing, his last class or two might’ve been less good due to the better recruits not wanting to board a sinking ship.

I went through and looked at the draft after each of Florida’s head coaches since Ron Zook to see what there is to learn here. Draft picks went into three buckets. Holdovers are anyone who played for the prior head coach; in Zook’s case, that’d be anyone who suited up for Steve Spurrier. Signees would be any traditional high school or JUCO recruits who signed for the head coach in question. Transfers then are anyone who transferred into the program under the specified head coach.

Here is what I found:

The one that sticks out as most strange is probably the first. Not a single Spurrier player got drafted after Zook’s third (and final) season. The last of any to hear their name called came the prior year’s draft in 2004, which followed the 2003 season. The Gators still managed three guys taken thanks to Zook’s recruiting prowess: high school signees Channing Crowder and Ciatrick Fason along with JUCO signee Reynaldo Hill. Crowder was the highest guy taken as a third rounder.

The 2008 draft, after Urban Meyer’s third season in 2007, saw even fewer at just two: first rounder Derrick Harvey and third rounder Bubba Caldwell. UF had just seen off nine selections the year before after Meyer’s first national title, and they had a lot of younger talent getting ready for another title run the next season.

The Gators bounced back with four picks in the 2014 draft, which came after Will Muschamp’s third year in 2013. It was mostly due to holdovers from Meyer’s final blowout recruiting class in 2010: Dominique Easley (first round), Jaylen Watkins (fourth), and Ronald Powell (fifth). Jon Halapio (sixth round), who signed the year before in 2009, was the only exception there. The only Muschamp signee to go pro early was Marcus Roberson, but he went undrafted.

Jim McElwain did Muschamp one better by having one of his own signees meet the commish. There were a couple of early round picks thanks to Coach Boom’s eye for defensive talent, and a specialist finally appears. The list is first rounder Taven Bryan, second rounder Duke Dawson, the one signee in fourth rounder Antonio Callaway, fifth rounder Johnny Townsend, and sixth rounder Marcell Harris.

The 2021 draft class that came after Mullen’s third year in 2020 is the high-water mark here. He was the first since Zook to have two signees get drafted, one somewhat predictable in versatile tight end Kyle Pitts (first round) and one very unexpected in kicker Evan McPherson (fifth). Rare is the specialist who declares early for the draft.

The number is also juiced a bit by two rare fifth-year senior selections in Kyle Trask (second round) and Stone Forsythe (sixth). True pro prospects usually, though not always, don’t stay in school that long. There is also a good chance that Marco Wilson (fourth) declares the year before if his career wasn’t set back by injury. Wilson came from McElwain’s low-key quite impressive 2017 recruiting class, along with Kadarius Toney (first), Shawn Davis (fifth), and Tedarrell Slaton (fifth). Mullen did a good job of making a meal from the groceries Mac bought in his final go-round.

Which brings us to Napier. For the first time, there isn’t a zero in the Transfers column. In case you don’t have the names memorized yet, they are Chimere Dike (fourth round), Cam Jackson (fifth), Graham Mertz (sixth), and Trikweze Bridges (seventh).

It’s not that none of the other coaches had transfers selected in early drafts. For example Meyer had Ryan Smith and Mullen had Jonathan Greenard, both of them one-year grad transfers, taken in the drafts after their second seasons. Transfers are just so much more common now that you’d have to either be terrible at the portal or a near-abstainer like Dabo Swinney to not have any transfer draftees at a Power 4 program. Recall that last year’s one pick was a transfer who Napier had picked up.

Mullen got the boot for many reasons, several of which boiled down to his recruiting. In an “exceptions that prove the rule” showing, the two holdovers were one of two 5-stars that Mullen signed in four seasons (Jason Marshall, fifth) and an Aussie punter (Jeremy Crawshaw, sixth). Mullen did at least get a commitment from the one Napier signee (Shemar James, fifth), though he decommitted and later re-committed to Florida under Napier.

In a sign of the times, three players who transferred out of Florida were taken in this draft. One, sixth round pick Antwaun Powell-Ryland, transferred out a couple seasons ago. But Princely Umanmielen, picked before any Gator in the third round, and Trevor Etienne, taken only behind Dike in the fourth, only left after last season and easily would’ve been welcomed back had they not entered the portal.

If you imagine no transfers had happened and just look at players who originally signed with UF in this draft, you’d see six total: four holdovers in Umanmielen, Marshall, Powell-Ryland, and Crawshaw, along with two signees in James and Etienne. That mix wouldn’t have stood out from the results for McElwain and Mullen.

So what did we learn here?

For a draft at this point in a head coach’s sequence, the thing that had been providing the bulk of the selections was the prior coach’s final recruiting class. Spurrier’s last one was very small at just 15 guys, and though it had some good college players, it didn’t have many pro prospects. Zook’s final class was bigger at 23 and had a higher percentage of good college players, but it still had just three total draft selections (Harvey, plus Brandon Siler the year before and Cornelius Ingram the year after).

But then Muschamp got four holdovers from Meyer, McElwain got four from Muschamp, and Mullen got six from McElwain — but four from Mac’s final recruiting class. Napier got just one this year from Mullen’s final class in Marshall. Crawshaw was a 2020 signee, and actually so were Umanmielen and Powell-Ryland if you’re counting along at home.

That said, the new era of college football shows up for Napier beyond all the transfers. That final Mullen class still has more picks to go out of Gainesville. Jake Slaughter, Tyreak Sapp, and Austin Barber all signed in 2021, and each are real draft prospects for next year.

Slaughter, as an All-American, easily could’ve gotten picked this year. Sapp, due to body changes from Napier’s staff moving him inside and then back out, and Barber, due to some injury history, would’ve been more borderline. All are back in college football in no small part due to NIL making it possible for guys who aren’t certain early-round picks to stay for longer by removing some or all of the financial risk.

Whatever Sapp and Barber are making in NIL this year, I would guess that it’s a healthy chunk of what a seventh-round pick makes in a year, and that’s if the seventh-round pick makes the team. I’m sure it’s more than the $101,474 signing bonus that their former teammate Bridges gets as a seventh round pick, and he may not make much more than that if he gets cut before the preseason.

Florida could’ve had earlier picks if the likes of Slaguhter or Caleb Banks declared for the draft. The Gators maybe could’ve had more picks if Sapp and Barber (or a handful of others) did too.

In any event, the breakdown here shows in a concrete way how the NIL and free-transfer rules have changed how talent flows through the college ranks and then onto the professional level.