By Franz Beard
A few thoughts to jump start your Thursday morning:
IT’S FOOTBALL TONIGHT … SORT OF
The Gator Nation will get its first glimpse of Billy Ball, football style, tonight when the Orange and Blue Game is played at The Swamp (7:30 p.m., SEC Network+/ESPN+). Anthony Richardson will quarterback the Blue team while Jack Miller III will quarterback the Orange team. The way the rosters are broken down, it would seem that the Orange team will have the No. 1 defense and the No. 2 offense, while the Blue team will have the No. 1 offense and No. 2 defense.
If we go by the rosters this is what appears to be the No. 1 offense and defense:
No. 1 Offense: QB Anthony Richardson; RB Lorenzo Lingard; TE Dante Zanders; LT Richard Gouraige; LG Ethan White; C Kingsley Eguakun; RG O’Cyrus Torrence; RT Michael Tarquin; WR Justin Shorter; WR Marcus Burke; WR Xzavier Henderson
No. 1 Defense: DE Princely Umanmielen; DT Gervon Dexter; DT Desmond Watson; OLB Brenton Cox Jr., ILB Ventrell Miller; ILB Amari Burney; OLB Chief Borders or Antwaun Powell-Ryland Jr.; CB Jason Marshall Jr.; CB Jaydon Hill; S Trey Dean III; S Rashad Torrence II
The game will be played in four 15 minute quarters with a running clock. If it’s typical of spring games. Richardson and Miller will play half the game, turning it over to Carlos Del-Rio Wilson and Jalen Kitna for the second half. The offense will be pure vanilla with some long passes thrown in to excite the fans and the defense will be a base 3-4 with no blitzing allowed. The idea for the game is to give the fans a show and get out without anyone getting hurt.
And, the moment the game ends and the post-game press conference concludes in the South End Zone meeting room, you can expect every coach and staffer to be working high school recruits attending or working the transfer portal.
UF GYMNASTICS: GATORS START QUEST FOR NCAA TITLE
There isn’t a hotter gymnastics team in the country than the second-seeded Florida Gators, riding high into the NCAA Gymnastics Championship semifinals tonight in Fort Worth (6 p.m., ESPN2) on the heels of a 198.775 score – top score in the nation this year and the third highest score all time in an NCAA gymnastics meet – to win the Auburn Regional. The Gators will be the top seed in the evening session with No. 3 Michigan, No. 7 Auburn and No. 11 Missouri. The top two teams will advance to the championship on Saturday against the top two teams from the afternoon session – No. 1 Oklahoma, No. 4 Utah, No. 5 Alabama and No. 8 Minnesota.
The Gators feature the nation’s top gymnast in Trinity Thomas, who scored four perfect 10s – two in the semifinals, two more in the finals – at the Auburn Regional. Thomas had a 39.900 all-around score in the championship round, the highest score in the nation so far and the fifth highest score in NCAA history. Thomas has 18 perfect 10s in her career, 10 this season. She is only the seventh gymnast in the 40-year history of the NCAA sponsoring the sport, to record ten perfect 10s in a single season. Freshman Leanne Wong had a 39.875 all-around at the Auburn Regional, which ties Thomas for the second highest all-around score this year. Six times this year an all-around score of 39.850 or higher was scored. Five of those scores were turned in by Thomas and Wong.
The Gators come into the event with seven scores of 198 or better this season (best in the country) and five of the 20 highest team scores in the country.
UF BASKETBALL: TWO IN, ONE OUT
This is that time of the year when you can’t tell the players without a program. That’s true of both football and basketball, and it will only get worse in the next two weeks as the NCAA May 1 deadline approaches. Athletes from sports such as football and basketball have to be in the portal by May 1 for immediate eligibility. It’s precarious after May 1 because then athletes have to go through the waiver process which is dicey.
Wednesday, new head basketball coach Todd Golden and the Gators successfully welcomed transfers Will Richard (6-5, 195, from Belmont) and Alex Fudge (6-8, 190, from LSU). That was the good news. The bad news was Kowacie Reeves put his name in the portal per Travis Banham of 247Sports. More on that later.
Richard visited Florida last weekend and committed on Sunday but it was only announced as official Wednesday. He averaged 12 points and 6.1 rebounds per game last season at Belmont. He is a combo guard who rebounds and defends well enough to play the small forward. Richard has three seasons of eligibility remaining.
Fudge, a Jacksonville native who prepped at Robert E. Lee, is a former 4-star recruit who played in 29 games for LSU, averaging 3.3 points and 3.2 rebounds per game. He is a lights out scorer who is particularly dangerous when he puts the ball on the deck and heads for the rack. Fudge also has three seasons of eligibility remaining.
Reeves (6-6, 180) is somewhat of a surprise. The former 5-star recruit had a sensational game against Texas A&M at the SEC Tournament and played well against Xavier in the NIT. When he didn’t immediately enter the transfer portal when Mike White left for Georgia it was thought he would be staying with UF. He still could since Banham reports that Florida will remain an option when he makes his decision about next season.
There is plenty of speculation that Reeves wants to stay at Florida, but is going to dabble in the portal to see what kind of NIL deal he can get. Colin Castleon, after all, elected to stay at Florida after the Gator Collective offered him an NIL deal that made staying at UF financially worthwhile. There are all sorts of reports that Castleton is getting somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000 to stay.
And speaking of Castleton, he is having his torn labrum surgically repaired. This is a 4-5 month rehab process so he should be in very good shape by the time the Gators open their season in November.
UF SOFTBALL: GATORS OPEN 3-GAME SERIES WITH OLE MISS TONIGHT
Coming off a 12-7 win over No. 2 Alabama Monday evening, the 10th-ranked Gators (31-9, 8-7 SEC) hit the road for a critical SEC series with Ole Miss (29-11, 5-7 SEC) in Oxford. Tonight’s game (7 p.m.) will be broadcast on SEC Network+. The Gators will face Ole Miss Friday at 6 p.m. and finish the series at 1 p.m. Saturday.
This is the third SEC road series for the Gators, who own series wins over Texas A&M and Auburn. The Gators come into the game second in the SEC in pitching (2.22 ERA), first in fielding (.982) and fourth in hitting (.328). Shortstop Skylar Wallace is making a serious bid for SEC Player of the Year. She’s hitting .411 with 49 runs scored, four triples, five homers, 33 RBI and 33-35 in stolen bases.
SEC FOOTBALL/BASKETBALL
Alabama: Freshman guard JD Davison is off to the NBA. He averaged 8.5 points and a team-high 4.3 assists per game last season.
Auburn: Former Auburn quarterback Jeff Klein has passed away.
Georgia: Mike White pulled off one of his better recruiting jobs Wednesday because Kario Oquendo, Georgia’s leading scorer last season at 15.2 points per game, has withdrawn his name from the transfer portal … White is working the portal to try to lure Dayton transfer Elijah Weaver (6.6 points per game last season) and UConn transfer Corey Floyd Jr. (didn’t play as a true freshman).
Kentucky: Small forward Dontaie Allen announced that he will be transferring to Western Kentucky. He averaged 2.2 points in 19 games last season.
LSU: Freshman guard Justice Williams is the second LSU basketball player to withdraw from the portal to play for new coach Matt McMahon. A former 4-star recruit, he averaged 1.7 points per game last year.
Missouri: Head football coach Eli Drinkwitz says that landing recruits Luther Burden, Dominic Lovett and Mookie Cooper give the Tigers “a chance to be really explosive.”
South Carolina: In discussing last season’s surprising 7-win season, football coach Shane Beamer told Paul Finebaum, “It’s such a thin line between winning and losing. Yes, we won seven and that could have easily been nine and that easily could have been five in some ways.”
Texas A&M: Former 4-star offensive lineman Derick Hunter, who has played in 18 games since signing in 2019, has entered the transfer portal.”
ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT: Maybe the powers that be didn’t listen last week when Dabo Swinney went on a rant about the direction in which college football is headed. Maybe they will now because Nick Saban has weighed in and he told the Associated Press, “I don’t think what we’re doing right now is a sustainable model.”
Saban says he is happy NIL allows players to make some money, but that’s not the problem as he sees it. Recruiting? That’s another story altogether.
“[NIL] creates a situation where you can basically buy players,” Saban said. “You can do it in recruiting. I mean, if that’s what we want college football to be, I don’t know. And you can also get players to get in the transfer portal to see if they can get more someplace else than they can get at your place.”
When Texas A&M signed what some are calling the greatest recruiting class of all time, there were all sorts of rumors out there that Aggie boosters, using NIL as their cover, spent as much as $30 million to lure the players to College Station. Jimbo Fisher went on a post-signing day rant claiming the Aggies were pure as the driven snow. Maybe he liked the sound of what he had to say, but not a lot of people were actually buying it.
Lane Kiffin at Ole Miss certainly wasn’t.
“We don’t have the funding resources as some schools with the NIL deals,” Kiffin said in February when responding to the Aggies outrecruiting everyone in the nation. “It’s like dealing with salary caps. I joked I didn’t’ know if Texas A&M incurred a luxury tax with how much they paid for their signing class.”
Saban is right. Dabo is right. So is Lane Kiffin. College football is about to be altered in ways that were unthinkable not all that long ago. We have current players making millions and we have a kid like Long Beach Poly quarterback Nico Iamaleava who has an $8 million NIL deal before he plays his senior season in high school and even before taking a single snap at the University of Tennessee, where he is committed.
And indeed, we do have players testing the NIL waters in the portal, selling themselves to the highest bidder. There are no rules because the NCAA chose to okay NIL even before some common sense guidelines were in place. Instead of something that could have prevented the utter chaos that we now have, we have a wild west show going on.
“We now have an NFL model with no contracts but everybody has free agency,” Saban said. “It’s fine for players to get money. I’m all for that. I’m not against that, but there also has to be some responsibility on both ends, which you could call a contract so that you have an opportunity to develop people in a way that’s going to help them be successful.”
Some might say that Saban complaining about money changing hands to lure recruits or from one school to another is like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black, but whether or not you think Alabama has been known to spend a few dollars here and there to – shall we say – enhance recruiting isn’t the point. The point is, Nick is right. This is unsustainable.
A few thoughts to jump start your Thursday morning:
IT’S FOOTBALL TONIGHT … SORT OF
The Gator Nation will get its first glimpse of Billy Ball, football style, tonight when the Orange and Blue Game is played at The Swamp (7:30 p.m., SEC Network+/ESPN+). Anthony Richardson will quarterback the Blue team while Jack Miller III will quarterback the Orange team. The way the rosters are broken down, it would seem that the Orange team will have the No. 1 defense and the No. 2 offense, while the Blue team will have the No. 1 offense and No. 2 defense.
If we go by the rosters this is what appears to be the No. 1 offense and defense:
No. 1 Offense: QB Anthony Richardson; RB Lorenzo Lingard; TE Dante Zanders; LT Richard Gouraige; LG Ethan White; C Kingsley Eguakun; RG O’Cyrus Torrence; RT Michael Tarquin; WR Justin Shorter; WR Marcus Burke; WR Xzavier Henderson
No. 1 Defense: DE Princely Umanmielen; DT Gervon Dexter; DT Desmond Watson; OLB Brenton Cox Jr., ILB Ventrell Miller; ILB Amari Burney; OLB Chief Borders or Antwaun Powell-Ryland Jr.; CB Jason Marshall Jr.; CB Jaydon Hill; S Trey Dean III; S Rashad Torrence II
The game will be played in four 15 minute quarters with a running clock. If it’s typical of spring games. Richardson and Miller will play half the game, turning it over to Carlos Del-Rio Wilson and Jalen Kitna for the second half. The offense will be pure vanilla with some long passes thrown in to excite the fans and the defense will be a base 3-4 with no blitzing allowed. The idea for the game is to give the fans a show and get out without anyone getting hurt.
And, the moment the game ends and the post-game press conference concludes in the South End Zone meeting room, you can expect every coach and staffer to be working high school recruits attending or working the transfer portal.
UF GYMNASTICS: GATORS START QUEST FOR NCAA TITLE
There isn’t a hotter gymnastics team in the country than the second-seeded Florida Gators, riding high into the NCAA Gymnastics Championship semifinals tonight in Fort Worth (6 p.m., ESPN2) on the heels of a 198.775 score – top score in the nation this year and the third highest score all time in an NCAA gymnastics meet – to win the Auburn Regional. The Gators will be the top seed in the evening session with No. 3 Michigan, No. 7 Auburn and No. 11 Missouri. The top two teams will advance to the championship on Saturday against the top two teams from the afternoon session – No. 1 Oklahoma, No. 4 Utah, No. 5 Alabama and No. 8 Minnesota.
The Gators feature the nation’s top gymnast in Trinity Thomas, who scored four perfect 10s – two in the semifinals, two more in the finals – at the Auburn Regional. Thomas had a 39.900 all-around score in the championship round, the highest score in the nation so far and the fifth highest score in NCAA history. Thomas has 18 perfect 10s in her career, 10 this season. She is only the seventh gymnast in the 40-year history of the NCAA sponsoring the sport, to record ten perfect 10s in a single season. Freshman Leanne Wong had a 39.875 all-around at the Auburn Regional, which ties Thomas for the second highest all-around score this year. Six times this year an all-around score of 39.850 or higher was scored. Five of those scores were turned in by Thomas and Wong.
The Gators come into the event with seven scores of 198 or better this season (best in the country) and five of the 20 highest team scores in the country.
UF BASKETBALL: TWO IN, ONE OUT
This is that time of the year when you can’t tell the players without a program. That’s true of both football and basketball, and it will only get worse in the next two weeks as the NCAA May 1 deadline approaches. Athletes from sports such as football and basketball have to be in the portal by May 1 for immediate eligibility. It’s precarious after May 1 because then athletes have to go through the waiver process which is dicey.
Wednesday, new head basketball coach Todd Golden and the Gators successfully welcomed transfers Will Richard (6-5, 195, from Belmont) and Alex Fudge (6-8, 190, from LSU). That was the good news. The bad news was Kowacie Reeves put his name in the portal per Travis Banham of 247Sports. More on that later.
Richard visited Florida last weekend and committed on Sunday but it was only announced as official Wednesday. He averaged 12 points and 6.1 rebounds per game last season at Belmont. He is a combo guard who rebounds and defends well enough to play the small forward. Richard has three seasons of eligibility remaining.
Fudge, a Jacksonville native who prepped at Robert E. Lee, is a former 4-star recruit who played in 29 games for LSU, averaging 3.3 points and 3.2 rebounds per game. He is a lights out scorer who is particularly dangerous when he puts the ball on the deck and heads for the rack. Fudge also has three seasons of eligibility remaining.
Reeves (6-6, 180) is somewhat of a surprise. The former 5-star recruit had a sensational game against Texas A&M at the SEC Tournament and played well against Xavier in the NIT. When he didn’t immediately enter the transfer portal when Mike White left for Georgia it was thought he would be staying with UF. He still could since Banham reports that Florida will remain an option when he makes his decision about next season.
There is plenty of speculation that Reeves wants to stay at Florida, but is going to dabble in the portal to see what kind of NIL deal he can get. Colin Castleon, after all, elected to stay at Florida after the Gator Collective offered him an NIL deal that made staying at UF financially worthwhile. There are all sorts of reports that Castleton is getting somewhere between $100,000 and $300,000 to stay.
And speaking of Castleton, he is having his torn labrum surgically repaired. This is a 4-5 month rehab process so he should be in very good shape by the time the Gators open their season in November.
UF SOFTBALL: GATORS OPEN 3-GAME SERIES WITH OLE MISS TONIGHT
Coming off a 12-7 win over No. 2 Alabama Monday evening, the 10th-ranked Gators (31-9, 8-7 SEC) hit the road for a critical SEC series with Ole Miss (29-11, 5-7 SEC) in Oxford. Tonight’s game (7 p.m.) will be broadcast on SEC Network+. The Gators will face Ole Miss Friday at 6 p.m. and finish the series at 1 p.m. Saturday.
This is the third SEC road series for the Gators, who own series wins over Texas A&M and Auburn. The Gators come into the game second in the SEC in pitching (2.22 ERA), first in fielding (.982) and fourth in hitting (.328). Shortstop Skylar Wallace is making a serious bid for SEC Player of the Year. She’s hitting .411 with 49 runs scored, four triples, five homers, 33 RBI and 33-35 in stolen bases.
SEC FOOTBALL/BASKETBALL
Alabama: Freshman guard JD Davison is off to the NBA. He averaged 8.5 points and a team-high 4.3 assists per game last season.
Auburn: Former Auburn quarterback Jeff Klein has passed away.
Georgia: Mike White pulled off one of his better recruiting jobs Wednesday because Kario Oquendo, Georgia’s leading scorer last season at 15.2 points per game, has withdrawn his name from the transfer portal … White is working the portal to try to lure Dayton transfer Elijah Weaver (6.6 points per game last season) and UConn transfer Corey Floyd Jr. (didn’t play as a true freshman).
Kentucky: Small forward Dontaie Allen announced that he will be transferring to Western Kentucky. He averaged 2.2 points in 19 games last season.
LSU: Freshman guard Justice Williams is the second LSU basketball player to withdraw from the portal to play for new coach Matt McMahon. A former 4-star recruit, he averaged 1.7 points per game last year.
Missouri: Head football coach Eli Drinkwitz says that landing recruits Luther Burden, Dominic Lovett and Mookie Cooper give the Tigers “a chance to be really explosive.”
South Carolina: In discussing last season’s surprising 7-win season, football coach Shane Beamer told Paul Finebaum, “It’s such a thin line between winning and losing. Yes, we won seven and that could have easily been nine and that easily could have been five in some ways.”
Texas A&M: Former 4-star offensive lineman Derick Hunter, who has played in 18 games since signing in 2019, has entered the transfer portal.”
ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT: Maybe the powers that be didn’t listen last week when Dabo Swinney went on a rant about the direction in which college football is headed. Maybe they will now because Nick Saban has weighed in and he told the Associated Press, “I don’t think what we’re doing right now is a sustainable model.”
Saban says he is happy NIL allows players to make some money, but that’s not the problem as he sees it. Recruiting? That’s another story altogether.
“[NIL] creates a situation where you can basically buy players,” Saban said. “You can do it in recruiting. I mean, if that’s what we want college football to be, I don’t know. And you can also get players to get in the transfer portal to see if they can get more someplace else than they can get at your place.”
When Texas A&M signed what some are calling the greatest recruiting class of all time, there were all sorts of rumors out there that Aggie boosters, using NIL as their cover, spent as much as $30 million to lure the players to College Station. Jimbo Fisher went on a post-signing day rant claiming the Aggies were pure as the driven snow. Maybe he liked the sound of what he had to say, but not a lot of people were actually buying it.
Lane Kiffin at Ole Miss certainly wasn’t.
“We don’t have the funding resources as some schools with the NIL deals,” Kiffin said in February when responding to the Aggies outrecruiting everyone in the nation. “It’s like dealing with salary caps. I joked I didn’t’ know if Texas A&M incurred a luxury tax with how much they paid for their signing class.”
Saban is right. Dabo is right. So is Lane Kiffin. College football is about to be altered in ways that were unthinkable not all that long ago. We have current players making millions and we have a kid like Long Beach Poly quarterback Nico Iamaleava who has an $8 million NIL deal before he plays his senior season in high school and even before taking a single snap at the University of Tennessee, where he is committed.
And indeed, we do have players testing the NIL waters in the portal, selling themselves to the highest bidder. There are no rules because the NCAA chose to okay NIL even before some common sense guidelines were in place. Instead of something that could have prevented the utter chaos that we now have, we have a wild west show going on.
“We now have an NFL model with no contracts but everybody has free agency,” Saban said. “It’s fine for players to get money. I’m all for that. I’m not against that, but there also has to be some responsibility on both ends, which you could call a contract so that you have an opportunity to develop people in a way that’s going to help them be successful.”
Some might say that Saban complaining about money changing hands to lure recruits or from one school to another is like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black, but whether or not you think Alabama has been known to spend a few dollars here and there to – shall we say – enhance recruiting isn’t the point. The point is, Nick is right. This is unsustainable.
