Katie Turner details UF's signing day, how the process has changed
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The announcements from Florida started rolling in at 7:18 in the morning with T.J. Searcy and came to a close 10 hours later at 5:17 p.m. ET.
And with the final from letter of intent from Jaden Rashada, the Gators’ 2023 class was signed, sealed and delivered as Billy Napier took the podium last Wednesday.
After a chaotic month to close out the cycle, UF assistant athletic director of recruiting strategy Katie Turner and Napier’s staff could finally take a deep breath.
“It’s not gonna last for long though,” Turner said on the Gator Tales Podcast. “We still have spots available, and we still are gonna try to supplement with the transfer portal. I’m very excited about that. It feels like there is a sense of relief (on signing day) and I’m just so glad that we got all of our commits. So, that felt really good. But there’s still a lot to do.”
The Gators signed a top-10 class in Napier’s first full recruiting cycle, including 16 blue chips out of 20 high school prospects. The average rating of Florida’s signees was 91.55, which is No. 5 nationally in the On3 Consensus Team Rankings behind Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia and Texas.
Gators Online reported last Tuesday that UF pledge Isaiah Nixon would be signing with UCF and that his decision should not be considered a “flip”. Florida wasn’t expected to land any uncommitted targets on signing day, and Turner said there weren’t any surprises for the staff as pen hit paper.
“I think that a good rule of thumb in recruiting is just if you don’t know if the kid is committing to you, then a kid probably isn’t committing to you. For the most part, even if they aren’t telling anyone, you still somehow find out that it’s you. And if you don’t know, he’s probably not,” Turner said. “So, it does kind of take the surprise element out of it. For the most part, you can read between the lines a lot of times. So, it just depends. There weren’t really any surprises this year (on signing day), but every recruiting class is different and every year is different. So, it’s been a good year.”
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What is a typical signing day like for Turner and Florida’s staff in the recruiting war room? For one, they are no longer huddled around a fax machine waiting for letter of intents to come in.
The process of prospects officially becoming Gators is much easier and quicker.
“It used to be the fax machine. Now it is a group text, so it actually makes things so much simpler,” Turner said. “So, we just have a group chat, and you tell the coaches, ‘Hey, let us know when your prospects have gotten their papers.’ They sign the papers and take a picture of it. In the past they did have to fax it back, but now it’s as easy as taking a picture of all the papers and texting it back to the coaches. What happens is we get those and then we have to send them in.
“Everything has to get approved. They have to be academically eligible; they have to be cleared by compliance before we can even post them on social media. So, there is a lot of like checkpoints that they have to go through, and a lot of that work is done months leading up to it. That’s the point of getting transcripts and all that stuff. Once we get everything ready to go, there’s just kind of one more last checkpoint and then they’re official.”
