The Jaden Rashada saga is not Billy Napier's fault, but the fallout is another PR nightmare for Florida

Billy Napier finds himself at the center of a storm he can’t control.

The Jaden Rashada saga hasn’t officially reached it denouement — we don’t know if there will be impending lawsuits, other litigation or if the NCAA gets involved after a dispute over an alleged $13 million NIL deal gone haywire — but it’s clear the blue-chip quarterback from California will not play college football for the Gators. 

A week after the family denied On3’s Pete Nakos report that Jaden Rashada had requested his release from his National Letter of Intent, UF’s top-ranked signee did just that on Tuesday, severing a relationship that’s been complicated from the beginning. 

Rashada was Napier’s crown jewel in his first full recruiting class. The nation’s No. 64 prospect represented the future of Florida’s football program, a big-armed All-American quarterback who other blue-chip prospects wanted to play with. But a snag in a multimillion-dollar NIL deal destroyed such hopes. 

That’s not Billy Napier’s fault, but he’s wearing the blame.  

Jaden Rashada’s entire recruitment has been full of drama and twists and turns, and in fairness to the prospect, much of what has been written and reported on the quarterback’s whirlwind recruitment has been speculative and inflammatory. 

Rashada, who originally committed to Miami in the summer, was purportedly going to get close to $10 million from the Hurricanes. Now Florida has allegedly reneged on a $13 million deal. Are those figures true? It really doesn’t matter. It’s all funny money because of the lack of transparency in the NIL space. 

The lack of hard facts on what essentially amounts to backroom deals has led fans and coaches alike to toss out wild accusations about prospects and transfer targets.

At the AFCA convention in Charlotte last week, coaches floated the idea of a public database with every player’s NIL deal in the system. 

That’s nice in theory, but it’s never going to happen. We don’t know how much Deion Sanders makes for every commercial he does for AFLAC or Barstool Sports, so why should players’ private information be treated any differently?

The NIL system wasn’t intended to become pay-for-play, but that’s exactly what it’s devolved into. I don’t have an issue with that, but coaches certainly do — mainly because they no longer have control over the recruiting process. 

The third-party agents, lawyers and collectives are now at the center of whether a blue-chip prospect enrolls or not. Your head coach can be the best recruiter on the planet, but if the system around him isn’t functioning properly, it doesn’t matter anymore. 

The best solution to this problem would be to have prospects simply sign actual contracts with the schools, but that would require the universities and coaches to give up a big chunk of the pie. 

So until that gets sorted out in the future, coaches and administrators will continue to complain about the system without offering realistic or tangible solutions, and we’re going to see Jaden Rashada sagas happen elsewhere. 

This leads me back to Billy Napier and Florida. 

It’s been a rough Year 1 in Gainesville. The Gators went 6-7, and kicked a sad-trombone field goal in the closing seconds of their 30-3 bowl loss to Oregon State just to preserve a silly scoring streak. 

Now Napier is in the middle of a colossal mess. 

There’s a leadership vacuum at Florida, but it doesn’t start with Billy Napier. While Napier lauded the school’s strong alignment and organizational vision when he was hired, how’s that looking now with multiple NIL collectives operating at their own discretion and donors allegedly going rogue? Florida’s house certainly doesn’t look in order. 

It’s a giant PR disaster, which is why it could behoove Napier to get in front of a microphone and offer as many details as he can about what went wrong, where the miscommunication happened and how Florida plans to move forward in the NIL space in the future. 

Only, he can’t. 

In all likelihood, the true story will never be told. Perhaps because of NDAs or lawsuits. Also because Napier won’t burn the Gator Collective. He’s definitely not going to bad-mouth the UAA. He shouldn’t throw a 19-year-old kid or his family under the bus, either.

But as the rumors continue to run wild, Napier proceeds in a reality where he’s fighting a battle on all fronts. 

Perception, no matter the truth, is reality here. 

Billy Napier’s offseason just got a lot tougher.

If the $13 million figure is true, then that will be leveraged against Florida for future recruits. With Rashada bailing on UF, coaches and collectives elsewhere will make sure every top prospect or transfer know that you can’t trust the Gators’ NIL game, too.

The Jaden Rashada disaster is it’s simply the latest in a string of bad headlines for the Gators over the last six weeks. 

A second-straight losing season. A backup quarterback arrested on child pornography charges. An embarrassing bowl blowout loss.  UF’s quarterback room, with Wisconsin transfer Graham Mertz the likely 2023 starter, now has just three scholarship bodies, too. Napier tried to land LSU quarterback Walker Howard from the transfer portal this week, only to see the former 5-star go to Ole Miss.  

The Gators landed 11 blue-chip recruits from the state of Florida, but they didn’t sign any of the Top 20 prospects in the state. Georgia, Florida’s chief rival coming off back-to-back national championships, inked seven of the Top 20 players from the Sunshine State.

Billy Napier was hired because he was a man with a plan. He was a victim in this whole fiasco as much as anyone, but now it’s up to Napier to figure out how to best navigate Florida out of this mess because the headlines and PR headaches are only going to get nastier come this time next year if Florida has a third-straight losing season for the first time since the Eisenhower administration.