UCF Football Recruiting: Balancing Transfers with High School Prospects
While acquiring the verbal commitments of eight high school football prospects helped to bolster the Knights’ early recruiting fortunes, the class of 2022 will be far more about patience and due diligence than it will be finishing the recruiting class early. UCF is one of the more complex recruiting situations in college football.
The Knights currently hold commitments from four offensive and four defensive prospects. Those prospects represent a part of the steady and consistent climb that UCF will likely go through each year, right before the regular season begins, under the direction of Head Coach Gus Malzahn. Every Division I program has a fit within the recruiting cycle, and UCF will provide its own style of recruiting regardless of what else happens within the state of Florida. There’s a huge difference in style between UCF and several other schools for two primary reasons: college transfers and the UCF staff’s ability to recruit three of the best talent-producing states in the country.
Transfers Help to Bolster the Knights’ Roster
The Knights already secured 12 transfers for the 2021 season. Being in Orlando, it’s fairly safe to assume that UCF will be attractive to many transfers during the 2022 recruiting campaign, as well as the coming years as well. City life, theme parks, and a college student body of roughly 72,000 help make UCF one of the most unique college environments in the country.
There’s no reason that Coach Malzahn and the entire UCF staff will not be able to utilize just those three aspects of UCF’s overall package and lure transfers each year. When combining the personality and character of the UCF staff as a whole to the aforementioned three attributes, along with UCF being a really good academic institution, it’s going to be a smorgasbord of big-time transfers coming to UCF.
See defensive end Big Kat Bryant, cornerback Jarvis Ware and running back Mark Antony-Richards as prime examples, as two of the three players come from Auburn, and one from Missouri. Adding three highly-regarded SEC prospects to the roster would help any program. That also begs a very important question.
How does UCF balance high school recruiting with accepting transfers?
There may not be a specific answer to that question, but there is an important side point. The Knights need to consider that question, position-by-position and year-by-year, to make a determination. If the UCF roster truly needs help at the wide receiver position, then sure, take a look at transfers to add immediate help.
Big Kat Bryant
Douglas DeFelice - USA Today Sports
That’s exactly what the Knights did for 2021 by adding former Auburn and Colorado State wide receiver Nate Craig-Myers and former Notre Dame wide receiver Jordan Johnson, just as two examples. Both of the transfers made sense for UCF to go after them.
With that in mind, one also needs to consider the overall number of high school players that the Knights will sign and add that to the total number of transfers that are projected to be signed. The transfer era started already. It’s here. The Knights did an excellent job of managing it thus far but there’s still a precedent to be set by at least somewhat calculating total high school scholarship numbers for each class to make room for those valuable transfers.
High School Recruiting Comes First
Even though transfers will quickly help a roster, the UCF coaching staff and administrative recruiting staff know there needs to be an emphasis towards high school recruiting. Bringing a prospect into the UCF Football family and coaching that player for four or five years means knowing the system and being a part of a culture. Those qualities will bring about consistency on the gridiron. There’s also the matter of where UCF recruits.
This is the Sunshine State and it’s loaded with talent. The Knights secured commitments from five Florida prospects already, and that total will likely grow to 10 or more by the time the recruiting class finishes. Then there are the states of Georgia and Alabama, two states the majority of the UCF coaches and administrative staff know well.
If the Knights hit on five to eight prospects from these two states each year, UCF Football will do extremely well to improve its roster each season. The amount of talent in Georgia alone rivals any state in America. Alabama, per capita, holds similar talent levels to Georgia and Florida.
Considering Coach Malzahn and his staff know many of the high school programs across these two states, there’s going to be a few more “Boom!” Twitter posts from Coach Malzahn as it relates to these states before the end of the 2021 calendar year. For the Knights, there is one distinction between recruiting Florida as compared to Georgia and Alabama, however.
The Knights will have to be patient with Georgia and Alabama prospects as the Knights will be battling elite programs for their commitments, and the Knights will not be the hometown school like they are for many Floridians. With that stated, landing Thomas Castellanos and Tyler Griffin, each from Georgia, already proved that UCF can land top-notch talent from outside the state of Florida borders.
Final Thoughts
As the Knights build the 2022 recruiting class, expect UCF to consistently pick away with high school verbal commitments. There’s no rush. The UCF staff holds a plan and it’s being executed. There will be room left over for more transfers after the conclusion of the first high school signing day this December.
As a projection, the Knights will sign about 18 high school players. That is just a projection, however. Recruiting proves to be fluid each year, and with injuries and UCF losing transfers as well as gaining them, the total number of high school recruits could increase or decrease.
You will find me on Twitter @fbscout_florida and @UCF_FanNation
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