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O’Gara: How did Florida and Billy Napier ever get so desperate for this Jaden Rashada mess to begin?
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A year and a half later, I still don’t get it.
I don’t quite understand how Jaden Rashada and Billy Napier got here, on opposite sides of a lawsuit after a promised $13.85 million deal fell through following Rashada’s flip from Miami to Florida.
Rashada, who eventually enrolled at Arizona State and has since transferred to Georgia, is suing Napier, former Florida director of NIL and player engagement Marcus Castro-Walker and well-known UF booster Hugh Hathcock. Those reportedly were the defendants named in a 37-page complaint that was filed to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida.
Even in this world of NIL, wherein seemingly nothing is a surprise anymore, it’s hard to fathom that this story exists. It’s an SEC quarterback suing an SEC coach with $10 million sought in damages. Wrap your head around that if you can.
For any of us to gain some sort of understanding of how we got here — talking about a lawsuit for a player who never played a down of football at the school he signed with — one has to understand the role of Hathcock.
ESPN outlined that the lawsuit stated that Hathcock initially came over the top of Miami’s reported $9.5 million offer with a $11 million that later got bumped up to $13.85 million over 4 years. But resistance to the source of that money became an issue, according to ESPN:
According to the filing, Florida’s “pressure campaign” came back with an offer of $13.85 million over four years: $5.35 million from Hathcock — including a $500,000 “signing bonus” through Velocity Automotive — and the remainder paid through Hathcock’s NIL collective Gator Guard.
As the contract details were coming together on Nov. 10, 2022, Hathcock objected to using his company — which the lawsuit states he mentioned having plans to sell — or the collective to directly fund the NIL payments. He worked alongside athletic department representative Castro-Walker to run the money through the Gator Collective, another NIL group that had separate management, according to the filing.
Rashada then committed to Florida, but a month later, he reportedly got a letter from the Gator Collective saying it had plans to terminate the offer, which stated it could be ripped up “with cause.” What that “cause” was, who knows? All we know from the lawsuit was that Florida still wanted Rashada on Signing Day, just not at the original $13.85 million price.
Jaden Rashada has filed a lawsuit against Florida coach Billy Napier and three others over “false and fraudulent” NIL promises.
The suit alleges Napier called the QB’s dad on signing day and said a booster would wire him $1M if he signed with UF.
Details to follow shortly.
— Stewart Mandel (@slmandel) May 21, 2024
In the previous world, that would prompt an obvious NCAA investigation into Napier. In the current world, wherein the Tennessee victory in court prompted the NCAA to halt all NIL investigations, it’s hard to say with certainty that Napier will face any sort of institutional punishment if those events are proven in court.
But again, I ask. How did Napier get so desperate?
Mind you, this all unfolded during Napier’s first season on the job. Anthony Richardson felt NFL-bound by season’s end, even in the midst of a disappointing first and only season as Florida’s starter. The quarterback room lacked depth. Emory Jones transferred in spring 2022, as did Carlos Del Rio-Wilson. Jalen Kitna was kicked off the team in December 2022 after he was arrested on child pornography charges that were later dropped in a plea deal.
I get it. There was a ton of turnover in the quarterback room throughout 2022. The back and forth with Rashada only added to that. Napier didn’t want to whiff on a quarterback in his first full recruiting class.
What I don’t get is why Napier saw that much value in Rashada. That’s not just because Rashada airmailed throws at Elite 11. Take recruiting service rankings for what they are, but Rashada wasn’t as decorated as future 2024 Florida signee and current enrollee DJ Lagway, who committed to the Gators in December 2022. Sure, Rashada was the No. 7 QB recruit in the class and sure, the Miami figure of $9.5 million set the market.
But in the transfer portal world, which has no shortage of available options, why did Napier ever sign off on that initial deal for a high school recruit ahead of his senior season? And why was he still trying to make it work with that reported $1 million payment Rashada on Early Signing Day? Even if he wanted to cover his tracks and make sure he wasn’t banking on a 2024 commitment being his 2024 starter (Lagway), the portal changed how teams can build depth at the position.
And to be fair, that’s what Napier did by signing Graham Mertz. Florida was always going to need a portal quarterback in 2023. Well, I suppose you could go back to summer 2022 when that $13.85 million figure was proposed and deduce that Napier expected Richardson would be a 2-year starter for 2022 and 2023. In that world, Rashada could’ve followed Tennessee’s Nico Iamaleava plan of starting in Year 2 as a redshirt freshman.
(Iamaleava was the much more decorated player and he reportedly signed for $8 million at Tennessee, so any notion that Rashada was being offered “market value” with that $13.85 million figure feels off.)
Still, though. At the root of this mess was Napier’s initial belief that Rashada was the perfect fit in his system and that money shouldn’t have been something that got in the way of that. But one would think an elite offensive mind — or one who believes he’s an elite offensive mind — wouldn’t be so singularly focused.
Yeah, maybe Napier and Florida ultimately avoided overcommitting money to someone who wouldn’t have lived up to that lofty contract. In the long term, that could be a personnel win and a financial win, depending on what a potential settlement with Rashada is.
Then again, there might only be a handful of players in the sport during the past decade who had a college career that provided $13.85 million in value. Rashada, who played as a true freshman at Arizona State and is now in a backup role at Georgia heading into Year 2, will almost surely not provide that value.
There’ll be great irony if Rashada gets snaps for Georgia when the teams meet in Jacksonville this year. According to On3, Kirby Smart reportedly knew about the lawsuit and “signed off on it.” Why wouldn’t he? It’s not like Rashada is Georgia’s starting quarterback and this lawsuit will hang over the program (there’s a chance that he’s never available to the media). It makes perfect sense why Smart would sign off on a public lawsuit wherein the coach and a top-level booster of Georgia’s biggest rival were named as defendants.
What doesn’t make sense is why Florida was convinced in the summer of 2022 that it was Rashada or bust. Time will tell what shakes out with this lawsuit and what it means for Napier’s future. While Rashada hasn’t exactly emerged looking like a sympathetic victim, you can bet this wasn’t the type of headline Napier was hoping to be named in ahead of a pivotal Year 3.
This will be a cautionary tale in the NIL world. Unfortunately for Napier and Co., it reached a disastrous boiling point Tuesday.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
