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Florida Football Recruiting: Rounding Out The Class Of 2013

16 verbal commits by mid-May calls for a happy Muschamp pic.  (Photo by Scott Halleran/Getty Images)

National Signing Day is a little over eight months away, so it's a little crazy to be talking about who will finish off Florida's Class of 2013. But with 16 players already committed -- eight on offense and eight on defense (we’ll count Marqui Hawkins as a wide receiver for now) -- it's a legitimate topic.

The Gators will likely sign somewhere between 22 and 25 prospects this cycle, leaving six to eight spots left for a number of players still highly interesting in Florida.

Who will round out this class for the Gators? Will Muschamp will have some time to evaluate and arrange his board, considering he already has more than half of this class wrapped up (although he has to continue recruiting the committed players).

After the jump, we’ll take a look at who’s left and who gets in.

Continue reading this post »

17 comments  | 

Chomping At Bits: Will Muschamp Has 'A Loss' Planned For Mark Richt

It's another uncomfortably close picture of Will Muschamp!

Chomping At Bits comes stocked with the best Florida Gators links and news we can find. Got a link we should check out? Email us at AlligatorArmy@gmail.com, subject line CAB.

Will Muschamp knows how to make Gators fans happy:

Florida in Montrezl Harrell' top four: Am I hoping for Dorian Finney-Smith or Damontre Harris because I have a clue what their names sound like? Yes. (Kevin Brockway, Hoops Scoop | The Gainesville Sun)

Did Tim Walton do the right thing? Pat Dooley's probably heard the same things I have about Florida softball (which now go well beyond what has been reported here, though the veracity of rumor is tough to ascertain), but he thinks Walton did what he did for the best of the team. Do you? (Pat Dooley, The Gainesville Sun)

Florida men's tennis begins NCAA Tournament individual play: No Gators rank among the tournament favorites. (GatorZone)

Women's golf in NCAA Championship play: But the Gators are 18th after the first round, and are 16 strokes back of Alabama. (GatorZone)

As always: Talk about any and all of this and/or anything else you have to say in the comments. Need more Alligator Army in your life? Like AA on Facebook, follow AA on Twitter, and download the SB Nation Android app to take all of our Gators content — and the rest of SB Nation — with you on the go.

Check out the SB Nation Channel on YouTube

36 comments  | 

Florida Women's Tennis Wins Second Straight National Championship With Sweep Of UCLA

(Via NCAA.com live stream, provided by skigator93.)

Florida's women's tennis team needed to win its last matches against Stanford in the 2011 NCAA Tournament final and Duke in Monday's 2012 NCAA Tournament Final Four to win those dramatic contests. Today, the Gators dispensed with the drama and opted for dominance, sweeping UCLA 4-0 for the program's second consecutive national title and sixth overall.

As usual, Lauren Embree provided the day's biggest thrill. But after battling back to win Florida's final singles point against Stanford in 2011 and helping fend off Duke on Monday, the junior's Tuesday went relatively smoothly: she and doubles partner Joanna Mather didn't even need to finish their match, with the pairings of Allie Will and Sofie Oyen and Alex Cercone and Caroline Hitimana taking their doubles matches to give the Gators the doubles point, and then Embree blitzed McCall Jones 6-4, 6-0 to clinch the Gators' title.

Cercone and Oyen won their singles matches to put Embree in position to clinch, and Embree wasn't the only Gator still with a chance to win a match, after Mather and Olivia Janowicz forced third sets in their singles contests. But Embree's victory made those matches, and Will's likely loss in No. 1 singles play, moot; gave the Gators their second national title of the calendar and academic year, following men's indoor track; and earned her a second consecutive NCAA Tournament Most Outstanding Player award.

Women's tennis' six national titles leads all Florida sports, and the title gives the Gators 28 national championships across NCAA, AIAW, and FBS .Florida has won 19 national titles since the hiring of Jeremy Foley as athletic director in 1992, coaches hired by Foley have 12 of the 19 titles in that span, and eight different programs have claimed national titles under his watchful eye.

8 comments  | 

Florida Ranks Second For College Football Realignment Values

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The ongoing saga of college football realignment has gotten our buddies at SBNation.com thinking about how best to conceptualize the arms race to acquire the most valuable teams and array them in the most valuable constellations, and Jason Kirk's analysis of the values of college football teams to conferences from Monday is just about the best piece to come out of that effort.

And it's not just because Florida's second in the list of most valuable teams.

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The Gators earn a composite 9.61 average, well behind No. 1 Texas' 6.53 but just enough to edge out No. 3 Ohio State's 9.67, and Florida's terrific marks in revenue and all-sports success pace the Gators. You can read Kirk's methodology, which I think does a really good job of combining all the disparate factors that go into ranking colleges' athletic programs, but it's far more important to do things like laugh at the rest of the SEC (Florida's the only top-five program), Florida State (No. 20 overall, and dragged down by a hilariously high academics rating that is the largest of any team in the top 33 of Kirk's rankings), I think.

Go take a look at Kirk's piece to see the full rankings, then come back here and tell me: Is Florida being overrated by this accounting, or are the Gators being assessed correctly?

60 comments  | 

Chomping At Bits: Florida Sweeps SEC All-Sports Awards, Again

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Chomping At Bits comes stocked with the best Florida Gators links and news we can find. Got a link we should check out? Email us at AlligatorArmy@gmail.com, subject line CAB.

Florida wins SEC All-Sports awards: The Gators won the men's, women's, and overall SEC All-Sports titles, staging a sweep of the honors for the fourth straight year. Florida's overall title is its 22nd and sixth in a row, UF is the only school to ever sweep all three awards, and the Gators tied for the SEC lead in conference titles in 2011-12 with three — despite the year marking the first time since 2005-06 that Florida hasn't won at least five SEC titles. Jeremy Foley inherited a very good athletic program, and made it possibly the nation's best. (GatorZone)

Tim Boyle, Ryan Buchanan visiting Gainesville: Florida's still looking for a quarterback for its 2013 class. (Zach Abolverdi, Gator Prospectus | The Gainesville Sun)

Analyzing Florida's schedule: With jokes so old that most current Florida players were not born when life created those punchlines! (Chris Low, SEC Blog | ESPN)

Misunderstanding the SEC-Big 12 bowl: Of course it's not going to match champions every year, or very often; the point is that the SEC and Big 12 are going to keep more of the revenue. (Mark Bradley, Atlanta Journal-Constitution)

As always: Talk about any and all of this and/or anything else you have to say in the comments. Need more Alligator Army in your life? Like AA on Facebook, follow AA on Twitter, and download the SB Nation Android app to take all of our Gators content — and the rest of SB Nation — with you on the go.

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5 comments  | 

The 14-team conference has been negotiating with both networks this year after the SEC expanded with Texas A&M and Missouri. That triggered a clause in the SEC's deal that allows the league to go back to the negotiating table with its partners, just as the ACC recently renegotiated its media contract with ESPN after its own expansion with Pittsburgh and Syracuse.

The bigger negotiation is with ESPN, and talks appear to revolve around an SEC-branded cable channel that could launch as early as 2014. ESPN's current arrangement with the SEC — negotiated in 2008 — pays an average of $150 million a year over 15 years.

According to a CBS Sports report through Sports Business Daily, the SEC is a lot closer to adding a television network of their own than previously thought.

And the game continues to change. Also, according to the report, if the SEC does indeed begin its own network, it won't begin until 2014.

3 days ago Ewqqejuyfglbbfnrmgjceqywr32b5b7y_63_tiny FlaGators 20 comments

Florida Women's Tennis Downs Duke, Will Play For Second Consecutive National Title

And y'all said I needed a zoom lens. (Via @GatorZoneTennis.)

The Florida women's tennis team seems to enjoy dramatic contests in the NCAA Tournament. For the second straight year, the team played a match that came down to the final singles contest in the Final Four, only to prevail at the end thanks to a comeback, this time beating Duke, 4-3, in the national semifinal, thanks to Alexandra Cercone's singles victory.

Florida went up 3-0 in the match, taking the doubles point with wins by the teams of Allie Will and Sophie Oyen and Lauren Embree and Joanna Mather and singles victories by Embree and Mather, and giving the Gators the enviable position of needing just one more point to take the victory. But Duke rallied to 3-3 by topping Will, Olivia Janowicz, and Oyen in singles play.

That left Cercone as the Gators' final hope — and she delivered. After losing her first set 5-7 and taking the second set 6-4, Cercone fell behind 0-2 in the third set, then rattled off six of the next seven games, including four straight, to propel Florida to its third consecutive NCAA Tournament final.

Florida will face UCLA, a familiar foe from other Gators postseasons, for their second straight national title on Tuesday at 1 p.m. Eastern.

19 comments  | 

A rare loss for Will Muschamp on the recruiting trail this year, but pulling guys out of Georgia is always hard for Florida. And Allen's only 225 pounds, a bit off instant-impact size.

3 days ago Gatorclassicei8_tiny Andy Hutchins 2 comments

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