Florida nabs commitment from 2019 Tennessee PG Jacques Glover

With last week’s exodus of three players from its roster, the Florida Gators men’s basketball program finds itself with a surfeit of spots available at the moment — even with an incoming recruiting class that numbered three scholarship players as of last Wednesday, and got a fourth on Thursday in Jason Jitoboh, there were still outstanding scholarships to award.

One of those is going to a surprising name that had not been on the radar, apparently, as 2019 point guard Jacques Glover out of Tennessee turned some heads on Monday afternoon by announcing a commitment to Florida on Twitter.

That commitment is legitimate: Though Mike White didn’t tweet out any acknowledgement of it, he doesn’t do that, and Florida signee Scottie Lewis welcoming Glover “to the family” is probably just as good as an official acknowledgement from Florida.

But it’s also surprising, because Glover is low-profile to the point that he may more accurately be called no-profile. 247Sports does not have a prospect page for Glover, and neither does ESPN; only Rivals, of the big three recruiting networks, has a rating for Glover, and stakes him to three stars. Verbal Commits pegs him as a two-star player.

And Glover can’t really claim to be under-recruited, not when he crossed paths with the nation’s No. 1 overall recruit for 2019, James Wiseman, in a state final just last week.

So some of what’s working against Glover is undoubtedly his height. While he’s listed at 5’11” by Rivals and at 6’0” by a local paper, it’s fair to wonder whether some puffy hairstyles have inflated that number minimally, and it’s clear to see on video that he’ll be one of the smallest players on the court.

Then again, the last diminutive point guard Florida plucked from Tennessee turned out to be pretty decent at basketball. And Glover is apparently an excellent shooter and a quick-footed kid, and both of those skills would make him an ideal complement to Andrew Nembhard, whose fantastic freshman season still vexed some Florida fans because of his seeming preference for going slow in transition.

Florida should be (much) deeper in 2019-20 than it was in 2018-19, and better-equipped to run or push the pace with even its starters as a result. But pairing a smaller, quicker point guard like Glover with shooter extraordinaire Tre Mann in a second unit? That alone is a really enticing prospect.

And then there’s the moonshot possibility for Glover, a comparison that seems more like one of convenience than anything: He compares, per a coach who knows him well, to Purdue’s Carsen Edwards, a short but willful point guard with a shot wetter than summer rain.

Edwards just finished having one of the hottest NCAA Tournaments on record, and only execution on a very slightly higher level by Virginia in the Elite Eight on Saturday prevented Edwards from leading Purdue to the Final Four. If Glover is truly on that level, or could be, I would expect someone in the recruiting world to have been banging a drum for him by now.

But on the off chance that Glover does develop similarly, it’s possible that Florida’s 2019 recruiting class will be utterly legendary.

With Glover’s commitment, Florida would seem to have 11 slots allocated to scholarship players for the 2019-20 year. It seems likely that the Gators will still be adding at least one more player — likely a graduate transfer with immediate eligibility — to their frontcourt, as a minimum, but there are a lot of options out there for using those two spots.