Florida Football Head Coach Meets With Media
Wednesday, February 6, 2008 | Football
University of Florida football head coach Urban Meyer met with members of the media Wednesday to discuss his thoughts on the 2008 recruiting class.:
Opening Statement
"Everyone has been asking me about the last three classes and it's hard to say that this isn't my favorite class. If you look at the amount of time and research spent on each player, there are always going to be issues and certain things show up but I am awful proud of our staff that did it the right way. Many times, people jump on early commitments and we did not do that. We had a lot fewer numbers going into this year and had a couple transfers who increased that but we had fewer numbers than we had the previous years. I am very pleased with the amount of research that we did and the quality of student that we brought in. Obviously, we think that they will qualify or else we would not have signed them. I would like to thank the families of our coaching staff. It has been a grind, every since the National Championship game and all the way through. I'd like to thank their wives and kids for letting me have them and now they can be dads and husbands for a couple days and then we will be back to work for next year. I also want to thank Dr. Carodine, Tony Meacham, Jason Storch and Kim Green for doing a wonderful job. Also, Mickey Marotti, Scotty Holsopple, Mark Campbell and the entire staff did a great job. Kenny Parker is one of my favorite people. He played here and we asked him to be very helpful with our recruiting and he was. Remember that name because he is going to be a tremendous weight coach or football coach. Anthony Pass and the training staff did a wonderful job. Mark Pantoni is now in charge of our recruiting efforts and he did a great job. Mark and Emily Heater ran the show and did a phenomenal job for us. Obviously, our players helped us out. The new facility is going to be a tremendous help. It is going to be the front door of Florida Football. We look forward to that. Overall, it is a great class and that makes it three in a row. We are going to have a roster of 25 upperclassmen and 60 underclassmen. We have 11 seniors so it is going to be a very young team. We have 31 players with three more years of eligibility and now 29 players with four years of eligibility. The future is awful bright and I am anxious to get back out there and coach our team."
On branching out the recruiting effort:
“I'd much rather be a regional recruiting power, that's why our staff came here, because within four or five hours of the campus, you've got some of the best players in the country. The good thing is I think they are going to take the head coaches off the road in the spring and we've already hit a lot of the top juniors these last few weeks. We've already got a pretty good handle on next year's class. You can do that if it's regional and not national.”
On the last month of recruiting
"We closed really well. Not that I'm into rankings but every time I visited a site and see where we were ranked I was concerned myself. We were not ranked very high and then seven recruits later and you are. I think at one point we were No. 1. I saw that some teams are signing like 35 players and we have 22. I am not concerned about rankings, but a part of me likes to check. When you start adding people like Omar Hunter and T.J. Lawrence, who came in late, it became a good day for us. We had a bunch of guys who wanted to commit early, but I am not into that. We have people that say they want to commit but want to take four or five trips in the fall, so I tell them not to commit and to take those trips. The ones who commit early usually do not hold and that is why I am opposed to the early signing period as well. You are asking young people to make a decision that will follow them around for the next three or four years. So I think they should take their visits, come back and sit with their high school coaches and families and make the best decision."
