When Lon Kruger left the University of Florida the program faced a defining moment.  Arguably the best coach the Gators had ever hired had just jumped north to a better job.  Was Florida going to become a stepping stone position?  Were the benefits and notoriety of the 1994 Final Four run already squandered?  Florida decided to hire an up and coming coach who brought with him a frenetic style of basketball and, following a couple years of adjustment, Billy Donovan built Florida into one of the top basketball programs in the country.
 
What started with a couple of dynamic recruiting classes has continued to this day.  Florida is now a recruiting power picking the top prospects in the country on a yearly basis.  But what began with a bang and is now the norm was not always the case in the half decade in between.  There was a time when Florida looked to be slipping from its early recruiting success.  A time when Florida came in second or third for it’s top targets a little too often.
 
The year that changed the future of Florida basketball was 1999.  That’s the year when a group of freshmen took Gator basketball to new heights.  Mike Miller, Teddy Dupay, Udonis Haslem and Ladarius Halton brought a new level of talent and athleticism to Gainesville basketball.  Although Halton would eventually succumb to a degenerative knee injury, this core of players combined with the 2000 class of Brett Nelson, Justin Hamilton, Matt Bonner and Donnell Harvey quickly put the Gators in elite company in terms of skill and ability.  It didn’t take long for this group to stamp their mark on the basketball scene reaching the NCAA Championship Game in 2000.
 
While the skills of Dupay, Miller and Nelson were the more visible focus for fans of the team the heart of that squad was in a frontcourt rotation of Brent Wright (a 6′8″ Forward from the 1998 recruiting class), Udonis Haslem, Donnell Harvey and Matt Bonner.  Unfortunately after the 2000 season Harvey would declare for the NBA while Brent Wright would suffer a heel injury in his senior season that eventually caused him to miss much of the year and the postseason.  Once this dominant frontcourt broke up Florida would not get past the second round of the NCAA Tournament for the next 5 years.
It’s not that Donovan and the Gators were recruiting poorly.  Billy landed a number of top ranked players such as Anthony Roberson, David Lee, James White, Matt Walsh and Christian Drejer among others but while backcourt players seemed readily available, frontcourt recruits were slipping away.  Following the loss of Kwame Brown to the NBA Draft, the Gators suffered a slew of misses on frontcourt players - a position which was already woefully thin in college due to the rash of underclassmen heading straight to the NBA.  The one highly regarded big man who Florida did land in that span was David Lee who ended up having to play at both the 4 and 5 for the Gators by even though he knew his professional future lay at small forward (he currently plays the small forward position in the NBA).
 
Between the 2001 and 2007 classes the Gators managed to land some serviceable big men but not the top targets of Donovan and staff.  Additionally two of the big men Florida signed, Mario Boggan in 2002 and Mohammad Abukar in 2003, ended up transferring out of the program after a year and year and a half respectively.  This forced Florida to play less than stellar frontcourt players like Bonnell Colas, Adrian Moss, Abukar and Boggan (both of whom only played early in their careers at Florida) or use smaller players to fill the minutes.  In this period Florida had the benefit of two three very good four year players in the frontcourt (Haslem, Bonner and David Lee) but virtually no depth behind them.  It’s in this dark period of big man recruiting when Florida was heavily involved but missed on a number of top big men:
 
2002 - Torin Francis, Shavlik Randolph, Chris Bosh
2003 - Terrence Roberts, Kris Humphries, Trevor Ariza, Luol Deng
2004 - Lemarcus Aldridge, Sasha Kaun
2005 - Tyler Hansbrough
2006 - Lance Thomas
 
It was the 2005 season that unexpectedly changed things for Florida.  Gator fans will remember this year as when Florida landed Al Horford and Joaquim Noah.  Personally I believe Horford was always high on the Gator’s wish list but Noah became a priority after other kids committed elsewhere (Hansbrough to North Carolina for example).  In any effect Horford and Noah became dominant big men at the same time Chris Richard (who was a project recruit from 2003 despite his raw size) and Moss finally became contributors (Moss in his senior year).  The 2006 and 2007 season saw Florida with 4 quality big men (Horford, Noah, Richard and Moss in 06, Horford, Noah, Richard and Speights in 07), the first time the Gators enjoyed such wealth since the NCAA Title game run in 2000.  It’s no coincidence that the 06 and 07 seasons ALSO saw Florida playing in the NCAA Title game.
 
Why was it so difficult for Florida to recruit the top big men yet not backcourt players?  I believe it was simply a matter of perception.  Donovan was a guard in college and had a more in common with the guards he recruited.  Opposing coaches had also battered Donovan’s reputation on developing big men.  When John Pelphrey left the staff for South Alabama the only coach who had played in the frontcourt was gone.  Pelphrey was given much of the credit for the Gators success and the slow development of David Lee and NBA flop of Donnell Harvey contributed to the negative recruiting that other coaches were using.
 
But then something funny happened in basketball.  Almost overnight the landscape of Florida’s big men changed.  Udonis Haslem became a household name as Shaq’s sidekick in Miami and eventually garnered an NBA Championship Ring to go along with his NBA Rookie of the year honors.  In his second year, David Lee had become a double-double player off the bench for the Knicks and one of the fan favorites due to his on court intensity.  Matt Bonner became a serviceable bench player for the Raptors and played quality minutes for the NBA Champion San Antonio Spurs.  Florida won two consecutive National Championships with a starting frontcourt who were both selected in the top 10 of the NBA Draft while another frontcourt bench player was selected in the second round.  Finally, Marreese Speights in his first year of significant playing time went from a virtual unknown on the college scene to a likely first round NBA Draft pick in his sophomore season.  Suddenly Florida began to look like THE place to be for big men who dreamed of a future in the League. 
 
Now back to the present.  For the first time in 3 years, the 2007-2008 season saw Florida suffering with too few quality bigs.  The Gators were again forced to play undersized in the frontcourt.  But unlike the first half of the decade this looks to be an exception rather than the rule.  While Florida is losing its best big man, Speights, to the NBA draft, the 2008 roster should once again be stocked with a plethora of quality big men.  In addition to Alex Tyus, a freshman who received a lot of minutes in his first season, the Gators will add three 4-Star frontcourt players in Eloy Vargas, Kenny Kadji and Allan Chaney.
 
Tyus, Vargas, Kadji and Chaney give the Gators the 4 man rotation of quality bigs the team needs.  In addition all will be freshmen or sophomores for the 2008-2009 season.  And like any good infomercial would say - But wait!!!  It doesn’t stop there!!!   That’s correct, Florida already has verbals for two of the top big men for its 2009 recruiting class in Erik Murphy and Deshawn Painter.  Combine that with the transfer of power forward Vernon Macklin from Georgetown and the 2009-2010 season could see the Gators have an overabundance of riches with seven viable big men on its 13 man roster.  Evidently Billy Donovan has decided that the most important ingredient of “Big” success in college basketball is to have plenty of “Big” men on the team.  Let’s hope that Billy the Kid has figured out the quickest way back to the top starts at the bottom (of the paint).