FSU football: What’s happening with 2022 running back recruiting?

FSU football recruiting for running backs in the 2022 recruiting cycle has been murky where FSU stands with these targets.

The coaching staff has offered 31 running backs in this cycle and a couple of athletes with the potential to play the position in college.

One of those is three-star athlete Rodney Hill, who committed in early April after flipping from Virginia. He’ll be a running back, but the running back board seems to have question marks after that.

Here are the top targets the Noles are pursuing:

• Jovantae Barnes: No. 108 overall, No. 9 RB
• Kaytron Allen: No. 127 overall, No. 10 RB
• Terrance Gibbs: No. 187 overall, No. 17 RB
• Damari Alston: No. 303 overall, No. 29 RB
• Jaylon Glover: No. 531 overall, No. 42 RB

The player below is someone with an FSU offer who visited campus late last month that I’ll throw in there.

• Marlon Gunn Jr: No. 606 overall, No. 50 RB

Of all the players listed, Jaylon Glover was thought to be the one player leaning towards FSU a couple of months ago. However, 247 Crystal Balls have been flowing for the Florida Gators the past few days.

Glover officially visited South Carolina, Georgia Tech, Florida, FSU, and Utah in that order last month. It should be noted he’s the teammate of five-star FSU commit Sam McCall, who was previously committed to the Florida Gators. I see Dan Mullen’s ploy.

Kaytron Allen is trending towards Penn State, which is closer to where he is originally from. That’s typical for a lot of players that attend IMG Academy. He is teammates with FSU commits AJ Duffy and Aliou Bah and visited the Noles in June.

Terrance Gibbs is thought to be a Florida lean for a long time, although he did officially visit FSU in June.

Damari Alston visited FSU unofficially in June but seems to be trending elsewhere. He plans to release a top three school list Tuesday before committing on July 25. He’s officially visited LSU, Northwestern, and Penn State but has unofficially visited Auburn, Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia Tech.

Penn State already had one commit ranked higher than him and trending for Kaytron Allen. Auburn holds two recent crystal ball predictions.

Jovantae Barnes seems to be the No.1 target. He was part of the small group of players that attended the Midnight Madness event when the recruiting dead period ended. He’s playing football in Las Vegas but is originally from Florida, with family in the state. Barnes visited Oklahoma, LSU, North Texas, Utah, USC, and Texas A&M after visiting FSU last month. He doesn’t have any official visits set that I can tell, so we’ll have to pay attention to when he gets back to Tallahassee.

Thoughts

The FSU coaching staff only plans to take one more running back in the 2022 class. It looks like it’ll come down to Barnes or Glover realistically. Barnes is the No. 1 target, which is likely why we haven’t seen Glover commit when he was trending to the Noles a while back since Hill already committed. Glover said he plans to decide in late July or early August a while back. If he pops to Florida, I still wouldn’t count the staff out yet with that recruitment. I think it depends on how they feel about where they stand with Barnes.

Is that a gamble? Absolutely, but it’s not a great year for running backs nationally. It’ll be interesting to see how it shakes out.