The longer time goes on, and the more Florida head coaching administrations I see, the easier it is to draw parallels between them. I can’t decide if it’s because most football coaches are cut from the same cloth, or if it’s because the seeming chaos of college football is more in the details than in the macro sense.
Billy Napier lost Patrick Toney to the NFL — a jump that Napier says was a dream of Toney’s for as long as he’s known him — and replaced him with Austin Armstrong. Napier has made a big deal about calling football “a relationship business”, and this is a prime example.
Armstrong was a GA for Napier at Louisiana from 2017-18 and then was inside linebackers coach in 2020. This is a guy who Napier knows well. We all can argue whether a 29-year-old is ready for a job as big as play-calling defensive coordinator at one of the SEC’s powers, but we can’t argue that he’s coming in as a complete outsider. He is, to UF, but he’s absolutely not to Napier and the fellow former Louisiana coaches who worked with him.
It’s endearing to hear Napier talk about creating strong relationships with recruits and their families on the trail and then with the players after they enroll. It calls to mind a mentoring model that has traditionally been sold as a positive for youth and college sports forever. It also has a potential competitive advantage in the portal/one-time transfer era, as a guy who feels an especially strong connection with the staff is probably less likely to leave.
However canny a slogan as “relationship business” is, the flip side is cronyism. I’m not going to accuse Napier of such this early in his tenure, as anything can happen in one year, and staff hires are his prerogative as long as he’s at the helm. They’ll either pan out or he’ll move out.
The last two head coaches prior to Napier could credibly be accused of such, though. Jim McElwain held onto Doug Nussmeier despite the offense being a weak spot in his first two years, he retained Greg Nord despite him performing poorly as a recruiter, and he stayed with Mike Kent even though the strength and conditioning program was a clear negative. Dan Mullen essentially had to panic-fire assistants Todd Grantham and John Hevesy as the ship was sinking in 2021 despite there being a clear case that he should’ve made those moves already.
Napier is not in near that kind of situation. For one thing, the Louisiana assistant who came to Florida and caught the most ire over 2022 results was Toney, and he’s packing for Arizona right now. True, the plan had been to keep him on, but there’s no chance Napier will retain him too long as Mac and Mullen did with their guys.
The other coaches who have worked for Napier previously — RBs coach Jabbar Juluke, S&C coach Mark Hocke, and OL coaches Rob Sale and Darnell Stapleton — had good results last year. The offensive line and running backs were strengths of the team, and UF made some late-game surges that would’ve been impossible without good conditioning.
So, will Armstrong be more like those latter four or like Toney? I don’t know. It’s possible that in the second year of the scheme and with a year of understanding what coaching in the SEC is like — not to mention shedding some players who weren’t totally bought in — Toney’s defense would’ve had a great improvement. We’ll never know. As I said, anything can happen in one season.
I had a stray thought earlier this week that I haven’t been able to shake that Napier’s early tenure is mirroring a past UF coach, but it’s not McElwain or Mullen. It’s Will Muschamp. Temperamentally the two couldn’t be farther from each other, but there have been some striking parallels:
- A 6-6 first regular season with a minor bowl appearance
- Moving from the spread option to a power rushing offense that’s closer to what contemporary NFL teams run
- Wins tend to be close, regardless of opponent quality
- Positive marks on the recruiting trail
- Immediate staff churn
Is this fair? Well, let’s see. The first point is inarguable. The second is too. The third could be subjective depending on how you define “tend to be”. However, Napier beat eventual Pac-12 champ Utah and 1-11 USF by the same field-goal margin, and Muschamp’s second team beat 10-3 LSU, 5-7 Missouri, and then-called UL-Lafayette by the same touchdown margin (eight in LSU’s case, seven in the others).
Napier immediately got the program back into contention for the elite recruits that Florida had been used to courting before 2015, and if it was back in the pre-NIL days, the Gators probably would’ve picked up a couple more highly rated players in the 2023 class than they did. Muschamp had the strong on-field and recruiting success of the Meyer era as a wind at his back, and for three years at least, he kept that going.
The staff churn is where things really diverge. Napier and Muschamp both lost their play-calling coordinators from the opposite side of the ball that they coach to bigger jobs: Toney to the NFL, and Charlie Weis to a head coaching gig. Even that is overselling a similarity; Toney was one of Napier’s guys, while it’s been long-rumored that the former head coach Weis was forced on the first-time head coach Muschamp for experience’s sake.
The other staff change back in the day was Muschamp firing Frank Verducci, who had been Weis’s hand-picked choice as O-line coach. Napier has lost William Peagler and Keary Colbert to NFL jobs. Those aren’t the same at all.
It’s tempting to try to hand-waive the differences away and raise a red flag, pointing to the complete staff continuity that Meyer had from his first season to his second. However McElwain had near-complete continuity, only firing Kirk Callahan and upgrading to Torrian Gray at corners coach. Steve Spurrier had to replace two members of his 1990 staff after opposite-side play-calling coordinator Jim Bates went to an NFL position coaching job and ILBs coach Tim Marcum resumed his legendary Arena Football League career after a one-year stopover in Gainesville.
The fact is, if you look in the right areas, you can draw both positive and negative parallels between any two head football coaches you want to. Take the first of the “inarguable” parallels from above.
Muschamp’s first regular season was 6-6 despite that Meyer tailwind; Napier’s came after Mullen’s edifice had crumbled. Yes, they had the same record, but they came to their situations entirely differently. Whether those identical records even are a parallel depends on how large a scope you want to look at.
Give me enough time, and I can tell you how Napier is the next Meyer or Saban. Or the next Muschamp, McElwain, or Mullen. We’re still too early in the Napier era to know whether this experiment is the next big thing, is about to explode in the lab, or something in between.
It’s not ideal that three coaches have left for the NFL within a fortnight of spring practice starting, but it’s better than them being fired for poor performance or leaving for rivals. There has been a real trend this offseason of NFL teams hiring college coaches, and with all of the extra recruiting of your own players that has to be done due to NIL and the portal, there’s never been a better time to make the jump. It’s also not ideal to lose a couple dozen players in one offseason, but the same rule change that made that happen also made it possible to replenish the roster concurrently. This era is not like other eras.
And so yes, it is still too early to make sweeping statements about the Napier regime. Three assistants leaving for the League this week doesn’t necessarily mean anything other than that the coaches were ready to make that career step. Every job of Florida’s caliber comes with a constant inflow of problems to solve, and many of the solutions reveal themselves to be good or bad over the course of years.
After all, the last two Gator head coaches who got fired didn’t look like they were on raging hot seats until after their final seasons had started. Meyer didn’t look like he had a handle on creating a great SEC offense until the 13th game of his second season, and then all of a sudden he did. You never know exactly when things are going to break one way or another, but I would be against this week being one of those kinds of inflection points.