I’ve said my piece on why I think the Billy Napier era is going to be over soon. I’m just going to take that as given from here because, really, who out there thinks otherwise? Napier didn’t even try to offer much of a defense against the critics in his postgame presser.
This impending firing feels different for me compared to all the others in the last 20 years.
I was a student for the second and third Ron Zook years. I wasn’t very sophisticated as a fan at that point and just wanted the team to win. I grew up knowing only the Spurrier era, so I was used to the winning. I knew why fellow fans weren’t excited by the hire of the guy who’d been demoted from the defensive coordinator position, but I thought everyone would/should support the head coach regardless of who he was.
I also felt badly for Zook from the start in light of the FireRonZook.com thing, and I felt badly again for him when the axe came. I completely expected it given how bad losing to that year’s Mississippi State team was on top of his other struggles, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that it was my first experience of a failed coaching regime, and it was hard seeing someone I had unconditionally supported go down in flames.
I also felt bad for Muschamp. You can see that in the first piece I ever wrote in which I predicted a Florida head coach would be fired. He seemed like a good guy, and he was a good recruiter who would keep a solid floor under the defense. It’s just too bad that he was constitutionally unable to build a good offense.
With Jim McElwain, it was more shock than anything. I didn’t foresee him being in trouble at the start of 2017. Then the two close losses came, and then the death threats comments came. I didn’t even think much of them at first, so it was a slowly dawning realization of just how much he had stepped in it with them. I knew Gator fans were mad about McElwain’s impotent offense — believe me, I was very mad too – but I thought he’d make it through the year. Then he opened his mouth and gave UF an excuse to get rid of him.
It was a bit of shock too with annoyance mixed in for Dan Mullen. I wanted him to work out but wasn’t sure he would from my years of writing for an SEC blog while he was at Mississippi State. I couldn’t believe how bad the defense performed in 2020, but most defenses had rough years that season. I couldn’t believe he stuck with Todd Grantham afterward, but I figured the Gators would have a down 2021 and then let Mullen play the fire-the-coordinator card.
Mullen was completely fine through a month. September saw two cupcake wins, a competitive two-point loss to Alabama, and a comfortable win over Tennessee. There were no signs of impending doom at that point. But then, the Gators lost 20-13 at Kentucky, and everything spiraled from there.
With Napier, it’s a new feeling: anger. I was a bit surprised to find myself still mad on Sunday about Saturday’s game and Billy’s tenure in general, but I definitely was.
We were all sold a bill of goods from the start. There were quotes out there from others in the coaching profession that amounted to something like, “he’s the closest thing you can get to Saban without having Saban”. The reason was because of Napier’s voluminous plans for building the program and scripting out every day. It turned out that all those plans were actually a sign of timidity and rigidity.
Napier also made a point to manage expectations downward at the beginning. It seemed like a canny move for a confident head coach. Many newbies will promise the sun, moon, and stars by the end of their second seasons. Billy instead promised it would take some time and that struggles would come first, and he was right about the latter.
It gave him some credibility that he would later set on fire with happy talk all through both the 2023 and 2024 offseasons. It’s a terrible move: everyone will notice if the team improves, so you don’t need to talk it up much, but it’ll infuriate fans if it doesn’t.
Napier could hire some well-regarded assistants form outside his circle when he wanted to, but he stuck to cronies in the places where it counted most (OC, DC, STs coordinator). He couldn’t recognize that his offense was not good enough for the SEC. He apparently saw true evenly matched competition between his lines over the offseason such that he thought both were good, when in actuality both were bad.
He did a decent enough job building the roster other than the two lines, but he also foolishly cut loose or otherwise didn’t try to keep some really good players. For instance, it killed me that a lot of the time last year, UF was rolling out with two true freshmen safeties who weren’t all that good yet when Donovan McMillon was on his way to earning honorable mention All-ACC at Pitt.
I struggle to identify anything that Napier does that is above average for his profession. I struggle to find areas where the team is better than it was at the end of Mullen’s time other than specifically this year’s special teams. Joe Houston seems to really have fixed things, for all of the three games we’ve gotten to enjoy it so far.
If he’s this bad at the job, how’d be get it in the first place? What vetting process went on? Surely someone in the UAA could’ve seen the warning signs. Heck, I saw some of the warning signs with how lackluster the offensive results were at Louisiana, but I bit my tongue and went along with everything because it seemed like Napier could prove himself worthy. Oh, well.
I realize a lot of programs made runs at Napier before Florida landed him, and maybe everyone who was caping for him when he was the top candidate really believed what they were saying.
But the complaints about his offense now sound the same as those from when he was fired from Clemson 14 years ago. He either has learned or applied little since then. The complaints about how he runs the program now are the same as two years ago. For someone renowned as being bright, Napier sure seems to be hell-bent on not learning a thing.
So yeah, I’m mad about this tenure. In hindsight, it sure looks like a complete waste of all our time. We all only get so many seasons, so I am particularly impatient about lost seasons. It’s hard not to see the entire Napier era as lost in a way that only the McElwain tenure can match, but at least Mac won more games than he lost.
I am beyond ready to say goodbye to an era of boring offense and incompetent defense. It’s time.