If I asked you to draw a parallel between the 2025 Gator football season and another year in recent program history, I’d guess you would say 2014. In that season, Will Muschamp was in a prove-it situation. Win big, or be fired.
I would contend that in addition to having some 2014 vibes, there also is more than a bit of 2017. Jim McElwain had just gone to back-to-back SEC Championship Games, but he’d lost the second one 54-16. Though no one had Mac on preseason hot seat lists, it was a live question as to whether he’d already hit his ceiling as a head coach in Gainesville.
With the pressure on to prove he could engineer a breakthrough, things broke through all right — to the downside. Not long after the cracks formed, the bottom fell out.
Billy Napier’s worst year wasn’t as bad as Muschamp’s 2013, but 2025 is a prove-it year nonetheless. He promised a rebuild that would take some time, but quite some time has passed by SEC standards.
He kind of passed the Muschamp 2014 test last year, since he was on a lot of hot-seat lists in the offseason and had been fired by basically everyone but Scott Stricklin in late September before turning things around. But now, he needs to show that a good-considering-the-schedule 2024 result isn’t where he tops out. And if the levee breaks midseason, the monster of a schedule ensures that a 2017-like slide to the finish is on the table.
If history doesn’t repeat but does rhyme, Napier needs a more mellifluous result than what his predecessors had in the seasons that remind of this one.
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In 2007, Nick Saban asked this question to the Alabama athletic director who’d just hired him: “Do you think you’ve hired the best coach in the country?”
Mal Moore responded: “Why, Nick, of course I do.”
Saban retorted: “Well, you didn’t—I’m nothing without my players. But you did just hire a helluva recruiter.”
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Ray Graves coached up teams with a promising Tennessean quarterback to the Sugar Bowl in 1965 and the Orange Bowl in 1966. Ever since, the middles of decades have been kind to the UF program.
Doug Dickey’s best season was 1974, with another Sugar appearance. The Gators had back-to-back top five AP Poll finishes in 1984-85. Florida went undefeated prior to the bowl in 1995 and won its first national title in 1996. The second such title arrived in 2006. And, McElwain’s two division titles arrived in 2015-16. Those peaks all have different altitudes, but peaks have generally arrived in those middle years.
UF has a chance to have not just one but two peak years in the middle of a decade once again. The biggest reason is simple: DJ Lagway has two more years of eligibility before he goes off to make millions playing on Sundays.
But while Lagway is the biggest reason, he’s far from the only one. Napier took his time but did succeed in rebuilding the roster to the best it’s been on the whole since Muschamp was still coaching some Meyer recruits.
Two more years of Lagway, yes, but also two more of Jadan Baugh. The best receiver on the team might be true freshman Dallas Wilson. The offensive line is at an experience peak for ’25. The defensive front is so stacked on the edges that it won’t miss a player who left to go start at LSU. There might be four future NFL players at middle linebacker, and none are seniors. Defensive back might go 12-deep in players you’d trust to at baseline be a part of a rotation if not more, depending on how some of the true freshmen progress.
Make no mistake, there will be some big shoes to fill in the second of these two theorized peak seasons once the likes of Jake Slaughter, Caleb Banks, Austin Barber, and Tyreak Sapp move up to the pro ranks. Banks in particular doesn’t have an heir apparent right now.
However, the pattern of mid-decade peaks could be about to repeat, and not just for this season.
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Saban’s quote above was tongue-in-cheek; he was on the forefront of defensive tactics for most of his career, and as a program builder and motivator, he’s unparalleled. It’s not totally a joke, however.
Look only to his former assistants to see how big a difference it can make simply to have better players than opponents do. McElwain’s Bama offenses never failed to hit 30 points per game, and Doug Nussmeier’s two Crimson Tide attacks averaged over 38. When their powers combined at Florida, they finished under 24 points per game two years running before nudging it up to just above 27 in 2017.
Napier has one of the country’s best young quarterbacks in Lagway. By some point during this fall, should the signal caller stay healthy, that “young” qualifier could easily disappear from that statement. If Napier puts Tre Wilson, Dallas Wilson, and J. Michael Sturdivant on the field at the same time — presuming all three are healthy as well — then good luck finding a secondary anywhere that can adequately cover all three. Napier has a passing game cheat code called “put the starters in the game”.
Saban was a defensive genius who, for the first phase of his Alabama tenure, employed offensive coordinators who were good enough. A genius and good-enough was a combination that could win titles in an era of big, heavy offenses and defenses, and the college football pendulum appears headed back that way.
Napier has called plays for ten teams as either offensive coordinator or head coach. Just one of them, 2019 Louisiana, made it out of the low 30s in points per game. With remarkable depth and speed at receiver, and the counsel of his Air Raid-steeped offensive coordinator Russ Callaway, will Napier keep a heavy role for two-tight end sets? Or will he open things up and try to score points in a way he seldom has in the past?
Ron Roberts is an innovator of sorts, having pioneered some of the simulated-pressure and creeper schemes that are now found at every level of football. He has a real coaching tree that includes the likes of Baylor head coach Dave Aranda and former Alabama/current Ole Miss DC Pete Golding. He himself has had few years at the highest level of the college game, however, with just three tenures at power programs. One ended when his former mentee Aranda fired him from Baylor after three seasons. Another was a single year at Auburn. The third is his present gig.
Is the combination of Napier and Roberts good enough to realize the full potential of the impressively rebuilt roster? That’s where everything hinges in 2025 for UF. The groceries look scrumptious, but are the chefs up to the job?
I am done trying to predict things in the Napier era at Florida. I thought he had showed a real ability to win after the 2022 Utah victory, and I thought the 2023 team would be an improvement over the prior season. And then, I thought he was toast after the ’24 Texas A&M game.
The schedule is still likely to be brutal, but so it goes in the superconference era. Napier’s job has always been to get to the point where the boys from old Florida are not the subject of sympathy for how rough they have it but rather are among the Big Bads making other teams’ slates sound difficult.
I will follow the old coach’s chestnut and take the 2025 season one week at a time. Napier will win enough or he won’t, and by now, it’ll all be on him whether he does. The only Mullen recruits left are starters.
The margin for error is thin, with one or two key injuries at places like quarterback and defensive tackle able to sink the season and perhaps Naper’s tenure entirely. In the portal era, however, everyone has weaknesses like that. Saban traded the sideline for College GameDay in no small part because he could see that assembling his Death Star teams wasn’t going to be possible anymore even with all the advantages he had.
As a result, with the right injury luck and some bounces going their way, a lot of teams can find their way into a 12-team Playoff. For the first time since 2020, UF has a team that could plausibly make its way into the final top dozen in the country. Whether the mid-decade magic returns is up to the Fates to decide, but the Gators at their best have a realistic chance to do some serious damage in the arena once again.