The Florida Gators lost to Tennessee 31-11, their first defeat at the hands of the Volunteers at home in more than 20 years. The team has been inconsistent under interim head coach Billy Gonzales, with exemplary efforts against Georgia and Ole Miss interleaved with crushing losses to Kentucky and UT.
The Billy in whom the blame resides is not Gonzales but Napier. Inconsistency is the essence of the program he made The four-game win streak to end the 2024 campaign sticks out because it was the longest in-season streak of his tenure. The next-best run of wins was three in 2023, with a win over those same Vols but it being sandwiched between FCS McNeese State and a dreadful Charlotte team. If UF can’t beat a struggling FSU team next week, it’ll be the second five-game loss streak of the Napier years after ’23 also ended on such a slide.
If the Gators fall again next week, it’ll lock in a 3-9 record. It’d be the worst since the infamous 0-10-1 season in 1979. Galen Hall never finished worse than .500. Ron Zook and Dan Mullen’s worst were the years they got fired at 7-4 and 6-6 regular season records, respectively. Will Muschamp and Jim McElwain bottomed out at four wins, though in the latter’s case a hurricane-canceled cupcake game would’ve made a fifth win.
The schedule would mostly be to blame for getting only three instead of the previous low of four. UF had to play a playoff contending Miami team and a good USF team in the non-conference as well as three of the four top teams in the SEC. There are no instances of 2-10 Kentucky or 3-9 Arkansas teams, like in 2013, or a 4-8 Tennessee like in 2017. That said, UF was one of Kentucky’s mere two SEC wins on the season, and Florida had to work extremely hard to lose the game to South Florida. They tried harder to lose that game than some teams ever put into winning a matchup.
And so now Florida is on Lane Kiffin watch for a week, and I don’t suspect we’ll hear anything definitive until late in the week. Ole Miss released a statement saying that Kiffin would address his future on the Saturday after the Egg Bowl, which is being played on Black Friday.
UF is one of a trio of teams, along with LSU and Ole Miss, vying for his services going forward. On3’s Pete Nakos reported Friday that all three of them have offered Kiffin a deal in the $13 million annual range, which would likely put him above Kirby Smart for highest paid coach in the sport. It would be a monumental sum for a program that had never paid any head coach more than the roughly $7 million a year Napier was getting.
I don’t have any sourcing and won’t pretend I know what will happen. It’s Lane Kiffin, so predictions are a fool’s errand anyway. He’s as mercurial as they come in the business. When I read reports about how he himself hasn’t decided what to do yet, I believe them. It’s a tough call, and someone as emotional as he is probably has been swinging all over the place about what the right thing to do is.
I don’t think Kiffin is a sure thing who will definitely win a national championship at Florida or wherever else he goes. This year’s team is the first one of his that appears that it maybe won’t get stuck at his past ceiling of the bottom of the top ten, but it still might. He could easily choose to stay in Oxford but then lose in the first round of the playoff and end up around No. 9 or so. The Rebels had about as favorable a draw as they come in the SEC. What is his second-best win this year after Oklahoma? It probably is a 45-10 blowout of former conference member Tulane.
But then, there are no sure things. Looking back at that list of highest paid coaches, the closest thing was Smart. No. 2 Ryan Day was close, given how good of a situation he inherited from Urban Meyer. However as late as right after yet another loss to Michigan a year ago, people were starting to wonder if OSU would get tired of losses to the Wolverines and seek to rehome him. No. 3 Lincoln Riley was a major coup for USC, but he’s been a disappointment. Andy Staples said on his weekend recap show that Riley’s agent has been putting him up for jobs and that USC would prefer he take one of them, though Staples said Riley’s not actually going to leave.
No. 4 Dabo Swinney was an elevated interim who no one saw coming. No. 5 Steve Sarkisian had things to prove from his tumultuous past history. No. 6 Dan Lanning was a coordinator the average college football fan had never heard of. No. 7 Kalen DeBoer is perpetually in trouble because he can’t win at the level the true Greatest of All Time did (no one can). No. 8 Brian Kelly was fired. No. 9 Bill Belichick is a train wreck. No. 14 is Deion Sanders. No. 16 was James Franklin.
Kiffin would be the most accomplished head coach Florida has hired in my lifetime, though much of that would simply be that he isn’t an up-and-comer with a short head coaching history. He’s had 14 years as a head coach somewhere. Dan Mullen and his nine years at Mississippi State are the next-most. Steve Spurrier had just six years of head coaching experience, three in the USFL and three at Duke. Meyer and Napier each had four, and McElwain had three. Zook and Muschamp were first-timers at Florida.
Of course, Kiffin still has catching up to do to match Spurrier’s one pre-Florida power conference championship, the shared 1989 ACC title. Kiffin might’ve won the Pac-12 with his 10-2 team in 2012, but the NCAA had imposed a postseason ban on the Trojans. He probably won’t even make the SEC Championship Game this year because of the way the tiebreakers fall, though it’s technically not impossible.
If Kiffin comes to Florida, he probably will improve the program greatly in short order. He did that at Ole Miss, beginning the process before the Rebels had one of the best NIL operations in the country and prior to House settlement revenue sharing.
But you never know with these things. You don’t know if he’s coming. If he comes, you don’t know if he’ll break out above that bottom of the top ten ceiling he’s had in Oxford. You don’t know that the second or third choice for the job won’t be great. Pete Carroll was something like USC’s fifth choice.
Coaches come and go, but rivalries matter forever. Even with all the unusual circumstances, it hurt that Tennessee broke its losing streak in the Swamp. It will hurt if the Gators drop one to an FSU team that’s been wishing it had the money to fire its own coach for months. Take some time this week and marinate in the rivalry rather than the day-to-day minutiae about Kiffin Watch, especially since it’s going to be a war of information and misinformation from sources with agendas.
The 2025 season is not over yet, and there is still yet a chance to end on a small positive note by knocking the hated Seminoles out of bowl contention. That’ll be a feather in this team’s cap no matter what the head coach in Mississippi decides to do.