Kentucky beat Florida mainly because Anthony Richardson lost his confidence and played a terrible game. AR said as much in his postgame comments.
I don’t think there’s much reason to look at the game as anything beyond that. The defense had some pass coverage issues with tight ends early, and Will Levis had his one long touchdown bomb where Jalen Kimber got out of position covering Dane Key. Largely, though, the Gator quarterback was awful, and there’s little that can be done in the modern era to beat a solid team when your signal caller is that big a net negative on the game.
Even this early in a coaching tenure, folks try to make big conclusions on small sample sizes. I must have seen a dozen times or more where a frustrated Gator fan proclaimed Billy Napier the new Jim McElwain following the loss. I get the impulse, given that the former UF head coach is a mentor to Napier. I will say this much before going too far astray, the actual system that Napier runs now is not at all like what McElwain employed a half dozen years ago.
Maybe Billy is the new Mac, maybe he’s not. Time will tell. What I do know is that Napier is a lot different than his predecessor, Dan Mullen. That fact cuts both ways.
Napier has a plan for every last detail of his program. He seems to be way more into every aspect of the job of being a major college football head coach than Mullen ever was. If the present 2023 commit set holds, then he’ll have shown himself to be a clearly better recruiter than Mullen as well. Plus, Napier is by early accounts the best head coach at former player relations since at least Steve Spurrier.
Yet for all the reasons Mullen falls short in comparison to Napier, he still did get two SEC head coaching jobs. The reason is because he is a true offensive savant. He has been for a while, and he’s gotten better over time. For instance, his offenses in 2019 and 2020 for the pocket-bound Kyle Trask were far better than what he put together for Chris Leak at UF and Tyler Russell at Mississippi State.
When he wanted to — which was not every week, which is part of why he’s now on TV instead of on a sideline — he could assemble a game plan to compete with anyone using whatever parts he had on hand. It’s easy to forget as the years recede, but what he did in his first year in Gainesville was a minor miracle.
Since Tim Tebow graduated, Florida had only averaged 30 points per game once — in 2014, just barely at 30.3 per game. All three of McElwain’s teams failed to average even 24 points per game, and his final in 2017 was the lowest at 22.1 between himself and interim head coach Randy Shannon.
Then Mullen arrived. He raised the team’s scoring average by 13 points per game to hit an even 35.0 per contest. Feleipe Franks when from a deer-in-the-headlights disaster in 2017 to a perfectly average SEC quarterback in 2018 with a legitimately good 1.9% interception rate. All three times Florida has exceeded 39 points per game since Spurrier left had Mullen calling plays: 2007, 2008, and 2020.
Even when things fell apart in 2021, the Gators still topped 30 points per game at 30.7. Okay, yes, they did drop 70 on a Samford team that treated defense as a purely theoretical concept. Minus that, UF was at 27.4 per game, which would’ve been the third highest of the post-Tebow, pre-Mullen era behind 2014 and 2010 (29.8).
There are very few offensive minds out there who can take any assemblage of players and make something good or great with them. Mullen is one of them. There are even fewer who can do that and run a complete program. Mullen is not one of them, unfortunately.
Napier is not either, and that’s okay. He doesn’t need to be to get Florida where it wants to go. What that does mean, though, is that he was never going to take a collection of players recruited for Mullen’s system and blend that system with his own to smooth the transition.
He’s running his offense the best he can with what he’s got. He doesn’t have much in the way of fast, shifty receivers because Mullen didn’t leave him any. Ricky Pearsall has yet to be asked to do anything of that nature, so Napier might still not really have one. He also doesn’t have a true dual-threat tight end who is both a great blocker and a great pass catcher, and he’d prefer to have several.
Plenty of Gator fans, myself included, from the start were skeptical about Napier’s plan to skip having a play-calling offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach, taking those roles on himself with the help of analyst Ryan O’Hara, to hire two on-field offensive line coaches. He also hired multiple offensive line analysts, so there is no shortage of staff helping the line.
While football is won and lost in the trenches, especially in the SEC, having a special play caller can make a big difference too. Napier doesn’t seem to truly be special, even throwing out his time at Clemson when he was elevated to OC too early in his career. His sole season at Arizona State was fine if not exceptional, and only one of his seasons at Louisiana saw him get out of the low 30s in points per game (his second, before he fully built up the sizable talent advantage he had in his final two seasons).
I can’t say after two games whether Napier’s play calling is good enough for what Florida needs. I wasn’t impressed by the selection against Kentucky either, but nothing will look good with how poor the quarterbacking was. We also don’t know how much of the playbook is installed and how much of it he can run anyway between the tight end deficiencies and seven of the scholarship wide receivers being approximately clones of each other.
But all of it is a package deal with Napier. If you want his organization and recruiting and fan and player relations, you also have to take his idea for how to build the staff. It’ll work or it won’t, and if it doesn’t, he’ll fix it or he won’t. Those 15 words will be a years-long process of discovery.
Napier is not Mullen. He isn’t going to take someone else’s collection of players assembled for a different system and make a large helping of tasty chicken salad out of it. But, he also isn’t going to let any principal recruiters take a vacation before the dead period starts either.
There are trade offs in everything in life, and you just have to hope the good outweighs the bad. And a mere two games, one of which saw the quarterback have a crisis of confidence midstream, is just not enough to base a lasting decision on.