Every now and then, a quote goes by in a press conference that I don’t think gets enough attention. The last one of those was when Anthony Richardson talked about dealing with an ankle injury throughout the 2022 season. The ups and downs of the offense make more sense viewed through the lens of the playmaking quarterback not being able to trust his ankle every week. I didn’t see a lot made of it, though.
The latest example came from Billy Napier’s press conference following the first scrimmage of spring. A reporter asks him a question with a long lead up about how Graham Mertz fits in the offensive system and how Napier’s second team at Louisiana scored a lot more points than the first one did.
Napier takes it as a jumping-off point. “Man, we just weren’t very good,” he starts, referring to 2022. After cycling through some filler words as he decided what to say, Napier said the important line:
“We’re going to improve.”
Now, let’s not take this and run with it too far without appreciating what Napier likely meant. Immediately after saying that line, he went on a long description of the difficulties of being a first-year head coach. He called being in Year 1 “a blender”, and he talked about all the things that are new and require learning (players, recruiting grounds, coaching staff, leadership, etc.).
He next said he believes in his process, thinks he hired well, and expects improvement to come from that. Ever the good boss, he said the improvement “starts with me”. He then went on about all the various aspects of being a head coach: teaching, coaching, evaluating, recruiting, and leadership. Finally, he said that anyone who knows him will vouch that he’s going to “get it right”.
Anyway, you can tell that the question hit on something that Napier has been thinking a lot about. He went on more than a minute-long soliloquy about the program as a whole. He didn’t mention Mertz once even though the transfer quarterback was ultimately the point of the original question. Coaches are infamous for answering the question they’d preferred to have been asked instead of the one they actually were, but this answer didn’t really feel like that to me.
Napier knows that the 6-7 finish from 2022 is not good enough. It’s not good enough for him, personally, as an ambitious head coach. It’s not good enough at Florida, which has not been the kind of place to hang onto underperforming coaches for a long time.
It’s a bit much to say that Napier is already on the hot seat, as I don’t think anything short of a true scandal gets him fired before Week 1 of 2024. However another middling record this fall will put him squarely towards the top of all the hot seat lists. He’s done a good job of improving the talent level, but anything short of a breakthrough in ’24 risks him simply becoming a much less caffeinated Ron Zook.
The defense was nowhere near championship worthy a year ago, and we’ll see if Austin Armstrong can make strides there in a way that Patrick Toney couldn’t.
The offense was “not very good”, to use Napier’s term, at times. It also was quite good at times. Like everything in 2022, it had its ups and downs. Consistency is an important part of being a good offense, so that also goes in the “not very good” pile.
It’s easy to go through the roster and try to figure out whether the position groups will be better in 2023 than in 2022. Quarterback seems unlikely, given Mertz’s performance at Wisconsin was not great and he lacks Anthony Richardson’s athleticism to get out of jams. We’ll see if he really takes as well to the new scheme as he says.
Running back is probably about the same, as the top two guys are the same. Maybe it improves a little if they can make more of an impact as pass catchers. Receiver could improve if the talented true freshmen are as good and college-ready as hoped. Tight end is an unknown with Keon Zipperer going down for a while, but there has been some positive buzz about the younger options in spring. Offensive line feels like it’s not likely to improve after losing an All-American in O’Cyrus Torrence among four starters, especially with expected starter Micah Mazzccua set to miss a ton of time to injury himself. UF does have two OL coaches and several analysts for a reason, so we’ll see if they can make up for it.
It’s a dicey proposition, in other words. I’m not sure, however, that Napier was actually predicting the Gators to run up more yards and points than last year.
Taking his entire answer as a whole, I think he was more predicting that the process will be a lot better. Everyone will be on the same page more. The playbook will have more options since everyone will know it now. They can make more progress in any given practice since most of the players and coaches have done it Napier’s way before. Even one of the two new coaches on that side of the ball came from the analyst ranks and therefore knows how it’s done now in Gainesville.
Napier’s second Louisiana team did improve a lot in scoring, going from 31.9 points per game in 2018 to 37.9 points per game in 2019. It didn’t stay that way, though. The 2020 team scored 33.6 per game, and the 2021 team scored 30.7 per game before the bowl game that Napier didn’t coach. Three and four years into his tenure, with all the process improvements that entails, did not translate into a consistently high scoring team.
It did translate into a winning team, though, as each of those final teams lost a single game each, won the conference, and finished ranked. The artist formerly known as ULL finishing ranked at all was once unthinkable, much less twice in a row.
That’s why I think Napier took off on saying his long piece about last year’s squad not being good but the high quality people and processes being likely to lead to improvement. I don’t think he’s thinking about raising points per game by six again; he’s focused on the entire product. I think it’s a better organized and executing offense that he’s promising, and the results will be what they’ll be. The process will be improved, and that’s all they can truly control.