Billy Napier will not make it past the 2024 season

Author’s note: this is an opinion piece and not reporting. It does not necessarily reflect the view of Gator Country or GC’s other writers.

Too many people get caught up in the idea of patience for college football head coaches being solely a matter of the number of years a guy gets. That’s the wrong way to think about it.

The real question is whether a coach can fulfill a program’s realistic goals. For some, that could be making a bowl each year. For others, it might be winning ten games every four to five seasons.

For Florida, it’s winning championships. And so, UF will patience until a guy shows he does or does not have what it takes to bring home titles.

Billy Napier does not have what it takes. I don’t know if the pink slip is coming in the next two days or two weeks or two months, but it’s coming. Soon. And it’s because he has demonstrated a fundamental misunderstanding of how to run a championship program on a number of fronts.

If a team is going to compete with the best, it must have the best people in charge of all facets of the game. There is no room to keep people around who routinely get outcoached or out-schemed.

Napier brought over an awfully young defensive coordinator with him from Louisiana in Patrick Toney. After a year of bad defense, Toney left for the NFL. Given a new chance, Napier hired an even younger DC in Austin Armstrong, who he’d also worked with at Louisiana. Then he brought in Ron Roberts for Year 3, yet another guy he’d employed at Louisiana. They’ve all run the same scheme, and the defense has yet to show any sign of durable improvement.

For the play-calling offensive coordinator, Napier hired himself in order to have room on his staff for two offensive line coaches. The scheme was static and predictable for two years, so Napier had a decision to make last winter. His choice ultimately was to keep the keys to the offense for himself. Accordingly, the offense has been static and predictable yet again. It’d be one thing if the dual offensive line coach arrangement was working out, but the line has been a liability for the duration.

The exception that proves the rule is special teams. Napier tried to get away with having an analyst run the unit for two years — and yep, said analyst came over from Louisiana — but Year 1 saw middling results and Year 2 saw a series of inexcusable gaffes. Napier hired a true professional, Joe Houston from the New England Patriots, to clean things up. Lo and behold, this year’s special teams so far have been easily the most rock-solid unit Napier’s had in any season among all three phases of the game.

Improving the talent situation was Job 1 for Napier following Dan Mullen’s lackluster recruiting. He did sign more highly rated talent than his predecessor, but it’s not clear he knows how to recognize what he’s got once the players get to campus.

Napier slowly ratcheted expectations upward throughout the 2023 offseason. The team then finished with one fewer win than the prior year. At SEC Media Days that summer, he predicted that it’d be hard to find two more impactful defensive tackles than Cam Jackson and Caleb Banks. In reality, neither has performed at even a marginal all-conference level.

He talked up his team even more this past offseason. He said all his systems were in place finally. Those systems produced a team that got smoked by Mario Cristobal, who’s been at Miami as long as Napier’s been in Gainesville, and safely handled by Mike Elko, who’s in his first season at Texas A&M.

Napier bragged about having his deepest team. Perhaps so, though it’s not as high a bar as you’d like. It has manifested in some rotations that just don’t make sense in the context of championship football.

Florida rotated a ton of offensive linemen in the opener against Miami, which gave some the impression of Napier treating the game like a scrimmage. He said afterwards that he gave Devon Manuel every third drive at left tackle to reward Manuel for playing well in the spring.

That’s not what coaches who are serious about winning titles do. Starting left tackle Austin Barber is clearly one of Florida’s best two linemen, and he should never come off the field in a game against a rival unless he’s hurt or it’s garbage time.

In the second half against Texas A&M, Napier put walk-on receiver Taylor Spierto on the field quite a bit. I have nothing against Spierto, who seems to be a hard-working and high-effort guy, but he’s just not an SEC wide receiver. He played only seven snaps against Samford, but, without having seen a team snap count for the contest yet, I am fairly sure he played more than that against the Aggies.

Receiver is one of the deepest rooms on the team, even with Tre Wilson out for the game. But when Florida got the ball back with a hint of a hope for a comeback, down 13 with a bit over three minutes to play, DJ Lagway threw a pick on the second snap. The pass was intended for Spierto, who was falling down on the play, instead of a scholarship player who’s bigger, faster, or both.

I could go on. From terrible clock management at the ends of halves in 2022 to the terribly bungled recruitment and NIL negotiation with Jaden Rashada to consistently poor preparation for road games, too many things have looked more like amateur hour than winning time.

Even the greats have their shortcomings and blind spots, but Napier has far too many of them to get Florida where it wants to go.

I’ll give one last one: a lack of sense of urgency. He chose not to try to flip the roster to any substantial degree upon entering. He insisted on doing time-consuming evaluations of transfer prospects, resulting in Florida losing out on premier portal talent. He’s had trouble with getting plays in on time all three years.

I don’t expect every coach to be Urban Meyer. However when he saw his pre-Florida offense was not going to cut it in the SEC, he chose to start overhauling it during the off week of his first season. There was no pabulum about evaluating things once the season is over; he did it right away. That’s what championship sense of urgency looks like. See a problem, fix the problem, as soon as possible.

Two weeks ago, Napier was out of excuses. After a dismal showing against Texas A&M, demonstrating all the same flaws as have existed since he walked in the door, he’s out of chances.

The Miami result wasn’t a one-game fluke. It’s been three years, and it’s difficult to point to much of anything that’s clearly better today than it was when Napier started. That pill is particularly hard to swallow considering Napier asked for and received far more resources than any other head coach in UF history.

Patience was giving Will Muschamp a fourth year because of how tremendously bad the injury plague was in 2013. Giving Napier a fourth year to keep doing the same things over and over again while expecting different results is something, but “patience” is not the right word for it.

It might not quite be time to invoke Jeremy Foley’s famous maxim, not the least because a decision must be made about who will hire Napier’s replacement. As soon as some ducks get in a row, that time will be at hand.

The loss to A&M wasn’t the crossing of a rubicon like Ron Zook falling to a Mississippi State team that had previously lost to Maine. Rather, the way the loss happened showed there is scant hope for Napier to win enough to save his job this year.

Barring some kind of miraculous turnaround and/or institutional paralysis due to UF having an interim president, Florida will be in the market for a new head coach yet again this November. I wanted Napier to work out because he seems like a genuinely good person. However, he’s in over his head with a job this big, and there’s nothing to be gained for him or the program by extending his tenure for much longer.

David Wunderlich
David Wunderlich is a born-and-raised Gator and a proud Florida alum. He has been writing about Florida and SEC football since 2006. He currently lives in Naples Italy, at least until the Navy stations his wife elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter @Year2