Since the end of the 2024 season, Billy Napier’s coaching staff lost Austin Armstrong but added Vinnie Suneri and Robert Bala. Both men are new coaches, not mere analysts.
But wait, aren’t there limits on coaching staffs? Does this mean someone has to leave? What is Napier doing?
I’ve got all the answers right here for you.
Back in Ye Olden Days (of 2023)
The NCAA used to restrict how many coaches a staff could have. An FBS football program could have up to 11 full-on coaches, one of whom had to be designated as head coach. It could employ other staff to do football things, but they weren’t allowed to directly “provide technical and tactical instruction” to players either at practice or on game days. Such staffers came to be known as “analysts”, though that term arose from the job title that was often given to them and not the rulebook.
Last summer, the NCAA changed its rules to erase the coach/analyst divide. Now, anyone employed by the school can provide any level of instruction at any time. In fact, the new bylaws (section 11.7.4, have fun) don’t use the word “coach” to describe these guys. They’re “institutional staff members”.
The new divide is now between those who can recruit off-campus and those who can’t. The old limit survives here, as only 11 institutional staff members can do off-campus recruiting.
Notably, there is a rule requiring off-campus recruiters to “regularly engage” in on-campus recruiting. No one is allowed to have a traveling sales and scouting department that doesn’t come back and do on-campus work as well. And off-campus recruiting doesn’t include phone calls or electronic messages, if I am reading things correctly, so guys outside of the blessed 11 can still recruit when a prospect is not physically present on campus.
The reason for the changes is that the coach/analyst divide was very hard to police. Basically everyone had people crossing the line while pretending everything was still kosher, and rarely did anyone get caught. The new rules end the farce.
Yet, the NCAA is still nothing if not a collection of its member schools, and so it does have to make a gesture here and there at competitive balance among institutions with wildly different levels of resources. Capping off-campus recruiters at 11 was meant to keep a lid on the big boys’ travel, lest they outrun their competitors through sheer expenditure. Heaven forbid.
There were, and still are, separate limits for the number of strength and conditioning coaches (five), graduate assistants (four), and undergrad student coaches (equal to the number of off-campus recruiters). But as for full-on coaches, programs can have as many as they want as long as only 11 of them recruit off-campus.
How is Napier reacting to the change?
Napier hasn’t been the fastest guy at reacting to change, but these new rules were proposed in 2022 and 2023 before they were finally adopted in 2024. He was ready last year and has already made adjustments.
If you’re now reaching for the close-tab button because you don’t want another round of extended job-title parsing, stop. It’s actually best if you ignore the job titles for the moment.
In an interview with Gator Country, Napier said that sticking with the old ten-assistants model didn’t make any sense given the rule changes. He talked about that with Gators Breakdown as well, describing Ryan O’Hara as being the quarterbacks coach last fall. So right there, Florida had 11 assistant coaches at the earliest possible moment to do so.
The real number was probably higher than that, though. Joe Houston and Chris Couch ran Florida’s special teams. I don’t know the precise division of labor, but one or both probably put in the workload of what a traditional special teams coach would’ve done. Now we’re talking about something more like 12 or 13 assistants in 2024.
O’Hara and Couch started as analysts when they came with Napier from Louisiana, and they were analysts there as well. It’s not the case that Napier hired them specifically to have guys waiting in the wings to become extra full-on assistant coaches once the rule changed. However, Napier’s preference of having a larger staff meant that when the new bylaws took effect late last June, he had guys ready to go to take advantage.
Isn’t this getting unwieldy?
Napier’s hiring practices have been so expansive compared to his predecessors that he’ll have to be in Gainesville a decade for anything to truly feel normal. But really, this is more an extension of recent trends than an innovation.
Prior to 2018, teams could only have nine assistants. The most plain way to assign those positions would be to have two coordinators, offensive and defensive, plus a position coach for the seven major groupings: quarterback, running back, tight end, offensive line, defensive line, linebackers, and secondary.
In practice, no one ever did that. Head coaches might be their own coordinators, coordinators would often have position coaching titles as well, a position coach would double up with special teams, and position groupings might have two coaches.
Florida’s history shows some of the many possible variations. Urban Meyer wanted to have two offensive line coaches, so Steve Addazio (2005-07) and John Hevesy (2008) coached tight ends too. Or take Steve Spurrier’s 1999 staff. Bob Sanders coached both defensive ends and strongside linebackers, Rod Broadway coached only defensive tackles, John Hunt coached only offensive tackles, Jimmy Ray Stephens coached interior offensive linemen, and Jim Collins coached weakside and middle linebackers. Good luck finding that precise patchwork of assignments today.
After the advent of the tenth assistant, it became common to see split duties. Not split quite like some of Spurrier’s assignments in ’99, but we’re talking things like having a corners and safeties coach instead of one secondary coach. Or having an interior/exterior split on either of the lines. Or increasingly in recent years, splitting Edge apart from linebackers.
Napier told Gators Breakdown that DBs coach Will Harris coached the entire secondary last year with the help of some analysts. He said Sunseri’s hire was meant to give Harris some help since Sunseri played and has coached safety. Bala, then, is more a drop-in replacement for Armstrong coaching linebackers.
Nothing’s been updated on the official team website yet, but Napier told Gator Country that Ron Roberts spent “the last two-thirds” of 2024 in a “walk around” role. That means he did more oversight and was less siloed on linebackers, as one his three titles in ’24 was inside LBs coach. Napier said he was looking at hiring a linebackers coach to allow Roberts to do that again, and then a short time later he hired Bala.
So, it sounds like Roberts will continue to have what Napier called “head coach of the defense” responsibilities, which appear to consist of oversight and game day play-calling. Having a defensive coordinator without a specified position isn’t new either. For example, both Dan Quinn under Will Muschamp and Todd Grantham under Dan Mullen had only the DC title and no specified position assignments.
Napier’s staff strategy is a mix of old and new. New, in that more than ten people can do the complete assistant coach job, with the occasional exception of off-campus recruiting. But also old, because he’s far from the first guy to have two O-line coaches (Rob Sale and Jonathan Decoster), two secondary coaches (Harris and Sunseri), or two linebackers coaches (Bala and Edge coach Mike Peterson).
It’s just that now, thanks to last summer’s rule change, he can have two of each of those all at the same time without having to cut or combine other roles.