Since I synthesized all of the complaints about Dan Mullen into a single frame at the beginning of October, I’ve been seeing everything through it. In that piece I talked about building up margin for error, but it’s essentially the same thing as “maxing out” or “ceiling strategy”. It comes down to this: is a given head coach doing everything he possibly could to make his program better?
I’ll admit it’s partially that I’ve long since internalized the Hypercritical ethos, that nothing is so perfect that it can’t be complained about. The list of head coaches who do everything well enough that there is slim room for complaint is very short. Nick Saban is at the top of said list. Maybe three or four more guys could go on it, and they’re all debatable.
It’s hard to say anyone has maxed out Florida football’s potential over a relative long haul other than Steve Spurrier. No less than Bear Bryant called UF a sleeping giant, and it never awoke scandal-free until the Head Ball Coach took over. It hasn’t stayed awake for more than half a decade since.
Billy Napier’s explicit task, as Scott Stricklin discussed in his presser after firing Mullen, is to sustain success. Each of the last four UF head coaches had seasons where they won 10+ games but also years where they failed to finish above .500 in SEC play.
Napier has already conquered one of the pitfalls of his predecessors, that being the need to marshal institutional support.
Florida aspires to not just be a Football School but an Everything School, so it doesn’t open the checkbook just because one of its head coaches asks it to. It is willing to spend, but that spending has to be justified.
Napier, true to his reputation, came in with extensive documentation for all of the outlays he wanted to make, and lo and behold, he’s getting to make those outlays. Some past coaches either didn’t want to put in the work to justify their desired spending increases or just didn’t want to, say, beef up the off-field recruiting staff at all.
So that’s one hurdle Napier has already cleared. Here are some roadblocks he’ll need to navigate to reach the pinnacle of Florida’s potential.
Making the Leap
Urban Meyer came to UF having spent time as a GA at Ohio State and five years as wide receivers coach at Notre Dame. Yet he thought he could run his Bowling Green/Utah offense that lacked fullbacks or blocking tight ends without modifications in the SEC. It took all of seven games before he gave in and changed course.
Napier has at least been a play-calling coordinator at the power conference level, a kind of experience neither Meyer nor his play caller Mullen had prior to 2005. Napier also has been a head coach before, so he won’t have to learn how to be the ultimate boss on the fly like Ron Zook and Will Muschamp did.
Yet, there’s nothing like being in a pressure cooker of a job like Florida’s other than being in one. Jim McElwain had been a G5 head coach and a higher-ranking assistant on a Saban staff than Napier’s been and the job chewed him up and spit him out in two-and-a-half years. Meyer is one of the greats of the era and it burned him out in five. Mullen tried to win in Gainesville in largely the same manner he used in Starkville with only transitory success.
Napier may have some advantages over past UF coaches in terms of experience coming in, but he still has to learn to be the boss of an elite program. Anticipating, rather than making, rookie mistakes will be key to maintaining his strong start.
Conservatism
Your first thought at this header was probably Muschamp, but I’m not even thinking about him here. He treated offense like something between an annoyance and a clock-burning aid for his defense. Napier obviously won’t do that.
No, I’m referring to Napier’s two most recent predecessors. They were offensive guys who nonetheless called relatively conservative offenses much or all of the time.
Mullen could put a big number on the scoreboard when he wanted to, but as I covered right after his hire and in his coaching obit and a few times in between, his instincts are conservative. Put him in a pressure situation and he goes directly to leaning on running (as much by the quarterback as possible) and field position. It doesn’t even have to be a true pressure situation either; he’d do that in just about any road game.
McElwain’s downfall here was more a lack of ambition. He just didn’t try to build an up-to-date, aggressive offense. Primarily, he didn’t use nearly enough spread sets to get the handful of playmakers he actually had in space. Instead, he ran a reheated version of the offenses he used at Alabama, which were schemes that Alabama itself was already going away from. Then during games, it was easy to see the offense going into doom loops of conservatism as bad choices and outcomes begat more bad choices and outcomes.
Napier’s offense at Louisiana ran a lot, but it also was mostly helmed by a mobile quarterback with questionable passing skills. I don’t think we can say yet what exactly it’ll look like this year, though it’ll be closer to McElwain’s than Mullen’s stylistically.
Style is beside the point, though. It’s what you do with your scheme that’s important. Spurrier built an offense so aggressive that it couldn’t be “turned off”. Will Napier press opponents similarly hard or will he back off the heat at times as his failed predecessors did?
Cronyism
When Mullen earned himself a head coaching job following the 2008 season, Meyer didn’t conduct a national search for the best possible replacement. He promoted Divemaster Addazio from within, and the team’s scoring output immediately dropped by about a touchdown per game.
McElwain never replaced close friend Doug Nussmeier as OC or strength coach Mike Kent (who came with Mac from Colorado State) even though UF administrators reportedly asked him to consider canning both. Once head coach at UF, Mullen remained loyal to a core group of assistants to a fault despite them underperforming as recruiters and/or on-field coaches.
As Napier has built his staff and off-field army, he has brought with him many figures directly from his Ragin’ Cajuns organization or otherwise people he’d worked with before. It’s not inherently wrong for him to do so. You wouldn’t expect anyone to hire only relative strangers, nor would you expect such an arrangement to work out. Plus, some of the staff in question have demonstrated success in jobs where they didn’t report to Napier.
Still, some of these hires won’t work out for any number of reasons. Why they don’t is neither here nor there. What is important is seeing that Napier will make tough moves when the situation calls for it.
Churn alone is no good indicator. Zook and especially Muschamp saw elevated levels of assistant staff turnover, and it portended nothing good. The comings and goings were symptoms, not causes. Hiring good staff in the first place is the trick of the thing.
One of Napier’s biggest prove-it hires is co-defensive coordinator Patrick Toney. At 31, he’s incredibly young for a P5 play caller. He also has zero P5 experience, with his resume having Louisiana, UTSA, Sam Houston State, and Southeastern Louisiana on it.
Maybe Toney is a wunderkind who will be running his own P5 program in a few years like how Oregon just hired the 35-year-old Dan Lanning off of Georgia’s staff. There’s no way to know. But the greats usually spare no sentimentality when peak performance is on the line, and when they do, it backfires the same as it does for anyone else.
Roster Management
It’s hard to sustain a sufficient level of good players at every position all at once. I don’t have the space to map it out here, but the post-Meyer coaches had a hard time with this aspect of the job. At varying times, in positions like offensive line, wide receiver, defensive back, and defensive tackle, you could see cycles of low levels of signing leading to scrambles for numbers. Not surprisingly, the ebbs of the talent cycle have hit on regular four-year intervals. The program’s lowest points have been in 2013, 2017, and 2021.
Napier has to break this cycle if he expects to sustain success. It’s impossible not to come up short at a position or two every so often, though the one-time transfer rule may help smooth things out. Regardless, he’ll have failed if the Gators are a marginal bowl team or worse in 2025.
Here, I also mean roster management to mean managing the people on the team. It’s been hard for most of the post-Spurrier coaches to do it.
Discipline got out of control under Zook (example: the frat fight), Meyer (myriad arrests), and McElwain (credit card scandal). Favoritism poisoned team culture under Meyer and Mullen too. Muschamp mostly only had discipline problems in terms of penalties, though Spurrier’s teams were often near the bottom of the SEC in flags too.
Napier has made a big show of talking about football as a people business. The rhetoric, at least, is on point. Not enough time has passed to adjudicate the execution of it.
Conclusion
It’s hard to avoid every single one of these traps. Meyer is one of the best coaches of this era and he fell into multiple of them. He did it at multiple schools too, with cronyism leading to his eventual exit from Ohio State after he harbored his mentor’s grandson Zach Smith on his staff for years despite a long history of misconduct.
The careful reader will note that Napier is taking over for someone who batted 1.000 on these trouble spots; even the line about a head coach not wanting to expand the recruiting department in the first section was not a hypothetical. The new guy will get something a conditional mulligan on his first year’s won-loss record provided the overall trajectory is headed in the right direction. He may very well need it depending on how deep the damage goes.
It’s incredibly difficult for someone to do everything well enough to sustain true success. Tenures even as long as Spurrier’s 12 years in Gainesville are increasingly rare and seldom found in the P5 outside of places with modest expectations like Iowa or TCU. Getting merely a good decade out of Napier would be an improvement over what most programs get these days, not the least of them being Florida itself.
If there’s any solace in it being hard for Napier to dodge all of these hazards, it’s that likewise few of his competitors can manage to do it themselves. Some may do most things right but call too conservative a game, or they replace departed assistants with buddies or green internal candidates instead of going out to find the best.
Remember what the sole certain guy on the list of ceiling strategists and Napier’s former mentor preaches: process over outcome. Someone can win as much as a national title while temporarily or even systemically running afoul of one or more of these.
The way to give yourself the best chance at sustaining championship-level play is to avoid them all as best you can, at which point the results will take care of themselves.