Billy Napier is 20-21 (.487) through 41 games at Florida. He’s 10-15 (.400) in SEC play.
Ron Zook was 23-14 (.621) overall and 16-8 (.667) in SEC competition at UF. Will Muschamp was 28-21 (.571) overall and 17-15 (.531) in conference play. Jim McElwain was 22-12 (.647) and 16-6 (.727) in the SEC. Dan Mullen was 34-15 (.694) overall and 21-13 (.618) in conference.
Napier has lost to a pair of teams that finished the year under .500, 2022 Vanderbilt (5-7) and 2023 Arkansas (4-8). Zook, Muschamp, and McElwain never lost to a team that finished below .500, though Muschamp lost to an FCS Georgia Southern team that went 5-4. Mullen lost two games to such teams, both of them (6-7 LSU, 6-7 Missouri) the year he was fired. It probably goes without saying, but neither Steve Spurrier nor Urban Meyer lost to any teams that would finish below .500 in 18 combined seasons.
Last year, Miami defensive coordinator Lance Guidry boasted of preparing for Florida’s top handful of offensive plays and seeing most of them within the first few snaps of the game. He prepared his defense for UF’s top passing plays and got a pick from a safety jumping a route and a sack.
Miami fired Guidry for poor performance after last season, and the defense is much improved so far this year with its new coordinator. Guidry is a defensive analyst for LSU, the team that just picked off DJ Lagway five times.
Miami’s head coach is Mario Cristobal, who was hired to the gig within a week of Napier’s hire at UF. His record is 25-16 (.610) overall and an even 12-12 in ACC play. He did lose to one team that finished under .500 in 5-7 Texas A&M in 2022, and he lost to Georgia Tech in 2023 after calling a handoff instead of a kneel-down with 33 seconds to go and the lead. It’s not been all sunshine and roses, but this year the Hurricanes have defeated last year’s national runner up Notre Dame and just blew out USF 49-12 a week after the Bulls won in the Swamp.
Speaking of Georgia Tech, head coach Brent Key took over as interim for the fired Geoff Collins for the last eight games of 2022. Collins was 10-28 when fired, and the Yellow Jackets were 1-3 so far that season while uncompetitive against Clemson and Ole Miss and with a loss to UCF. Key turned things around immediately, going 4-4 the rest of the way.
Key is has one more win (21) than Napier in fewer total games (37) despite taking over a much worse situation. No, the ACC isn’t as strong as the SEC, but Tech isn’t as well resources as Florida is. GT also plays Georgia every year and had non-conference matches against Ole Miss and Notre Dame during Key’s tenure. He has gone 3-0 so far this year, and he just knocked off Clemson.
Former Clemson defensive coordinator Brent Venables took over at Oklahoma the same year Napier did at UF. He has struggled more than he hasn’t, though he won ten games and beat Texas in 2023. Facing heat after a 6-7 campaign last year, he significantly changed tack with his underwhelming offense and brought in the young and dynamic Washington State offensive coordinator Ben Arbuckle along with Wazzu quarterback John Mateer. The Sooners are presently 3-0 with a win over Michigan and, more importantly, a much-improved offense. Venables accurately diagnosed his biggest problem and then fixed it.
Oklahoma’s former Big 12 and Big Eight rival Missouri appears in good hands with Eli Drinkwitz. Despite taking over in the pandemic season of 2020, he’s never failed to make a bowl game. He was 22-19 in his first 41 games, including 12-15 in league play. The last five of those 41 were a 5-0 start on the way to an 11-2 record in his fourth season of 2023. It’s not impossible, but appears unlikely, that Napier will come close to that record in his fourth year, though Mizzou’s schedule that season wasn’t near as tough as Florida’s this year or last.
Mark Stoops is the head coach of the University of Kentucky, a basketball school with little in its football history other than the trivia that Bear Bryant coached eight years there in the 1940s and ’50s. Stoops was set to take the Texas A&M job after Jimbo Fisher until Aggie fans revolted against the leaked news. His team fell to 4-8 last year, and he’d be on hot seat watch if his buyout wasn’t immense for a basketball school. He is 20-21 in his last 41 games, the same as Napier, though 7-13 in SEC play. He’s 2-1 against Napier.
Lincoln Riley also would’ve been on hot seat watch if not for a gigantic buyout. Presumed gigantic, anyway, since USC is a private school that doesn’t have to release contract details. His record that has the Trojan faithful antsy was 26-14 (18-10 in conference play) through three seasons, though he’s started 3-0 this year against some of the fluff of his schedule. He also coached up Caleb Williams to the Heisman in 2022.
Brian Kelly was also hired the same year as Napier, and he also coached up a Heisman winner. He’s 32-11 (18-7) so far, with two extra games on Napier because he’s never missed a bowl and made the SEC Championship Game in ’22.
Sonny Dykes at TCU went to the national championship game at TCU in his first year in 2022. The Horned Frogs had really fallen off in the last four years of his predecessor Gary Patterson (records of 7-6, 5-7, 6-4, and 5-7). Even as ’22 was an outlier year, he’s still 29-13 (18-9 in the Big 12) in the same amount of time in Fort Worth and Napier’s had in Gainesville.
Napier does compare favorably to some coaches of his cycle, such as the newly fired Brent Pry at Virginia Tech (16-24 overall, 10-13 in the ACC). And some, like Dykes’s successor Rhett Lashlee at SMU or Marcus Freeman at Notre Dame or Dan Lanning at Oregon, took over better situations than what Mullen left Napier. All three of them made the College Football Playoff last year in their third seasons with rosters largely their own, though.
Florida’s defense is playing well to keep the team in every game. It just managed to keep the Gators in it to the end at night in Death Valley against the nation’s No. 3 team while the quarterback was having an all-timer of a meltdown. Anything can happen in close games, including luck smiling on the Gators enough times in a row to preserve Napier’s job.
But we’re past the point of discussion about patience or what realistic expectations are. Plenty of time has passed, plenty of record has accumulated. Results for this coach as well as reasonable comparison coaches from around the country and UF’s own history are right here to look at. If it’s not absolutely clear that Napier should get a fifth year, then there’s little in this record comparison for him to fall back upon.
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