In college football, you get what you pay for. If you want the very best coaches to develop your players and instill a winning culture in them, you’ve got to be willing to at least match what the other top schools are willing to pay them. If you want to sign the very best athletes, you’ve got to have a deep and talented recruiting staff that can keep things organized and stay on top of recruits.
The Gators have spent a ton of money on the football staff, but they’ve been a bit behind schools like Alabama and Georgia in recent years.
That’s about to change. As part of Billy Napier’s agreement with UF, he will receive a $7.5 million salary pool to pay his 10 assistant coaches. For comparison, Dan Mullen’s 2021 staff was paid just more than $6 million. Napier will also receive a $5 million pool to hire support staffers.
Napier said that receiving that type of financial commitment wasn’t just a luxury; it was something that he needed to see in order to take this job.
“It’s absolutely the most important part for me,” he said. “I think in today’s era, in this college football dynamic that we compete in, it’s truly an organization. We’re talking about a very specific plan and all these different areas that affect your ability to compete. And in this league, the proof’s in the pudding. I think the two that played for the championship game last night [Alabama and Georgia], there’s evidence relative to the way that they’ve created their organization.
“So, we’re going to increase the manpower, if that makes sense. We’re going to create very specific plans in personnel, recruiting, development, nutrition, strength and conditioning, sports science, the training room, name, image and likeness, our journey program, which we’re going to create from the ground up.
“We’re going to hire an army of people here. We’re going to create an infrastructure not only in the personnel department but also from an on-campus recruiting, creative media, name, image and likeness. We’ve got a great vision for the organization that we’re going to create here.”
Napier later was asked about how big his “army of people” is going to be, and he responded, “Unprecedented.”
One of the biggest areas that UF’s increased financial commitment to the program should show up is in recruiting. The Gators have only finished inside the top-10 in the recruiting rankings twice since 2015, and their transition class currently ranks 40th.
As Napier said on Sunday, “this is a talent-acquisition business.” You can’t expect to be the best team in the SEC with middle-of-the-pack recruiting.
With better recruiters on staff and a larger recruiting operation overall, the hope is that Florida will soon be able to compete with teams like Alabama, Georgia, Clemson and Ohio State on the recruiting trail.
Napier sounds confident in his ability to recruit at UF. He’s not concerned about what Alabama and Georgia are doing. The way he looks at it, there is more than enough talent to go around in this state. As long as he signs enough good players and gets them into the extensive developmental program that he’s going to install, they’ll be fine.
“I think we’ve got to sign around 25 players a year,” Napier said. “I think that there’s enough out there. I think the important part here is that we don’t get consumed with the stars, four-star, five-star. I think it’s going to be more about evaluation. We’re going to go through a very thorough evaluation process.
“We’ve got a lot to sell here, and I think the timing is right. I think that the administration’s willingness to invest in our vision and this organization that we’re going to create, if you combine that with the resources that they’re providing to hire an exceptional staff, I think that the new facility is going to give us an advantage that maybe we haven’t had before here. I think that our proximity to player is a direct advantage [with] our ability to get these young men and their families on our campus. And then we do our job. If we can’t sign 25 good players at the University of Florida, then you’ll be looking for a new coach.”
Athletic director Scott Stricklin said that it was easy for him to give Napier more money to hire assistant coaches and staffers with after talking with him a couple of times. Napier explained to him in great detail how all of that additional money will be used and why it’s absolutely crucial to the program that he’s trying to build. He’s not just going to spend money for the sake of spending money.
“It wasn’t just ‘Throw resources at it,’” Stricklin said. “It was a detailed explanation of what those resources were going to do and what the personnel involved in those resources – what their roles were going to be, what the accountability piece would be, what the functions would be. It wasn’t just ‘We need people.’ It was ‘This is why we need these people doing these things,’ and it fit into an overall model that made a lot of sense.
“It’s kind of like when someone comes to you and asks you to invest in a company. You’re willing to do it when there’s a really good plan, a really good business model. And Billy has a vision for what that needs to look like. As I said, it’s something that gets you excited to help it come about.”
Stricklin also said that the way that Napier managed his resources at Louisiana played a factor in his decision. Louisiana obviously doesn’t have anywhere near as much money as Florida, but he was still able to build a smaller-scale version of the Alabama model at the school. If he can do that with a limited amount of funding there, what can he do with a larger budget at UF?
“He does a really good job of talking about the structure, the layers of personnel, what the roles will be, why that’s important, how that helps, what the end result’s going to be,” Stricklin said. “The great thing about all of that is, to him, it’s all about the people. It’s about making the players better. Identifying the right players, evaluating the right players, having the right staff, evaluating the right staff, putting the structure and support around all those people to make them as successful as possible. That’s something that is easy to get behind and something that I was excited about when he explained it to me.”
Napier is appreciative of the administration’s support, and he’s ready to go about building his unprecedented army.
“We’ve got a very specific plan here,” Napier said. “Their willingness to create those resources and put the finances that need to be in place to do that, that combined with the salary pool, they were willing to do what we wanted to do. [I] can’t compliment them enough for that.
“I think when it all is said and done, we’re going to put together a truly elite group of people here that will impact the players.”