At his introductory press conference nearly two weeks ago, UF head coach Billy Napier said that he was going to build an “army” of coaches and support staffers as part of his big-picture plan to bring success and stability to the program.
He’s made good on that promise so far. You would’ve been hard-pressed to go on the internet and not see read something about a new hire or two over the last two weeks. Napier even finalized the hire of receivers coach Keary Colbert just minutes prior to five-star safety Kamari Wilson’s announcement on Wednesday.
In total, Napier has hired half of his on-field coaching staff, Director of Strength and Conditioning Mark Hocke as well as somewhere between 10 and 20 analysts and recruiting staffers. And he doesn’t figure to slow down any time soon.
As for the 10 on-field assistant coaches, Napier said that there’s a lot more strategy that goes into the hires than some people may realize. You want excellent recruiters and excellent player developers, but you also want to diversify your recruiting footprint. For example, if you’ve already got three coaches on your staff who have strong recruiting ties in South Florida but nobody who is particularly strong in the Jacksonville area, it would make sense to target somebody who can fill that void.
These hires don’t happen in a vacuum. The type of coach that he hires for one opening changes what he’s looking for in the other spots on the staff. It’s like a puzzle.
“I think it’s the most challenging part of the job because you’re adding one piece of the puzzle at a time, and then the dynamic changes,” Napier said. “So, you’ve got to reevaluate the situation each time. So, you add this person to the team, how does that affect the next move? I think there’s so much that goes into that. I think it’s the most important part of what we do as leaders is get the right people in the right positions, and there’s a lot that goes into that – the integrity and character of each individual, their competence, their expertise in the job that we’re asking them to do, how they fit into our recruiting footprint, and it changes every time you add a person.”
While three of his five coaching hires so far were guys that followed him from Louisiana, Colbert and cornerbacks coach Corey Raymond are new to his staff. Colbert spent the last six years at USC, his alma mater, and mentored several NFL players, including JuJu Smith-Schuster. Raymond, meanwhile, worked for his alma mater, LSU, for the past 10 years and coached seven first-team All-Americans.
Napier is confident that the two of them will fit in well at UF.
“Certainly, these guys are some of the best in the entire country,” he said. “Not only the character, the integrity but the pedigree, the proven track record from a recruiting standpoint but, more importantly, a development standpoint. I think they’re great teachers. They’re going to fit our culture.
“They’re going to fit our vision for what we want this organization to be about, and [the] most important part of this is how they can impact the player as a person, how they prioritize education, and certainly how they teach football, and I think we’ve got some of the best in the entire country so far.”
While the on-field coaches’ duties are fairly easy for the general public to understand, analysts and recruiting staffers often work in obscurity. Some of them have very formal-sounding titles that don’t really tell you much about what they do. For example, Andrew Burkett is the “director of research and evaluation,” and Nick McDonald and Joe Hamilton are “personnel analysts.”
Napier offered a little bit of clarity as to what his overall operation will look like once he’s done hiring. It truly will resemble an NFL front office.
“We have a personnel department, and, within that department, you’ve got a high school personnel side, you’ve got a college personnel side and then you have underclassmen,” he said. “There’s lots of ways to acquire players, and I think that each part of that personnel department is important. Nick and Joe will be assigned specific responsibilities on that side of the ball. They will evaluate all the players on the board, but they will be working with the offensive coaches and the defensive coaches.
“Jacob [LaFrance] will oversee the entire operation with a focus on high school players. Andrew does research year-round on player production. He does research year-round on the evaluation process and has a lot to do with kind of our internal systems and how we operate.”
By creating such a large organization, Napier hopes to keep any individual from feeling overworked. He believes that people perform their best when they’re not tired and stressed out all of the time.
“I think the big thing here is we’re trying to create quality of life for the 10 assistant coaches so there’s a certain pace to life where they can do a good job at home,” he said. “I think that’s one of the things I learned working for Coach [Nick Saban] at Alabama. There’s several reasons for it, but one of them that I think is at the top of the list for me is the ability to do a good job with your wife, your children, to have a certain pace of life to where you don’t run yourself in the ground.
“This game will chew you up and spit you out if you let it, and I think it’s important that we keep perspective here, and this infrastructure will allow us to do that. I think everybody has got to have the right amount of work to do but not too little and not too much, and that’s the big-picture goal.”
Napier’s army is starting to take shape.