Let’s get this out of the way: Florida is not going to fire Billy Napier this year, despite some saber rattling from national columnists you might find out there from the weekend.
It’s cost prohibitive. Napier alone would be owed just shy of $32 million in buyout money, half of which would be owed within 30 days of firing. The whole thing would be more than $10 million above the current record buyout, the $21.7 million Auburn paid to get rid of Gus Malzahn. The UAA appears to be on the hook for all of it too, as reporting from the time of hire says Napier doesn’t have an offset clause where the buyout would be reduced by the amount of money that a subsequent job would pay him.
Then, the rest of the current coaches would have to be bought out, then the new head coach would have to be bought out of his current job, then all the new assistants would have to be bought out of their current jobs. It’s far more than UF has ever shown itself to be willing to spend on such things.
Plus, there’s the matter I’ve brought up before that should Napier get fired, it’s highly unlikely that Scott Stricklin would get to hire the replacement. Therefore on top of dealing with the enormous financial cost and likely torpedoing the current top 5 ranked recruiting class, you’re also looking at an AD search on top of it. It’s probably too late in this year to find a new AD and then have them make a well considered hire in time to salvage something for the December signing day.
So no, Florida’s not going to fire Napier this year.
The reason it even has to be addressed is because Napier has moved slowly from the start. Whether he thought of it in these terms or not, he chose to take a Year Zero in 2022.
The concept of a Year Zero, popularized mainly by Bill Connelly and the Split Zone Duo crew, is that sometimes a new head coach walks into such a giant mess that first-season struggles shouldn’t totally count against him. He has to take a Year Zero before even getting to a Year 1 where you can judge how well the guy is doing.
Napier said from the start that he wasn’t going to take a large transitional recruiting class. He came through on that. Nearly all of the prior commits left the class to sign elsewhere, and only 18 high school prospects faxed in letters of intent. He did add a pair of JUCOs over the summer to bring the class’s number up to a still-small 20. As for the new era of the one-time transfer rule, half of his six portal takes were guys he brought with him from Louisiana.
Napier believes strongly in his process for evaluating players, but it’s not a quick process. There was never going to be time to make like fellow new hire Lincoln Riley at USC and take advantage of the suspension of the initial counters rule to flush the roster and bring in 20 transfers to replace the departures.
The upshot was that the 2022 season stands as something of a lost year, one in which Napier leaned heavily on Mullen-era holdovers who aren’t around anymore due to NFL Draft entry or transfer. The roster flush did end up happening, it just came after a season had passed and not before. As a result, UF ended up 115th in Connelly’s final returning production ratings for 2023.
This created a dynamic where Napier’s second recruiting class was also on the smaller side because he had to load up on transfers to compensate for the exodus. The portal brought twice as many players as the previous cycle did, and most of them have been contributors. It remains true, however, that only one of the 18 transfers has performed on an all-conference level: 2022 All-American O’Cyrus Torrence. Those kinds of players just don’t show up in the portal that often, and when they do, they usually have a destination in mind already.
Having a team struggling to gel because it’s chock full of youth and transfers is expected in Year 1. It’s not a great place to be in Year 2 though, especially after a rough Year 1. The bigger, quicker roster flippers haven’t yet proven that model to be a great one — Colorado is flailing, LSU doesn’t have a defense, USC just fired its DC and would be in a world of hurt had it not been able to import Caleb Williams from Riley’s old school, and so on — but roster issues aren’t the only ones Napier faces.
Florida’s offense can’t score on a defense with a pulse, except for one half against Tennessee. Its defense had a great first four games but, Vandy aside, has been a sieve since. Special teams has an extremely hard time going an entire game without some kind of gaffe and still sent only ten players out on field goal coverage at least once last weekend.
Napier started to get very defensive in his press appearances following the face plant at Kentucky before pulling out of the downward spiral midweek, but his press conference after the Arkansas loss was wholly unsatisfying.
He touted the week’s military appreciation program in his opening statement, which came off as either a transparent attempt at distracting from the game or a “championship of life“-style platitude that no one wants to hear after a loss. He pinned the field goal unit snafu at the end on a player making an honest mistake, which is bad because either a staff member should be in charge and not a player, or he’s covering for the analyst who runs special teams possibly doing more than rules would allow on game day.
When asked about special teams having consistent issues, he asked for examples despite every game except one having some kind of glaring problem. When provided examples, he fell back to generalities like saying everything gets evaluated. It’s not hard to interpret it as sounding like the kind of answer someone gives in class when they didn’t do the reading.
Between Mullen truly leaving behind a mess, Stricklin’s job being on the line with Napier’s performance, the massive chunk of money required to make a change, and the first elite recruiting class in a decade being on the hook but not signed, Napier will be back next season. He still gets to play the fire-the-coordinator card, one which it was reported after the Kentucky loss that he does intend to deploy in the offseason.
The problem with that is the coordinator he needs to fire most is himself as OC. It needs to happen not just because Napier can’t hack it against elite defenses, but because he needs to spend more time managing and overseeing his program. However, he can’t say that mid-season, because he can’t bring aboard anyone worth hiring in that capacity mid-season.
And making room for a proper offensive coordinator is going to require firing or otherwise running off a current member of the staff, and to do that mid-season comes off as a panic move. It just worked for Arkansas, but that was because the offense had essentially quit on Dan Enos. Nothing at UF is that bad right now, and the Gators don’t have a more dynamic offense from last year to fall back on as when Kenny Guiton resurrected some elements of Kendal Briles’s attack for the Razorbacks on Saturday.
It’s not going to get any easier next year with a gauntlet of a schedule, but Napier is getting paid over $7 million a year to deal with the pressure. He’ll be back in 2024, but it’ll be decisions he makes between now and that year’s dawning that determine if he’ll still be in Gainesville in 2025.
Again, the roster issues are only part of the problem at hand. If next year’s team still can’t count to 11 on special teams, can’t reliably tackle any running back over 200 pounds, and can’t even scheme a way to be competitive with Kentucky, much less Georgia, then it won’t be the roster that gets flushed the next time.