In the tumultuous dozen years since the Gators went 13-1 in 2009, the program has had to make four head coaching hires. One underappreciated aspect of how hires happen is the timing of when exactly they occur.
Sometimes timing is an obvious factor. Urban Meyer didn’t tell anyone about his hospital trip following the 2009 SEC Championship Game, and he waited weeks after before deciding to resign. Had he made his choice shortly after the game, there’s a good chance that Jeremy Foley engineers a smooth transition where the news of Meyer’s resignation and Charlie Strong’s ascendance happens concurrently.
Instead, Strong went to Louisville four days after the SECCG loss, leaving Foley no choice but to look outside the program when Meyer resigned for good the following year. Timing meant there was no continuity option.
But that was a factor of Meyer’s idiosyncratic decision making. Only one choice made by the Florida brass to keep or let go a head coach really stands out as questionable: retaining Will Muschamp after 2013.
The story as I understand it is that everyone at UF loved Muschamp. I’ve never read a story about anyone who’s worked with him who hates him. He got to stick around at South Carolina after years of diminishing returns — a 9-4 season in 2017 followed by 7-6 in 2018 and 4-8 in 2019 — probably for a lot of the same reasons. Everyone seems to love the guy.
However the athletic director who famously said what must be done eventually must be done immediately apparently didn’t see Muschamp’s ouster as an inevitability. Coach Boom got an extra year, and it affected who UF was able to go after.
One way to get an idea of who’s available is to look at retrospectives on coaching hires for a given cycle. And since churn among the top programs in college football is so high, there are always some peer programs to UF looking for a new coach to provide comparison points.
The 2015 cycle when Florida hired Jim McElwain stands out as being fairly bleak. The best hire among top programs was Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh, who finally broke through in Year 6 after taking a pay cut to avoid being fired. Nebraska is a historical blue blood, even if it’s fallen off some, and that was the year it hired Mike Riley.
What if Foley had pulled the trigger the year before? The 2014 class of new coaches looks much more promising.
Chris Petersen, the white whale for a lot of Gator fans the year the program hired Muschamp, probably wasn’t going to go anywhere except Washington that year. He was a Pacific northwest guy, and he had his agent call UW to see if they’d take him. USC, more of a peer to UF than the Huskies, hired Steve Sarkisian that cycle as well, but Florida almost certainly wouldn’t have considered him.
However, James Franklin went to Penn State in 2014, and for all his faults with late game management, his time in State College has gone a lot better than McElwain’s UF tenure did. If nothing else, he probably would’ve maintained recruiting a lot better than Mac did, especially since he wouldn’t have to dig out of the hole created by Muschamp’s lame duck season.
Moving a year earlier would’ve given Foley another shot at Strong, since he started at Texas in 2014.
It’s too easy to say Strong wouldn’t have worked out at Florida since he didn’t at Texas. To use everyone’s new favorite term, the Longhorns never had alignment behind Strong. He also probably should’ve taken a year off after Texas chewed him up and spit him out instead of jumping to the USF job, but alas. A Strong riding high off of his success at Louisville and coming to the more familiar recruiting grounds of Florida very well could’ve worked out better than he did in the Lone Star State.
Dan Mullen would’ve been available in either of those years, but I don’t know why Foley would’ve hired him in 2014 if he didn’t in 2015. Supposedly the two of them didn’t get along well if you believe a decade’s worth of rumors and don’t-call-it-a-report scuttlebutt from sportswriters. Foley supervised Mullen the assistant, so at the very least he had a good idea of what he’d be getting.
Another way to look at it is to see the next year’s hires to see who might’ve been willing to move had Florida called in 2015. There were two peer openings in 2016. Miami’s hire of Mark Richt is an obvious no since he was still coaching UGA in 2015, plus all the other objections you’re now thinking of.
The other peer program on the market in ’16 was Georgia. I can’t see Florida hiring Kirby Smart to follow Muschamp, and I don’t even know if the Bulldog alum would’ve come. Willing or no, I can’t see Foley replacing a first-time head coach who was a former Saban DC with a first-time head coach who was a former Saban DC. With few exceptions, everyone hires the opposite of who they fired.
Napier is in some ways the opposite of all of those post-Meyer coaches since he actually won a conference championship before coming to Gainesville. Muschamp hadn’t been a head coach, McElwain topped out at second in his division at Colorado State, and Mullen’s best was second in the SEC West at Mississippi State.
Napier’s Louisiana was co-Sun Belt champs in 2020 after COVID issues canceled the league’s title game. We’ll never know if his Ragin’ Cajuns would’ve avenged their three-point regular season loss to Coastal Carolina in the final, but he technically was a co-champ. Then the week after his hire at UF, Napier coached UL to an SBC title game win to make it officially official.
If Mullen had gotten an NFL job as his agent was apparently trying to make everyone believe he might after 2020, does Florida still hire Napier? I don’t know. Louisiana is a rung or two below Colorado State in the G5 pecking order, and after only three seasons with the program, his resume would look a bit too McElwain-ish. The timing might’ve been wrong.
And if sacrificing John Hevesy and Todd Grantham had actually saved Mullen’s job and he hangs on for another year before getting the boot, would Napier still be available? Napier was reportedly a top candidate at Virginia Tech this year. While the Hokies aren’t at UF’s historical level, they’re like FSU or Clemson in that they act like an SEC program within the ACC. A good coach can win a lot of games there, and Napier doesn’t seem like the type to leave a place after one year. He might’ve still turned the VT job down to wait, but maybe not.
If you believe that Napier is exactly the right guy for Florida at this point in time, then timing worked out perfectly. It’s the most precise timing since Meyer in late 2004, at least. No one thought Muschamp was available in winter 2010 since he was head-coach-in-waiting at no less a blue blood than Texas. McElwain was an “okay sure, I guess maybe on paper” hire in a cycle with hardly any outstanding options. Then Mullen was a guy UF could’ve gotten in either of its two prior coaching searches but chose not to.
The stars aligned to make the Napier hire happen. It’s up to him to show it was serendipity and not mere coincidence.