Florida AD Scott Stricklin said in his written statement that Billy Napier was “the primary target immediately after this position came open” and was the only candidate he met with.
ADs usually try to make it sound like they hired their first choice, but all of the reporting through last week actually backs Stricklin up. There were never any credible media outlets reporting serious interest in any other coach, in contrast to November 2017 when reports about contact with Chip Kelly and Scott Frost surfaced before Dan Mullen’s hire.
Seeing as how Napier seems to actually have been UF’s first choice, what kind of choice was he?
You didn’t hear this from me, but…
There are myriad ways for programs and coaches to make surreptitious contact with each other to express interest. It can range anywhere from clandestine messages between university-adjacent trusted individuals to those highly paid coaching search firms to an agent calling up an AD and saying “you interested in my guy?”
With every coaching search, the question of who wants the job is always out there. It’s not an unanswerable question for the people actually making the decisions. If a coach is seriously interested, he can easily make that known to the school.
If Bob Stoops wanted the Florida job this time around, he’s still friends with Steve Spurrier. That’s an easy phone call. If newly hired USC head coach Lincoln Riley had wanted the job, well, that’s a call to Stoops who then calls Spurrier. If fill-in-the-blank coach had wanted the fill-in-the-blank job, coaching and agent networks are tight enough that it’s way less than six degrees of Kevin Bacon to get the news to the appropriate athletic director.
I don’t know what process Stricklin went through to gauge interest, but there is a zero percent chance he began the process the morning he fired Mullen. If a bigger name than Napier had wanted the job, there was time for that news to make it to the UAA. It’s possible such word did make it to Stricklin’s desk and he still ended up with Napier as his top choice, but we’ll probably never know.
High demand
Among the candidates who actually would take the job if offered, Napier was near the top of every media-made list following Mullen’s defenestration. He’s been near the top for plenty of other schools too. He was someone who Ole Miss, Arkansas, Mississippi State, South Carolina, and Auburn all wanted to talk to for their most recent openings, and Virginia Tech was reportedly interested in him this year too.
If Napier had put up the same records he did in Lafayette at an AAC or Mountain West school, he’d have been a white-hot name not too far off from where Urban Meyer and Will Muschamp were back in the day. As it is, he just about maxed out what can reasonably be done at a Sun Belt school. He led the league in recruiting for years, set school records for number of wins in a season, and finished ranked in the polls last year with the team in the polls again right now.
The story everyone had going into this cycle was that there weren’t any sure-thing hires out there. It turns out there was one for USC, but otherwise that’s largely been true. Just look at the other SEC opening. LSU has reportedly struck out on several options as a few big fish and many up-and-comers have decided to stay put this year.
From a coaching market perspective, Napier was about as sought-after a guy as there was to go get. Florida zeroed in on him early, hammered out the requisite negotiations, and closed the deal with what appears to have been little drama. The process worked in terms of UF getting the guy they wanted. What’ll play out from here is discovering whether that high rating they gave to Napier was an accurate assessment.
Another former Saban assistant?
At this point, Nick Saban has had so much coaching turnover — and is typically so good at hiring — that it gets harder by the year to find good candidates in the southeast who haven’t been on the Bama staff at some point or another.
Beyond that, there are now a couple of former Saban assistants who’ve either won (Jimbo) or played (Kirby) for national titles at other schools. Lane Kiffin just guided Ole Miss to the school’s first ten-win regular season ever.
The biggest question to ask is how much a coach actually learned from Saban. Many of the failed former assistants had glaring issues that never would’ve flied under the Nicktator’s watch. Jim McElwain didn’t emphasize the strength and conditioning program at UF. Much of the news following Jeremy Pruitt’s firing from Tennessee surrounded the alleged NCAA violations, but there were also stories about a lack of discipline and basic organization of activities.
All the stories on Napier say he’s Saban-esque in his attention to detail and passion for doing every aspect of the job of head coach. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’ll win at Saban-like levels; basically no one else does. It’s also easy for a perception of being “detail-oriented” to turn into one of “micromanager” or “petty tyrant” if the team doesn’t win enough to meet expectations.
Still, by all accounts he learned the right lessons from his time with Saban. That matters more than simply having drawn paychecks printed with a crimson letter A on them at some point in the last decade-and-a-half.
Consistency Needed
Stricklin mentioned in his press conference following Mullen’s firing that, while each of the prior three UF head coaches had their high points, none was able to win consistently. Napier, on the other hand, won 10+ games in three straight seasons at Louisiana. Is that enough to project consistency at a bigger job?
I went through and looked for any coaches who won 10+ games in three consecutive years at a non-power FBS school since the I-A/I-AA division split in 1978. Nine coaches did it, though curiously only at six different schools. Three programs had multiple head coaches pull it off.
If your college football memory is longer than ten years, you can probably guess two of them easily: Chris Petersen at Boise State and Gary Patterson at pre-Big 12 TCU. They are two of the bigger success stores, as Petersen later took Washington to the College Football Playoff and Patterson got TCU to the doorstep of it in 2014. The other big success story is LaVell Edwards at BYU. He hit the mark 1983-85, including the 1984 national championship, and is a hall-of-famer.
Three others were older coaches in the back halves of their careers who never got a look at bigger jobs. One is former UF assistant Doc Holliday, who did it 2013-15 at Marshall. Another is Rocky Long, who pulled it off from 2015 to ’17 at San Diego State.
Then you have former UF DC Bob Pruett, who took over Marshall in time to go 15-0 and win the I-AA national title in 1995. He then won 10, 12, and 13 games in the program’s first three years as a I-A team with future NFL QB Chad Pennington running the show. He later retired after the 2004 season.
Two more recent examples aren’t exactly inspiring yet. Bronco Mendenhall won 10+ games for BYU in four straight seasons, 2006-09, but he’s been nothing special at Virginia. Bryan Harsin also did four in a row at Boise from 2016 to ’19, but he has blown several leads in finishing 6-6 at Auburn this year.
The most direct comparison to Napier is probably Neal Brown. He lacked the coaching pedigree that Napier had before becoming a head coach, though he did play for Air Raid luminaries Hal Mumme and Mike Leach at Kentucky in the late ’90s. After one rebuilding year, he won 10+ games three straight years at the Sun Belt Conference’s Troy before taking the West Virginia job. In Morgantown he’s gone 5-7, 6-4, and 5-6 with one game left to play this year.
West Virginia is a far cry from Florida in terms of resources, history, and talent base. Brown’s bosses as an assistant also featured the likes of Larry Blakeney, post-Auburn Tommy Tuberville, and Mark Stoops, which is a far different lineup than Napier’s Tommy Bowden, Dabo Swinney, Nick Saban, Jim McElwain, and Todd Graham.
Napier having won 10+ games in three consecutive seasons at a non-power program is certainly better than many alternatives. It puts him in the same company as Edwards, Peterson, Patterson, and Pruett, who are all varying degrees of legends at their respective programs. It also makes him peers with Mendenhall and Brown, who have middling results at admittedly historically middling Power 5 programs. Nothing is guaranteed in college football hiring.
Something that is in his favor is that he had five new assistant coaches this year and turned in an 11-1 record to follow up last year’s 10-1 outing. The assistants that left for other jobs either went to the NFL (Rob Sale to NY Giants), got a promotion from position coach to coordinator (Austin Armstrong to Southern Miss DC), or moved up to SEC schools (LaMar Morgan to Vandy CBs coach, Robby Discher to UGA special teams analyst).
It shows Napier’s ability to hire quality assistant coaches for that level as well as an ability to have a good eye at replacing lost staff members. It did help continuity that Louisiana had tons of upperclassmen this year, so the roster did not experience the same high level of turnover that the staff did. Since the pendulum in Gator Nation has swung towards Jimmies and Joes meaning more than Xs and Os, that has to count for something too.
Final words
Since we’re about to be re-entering Sabanworld with a third former assistant as head coach, it’s important to remember what he’s all about: process over outcome. Do things the right way, and you’ll get good outcomes more often than not.
That doesn’t mean you’ll always get the outcome you want. You can do everything right within your power and have things go sideways anyway. Regardless, good process is the best insurance against bad outcomes.
Napier is a classic candidate for an SEC school: good coaching pedigree, is known as a terrific recruiter, has achieved success at a lower-level school. There’s a reason half the SEC has been interested in his services of late. As a bonus, the people around him actually see him as having a lot of Saban’s traits instead of merely sporting the afterglow of having been on his staff.
It’s a very, “nobody got fired for buying IBM” kind of hire. It has the potential to be a lot more than that, but we won’t know until the outcomes starting arriving.
No one outside the building is privy to Stricklin’s exact process in making this hire. Perhaps anticipating questions about how quickly it came together and how he didn’t meet with anyone else, he made sure his written statement began with, “I’ve followed and studied Billy Napier’s career with interest”. He wants you to know that he didn’t just start googling Napier’s name earlier this month.
But even as a Riley or Mel Tucker or James Franklin wasn’t interested enough in the job to reach out to UF instead of take a different job or sign big extensions, there could’ve been other guys beyond Napier who might’ve been a good fit. They’d have been a harder sell when comparing them to Napier, as he really does have one of the best resumes among plausible targets, but perhaps there was another great option somewhere out there. We’ll never know.
And because we’ll never know, the only thing left is to decide if you trust Stricklin’s process in making the hire. His leadership has been in question for some time, between not pushing for bigger changes following last football season (hi, Todd) and what appears from reporting to be serious mismanagement of Cameron Newbauer and the women’s basketball team. Performing the HR function of hiring a coach is a different kind of thing than those two issues, but it’s all of a piece when discussing a manager’s overall process and judgment.
I can’t tell you what to think, because I don’t know myself. This year, Napier always seemed to me to be a guy who checked a lot of boxes for the Florida job. Once things started falling apart after South Carolina, I figured he’d be a top candidate. That Stricklin made him the No. 1 priority and got the deal done matches my own personal priors. How much I can trust Stricklin in general is in doubt, though, but we’re starting to get far afield of Napier now.
New coaches can be exciting, and Napier is about as good a risk for the profile of Florida’s job as there was out there. And, the questions about him are almost entirely in regards to things he hasn’t had the chance to do yet rather than about the value of the things he already has done.
That makes him different than UF’s past two hires, and it leaves open a better chance for raising the ceiling of the program. After a hire that was largely sold as a way to raise the floor — and technically did, since the bottoming out ended at six wins instead of four — that’s a welcome change. If you wanted to see a hire meant to shoot for the stars instead of play it safe with a known quantity, you got one.