Jeremy Foley’s famous maxim that what must be done eventually, must be done immediately has a corollary: if you don’t do what must be done immediately, you might not get to do it at all.
Programs with iffy leadership can get themselves into trouble by not making decisive firing decisions. They sometimes will hem and haw about it only to see a coach play his way into another year. If you look at coach firings in September over the years, pretty much all of them are dismissals that should have happened the prior year (except for any due to off-field incidents).
Did Florida miss its window to fire Billy Napier? Maybe, maybe not. I’m not even sure anymore that UF will pull the trigger on the move. I predicted Napier’s firing after the A&M game, as basically at least one person from every media outlet that covers Florida did, but I left a caveat at the end:
“Barring some kind of miraculous turnaround and/or institutional paralysis due to UF having an interim president, Florida will be in the market for a new head coach yet again this November.”
UF has turned some things around since the loss to the Aggies. I wouldn’t call it “miraculous” yet; call me after a win over Georgia if you want to hear me declare that.
However, they are figuring some things out. The defensive turnaround has been stark. They used the first open date to rejigger the lineup and rotations, and Napier claimed to have upped the intensity of practice. He also moved Ron Roberts to the booth and Austin Armstrong to the field. They’ve yet to play a great offense since then — no, Tennessee doesn’t have a “great” one this year, not yet at least — but they’re not making otherwise merely above-average players look like Heisman candidates anymore.
The offense certainly put up more fireworks with DJ Lagway starting against Kentucky, which has one of the better defenses in the whole country. UK held Georgia to 13 points, three of them gifted after a seven-play “drive” following a fumble. They also held Ole Miss to 17 points and quarterback/wizard Diego Pavia’s Vanderbilt to 20. The Gators dropped 34 on the WIldcats, even after you take out the post-INT goal line touchdown and the pick-six.
It’s too early to say it definitively, but Napier does seem to be figuring some things out. It’s a mark against him to have taken so long to figure these things out, and his own in-game coaching decisions cost the players the Tennessee game. But, he is figuring some things out.
Here is where I direct you to the other half of the caveat past the “miraculous turnaround” bit.
Scott Stricklin is not on firm footing as athletic director. You don’t usually get to make three football hires, even if the hires looked okay at the time they were made. I’m not here to re-litigate anything, but I have seen solid reporting that Tennessee would’ve hired Dan Mullen had UF not and that Napier turned down South Carolina and Auburn in previous cycles. These were hires on more solid footing than, say, the Jim McElwain and Ron Zook selections.
Stricklin doesn’t just have two football hires that didn’t work out against him, assuming here that Napier hasn’t actually turned it around but just played a few beatable teams in a row. There were serious accusations of misconduct against his picks for women’s basketball and soccer too. He’s also spending a lot of time and resources on planning out a renovation of The Swamp in an era when pricey stadium improvements take a back seat to NIL.
If Napier flames out for good, it might be time to replace Stricklin. Only, there is no one to replace Stricklin because there is only an interim university president. Kent Fuchs may have been the full-time president previously, but he’s not going to make big decisions like that. The plan is to have a new president in place by summer of next year.
So: if Napier can win one of the next four — probably Ole Miss — and then beat the worst FSU team in 50 years, he’ll get to 6-6 and bowl eligibility. And that might be enough to buy him another year even with the trouble that the recruiting class is currently in: 51st nationally with a mere 11 commits as I write this.
It might even be desirable to get there. Do you really want the next university president to have to deal with a newly hired football coach that he or she had no input on? And if you really think Stricklin needs to go, are you going to saddle the new with a third Stricklin hire? Or a hire-by-committee executed by Stricklin and some Bull Gators? Neither of those is really good process.
I am coming around to the idea that the leadership vacuum really will get Napier another year as long as he can get to a postseason game. No, a series of 6-7, 5-7, and 6-6 is not good enough for Florida’s standards.
However, there are bigger issues afoot than just the football team’s record. If Napier really isn’t the answer, then getting the new leadership a chance for a clean sweep is probably better than continuing to do things piecemeal. This is not 2004 when there’s an Urban Meyer out there who’s obviously destined for greatness. Taking a little extra time to get things right might not be the worst thing.