Prior to the season beginning, one of the college football parlor games was trying to peg what number of games Billy Napier had to win against the toughest schedule ever in order to save his job.
Nine and up? Obviously that would be enough. Eight? Still doing great. Seven? Eh, should be fine. Six? Getting iffy. Five? Uh, maybe, depending on the five and how they looked in the losses. If they were mostly close but UF kept losing on fluky plays or bad officiating, possibly.
Well, that game is mostly over now. All Florida has to do is beat a truly awful FSU team and Napier will be at seven wins, which was in the safe zone for pretty much everyone. I am not going to count that chicken before it hatches, because players tend to get up for rivalry games and maybe the School Out West found a little juice from getting an easy 41-7 win over Charleston Southern. No, the Seminoles do not have the quarterback play to win a normal one against the Gators, but if DJ Lagway’s hamstring gives out early and some fluky things transpire, stranger things have happened.
But if we grant a win next week, then yeah, Napier saved his job the honest way. When Scott Stricklin issued his vote of confidence back before the Texas game, it absolutely was not clear that he’d get there on his own. That’s why the statement had to be made, after all. Lagway was lost, maybe for the season given how hamstring injuries often go, and Aidan Warner, while plucky, was not going to lead the team to any wins except maybe in the season closer.
Florida did take the drubbing from Texas that everyone expected. But then Lagway returned, and Napier outcoached Brian Kelly and coached Lane Kiffin to a draw in order to snag a couple of upset wins and even up his conference record at 4-4. Not bad for a guy who looked like a dead man walking at the end of September.
I don’t think the Gators truly outplayed Ole Miss. They only did so in the realm of not shooting themselves in the foot. I wrote last week about how the Rebels have a long history of blowing it in games where big things are on the line, and they played to type on Saturday.
There were a lot of memorable moments, from Lagway completing passes with defenders draped upon him to timely interceptions and Montrell Johnson’s career-crowning touchdown. The image that will probably stick with me the most is the sequence of a football hitting an Ole Miss receiver in the hands and then hitting the turf. I can’t remember the last time I saw that many drops, or balls otherwise grazing fingers but not quite being catchable. The margin between winning and losing can be inches sometimes.
I mean, it was a really thin margin. The Rebels were 0-3 on their red zone trips. One failure was a missed field goal that was within spitting distance of the uprights. It wasn’t a complete shank or anything. And then two others came on UF getting a 4th & 1 stop of a 325-pound defensive tackle trying to run the ball. Incredible.
The main thing that keeps me from saying this was proof of Napier having definitively turned a corner is that, after having some time to reflect on it, this win reeks of the 2016 LSU game. Last Saturday the Gators were outgained 464-345; eight years ago they were outgained 423-270. Both games featured a pair of dramatic 4th down stands. Even Jordan Scarlett’s rushing line (22 for 108) is very similar to Montrell Johnson’s (18 for 107), and Austin Appleby and Lagway threw the exact same 17 times for fewer than 200 yards apiece.
Jim McElwain had not found a durable breakthrough strategy, and I don’t think Napier did either. Victory required heroic plays from Lagway, a million drops from Ole Miss, a meltdown for the ages by Jaxon Dart, and some questionable-at-best coaching from Kiffin. Napier doesn’t have to watch his back anymore, but make no mistake: he didn’t do enough to win a game against a top ten team without some help and/or luck, yet he got that help and/or luck.
The good news is that Flipmas came early with three previously committed players jumping into the Gator fold yesterday. Linebacker Ty Jackson was the highest rated of them, a mid 4-star linebacker from Loxahatchee (near Palm Beach) who’d been pledged to USC. He’s a teammate of recent FSU OL flip Daniel Pierre Louis. I expect that the theme of trying to flip teammates of current commits and trying to get out-of-state commits to come back home will be a theme of the remaining recruiting and upcoming portal periods. It’s probably the best strategy for assembling quality in a hurry, which has been the quest ever since Stricklin’s announcement.
Regardless, Napier isn’t sticking around solely due to a leadership vacuum, or a dysfunctional administration, or whatever apropos term you want to apply to UF these days. That is why he got his stay of execution, but now he’s backfilled the justification with wins on the field against ranked opponents. It would be hard to script a better end to the season after the Texas debacle — again, provided they beat FSU. This is not the time to lose focus, but fortunately I’ve seen nothing to suggest they will.