The football season has been over long enough that there’s not really room for season-in-review pieces anymore. In lieu of doing one, here’s an outlook towards the year ahead.
In short, the baseline for the next 12 months is this: Billy Napier will get fired, and UF will hire Arizona’s Jedd Fisch as his replacement. Don’t buy anyone making that prediction in the next year as being edgy, prescient, or having a unique outlook. Again: that’s the baseline for the year ahead. Here’s why.
Napier has dug his own grave with how he’s approached the job. I have gone over these points before, so I won’t belabor them too much.
The summary is that he went with some unusual coaching arrangements, such as making himself the OC and QBs coach to afford to have two offensive line coaches, and using an analyst as the special teams coordinator. He’s not a good enough play caller to be an OC at the SEC level, however, and the special teams disorganization this year was genuinely shocking.
He also hired a young and unproven DC who didn’t make things better, and then he replaced him with an even younger and less proven DC. The defense did improve in some ways but not in the one that matters most, preventing opponents from scoring.
On top of that, Napier is a year late on landing a blowout recruiting class — assuming he can keep the present set of commits, some of whom are wavering — and he’s been slow at portal evaluations and offers.
Okay then, well, he made some mistakes. We heard some talk from within the program that staff changes would be coming and that they’d show more a sense of urgency in the portal. How’s it been going?
Napier was decisive in firing Corey Raymond and Sean Spencer promptly after the season. Raymond only got officially replaced earlier this week, and there still is no defensive line coach. It’s hard to re-recruit your roster and keep and add to commits when key position coach spots are empty.
There has been zero movement on the offensive staff. There was talk for months that Napier was willing to give up play calling to an OC, but unless he plans to hire someone off of a team in the College Football Playoff or a good NFL staff, it’s not looking likely. The only in-house option is Russ Callaway, but he’s an Air Raid guy. He’d be an odd choice to run Napier’s attack, and the roster is not in shape for switching to the Air Raid.
Last year Napier saw Patrick Toney and William Peagler leave the staff for the Arizona Cardinals in late February. Whether they were welcome back but wanted to go pro or were found landing spots to avoid public firings is still debated in some corners. Waiting that long this time around would be quite foolish when his job is on the line. It’s not inconceivable he could make more staff changes months from now, but what good options will there be long after the carousel has stopped spinning?
The staff did offer a very good Ivy League defensive lineman grad transfer promptly, earning a visit last weekend, but there isn’t a lot else to show for portal efforts yet. Plenty of teams have had plenty of action, but Florida is still waiting for its first portal commit.
It’s already debatable whether the portal has been a net positive or negative for the Gators under Napier, but so far it’s decidedly negative this winter. Losing Trevor Etienne, Princely Umanmielen, Chris McClellan, and Caleb Douglas is almost a worse loss than any group of four incoming portal players you could pick across the last two years.
Top it all off with a brutal five-game stretch to close the 2024 slate — Georgia, at Texas, LSU, Ole Miss, and at FSU — and it’s not looking good for Billy. It may not be as bad as it sounds; LSU won’t be as good without Jayden Daniels, and FSU will miss a lot from this year’s team. However, Napier might not even be around to take advantage of the graduation-weakened Seminoles.
Again, if Napier goes down, it’ll be his own fault. It’ll be because he thought too highly of his own play calling skills, did too poor a job at hiring assistants, moved too slowly in high school and portal recruiting, and was too consistently underprepared and disorganized on game days.
So that’s the pessimist’s case on Napier. Why is Fisch the leader in the clubhouse to replace him? It’s not just because he’s a UF grad.
Fisch never played high school or college ball, but he knew he wanted to coach by the time he went to college. He chose Florida specifically to try to one day work for Steve Spurrier. It happened for him two years out of school, as he was a GA for the head ball coach in 1999 and 2000.
Fisch bounced back and forth between the NFL and college for two decades before becoming a surprising and somewhat confusing pick to become the University of Arizona’s head coach. His career was more good than bad but had real ups and downs.
In Tucson, he’s been terrific. He took over a disaster and did go 1-11 in his first year of 2021, but the Wildcats improved to 5-7 in 2022 and then went 9-3 this year. Two of the three losses were in overtime, and the third was by one score to Playoff team Washington. They have some close wins over some not-great teams, and one of the OT losses was at Mississippi State, but they’re a legit top 25 team.
Now as for me, I’d want to see more before hiring this guy. And we will, since he’ll be back at the helm at UA next year. The three years of going straight up is basically what Jim McElwain did at Colorado State, and we all know how that turned out.
It’s not the same because the Pac-12 is P5 and the Mountain West is not, but it’s uncomfortably close for my taste. We’ll at least get one more year of data on him before anything happens, but if Arizona is a top 15 or 20 team again next year, the din about UF dumping Napier for him well get very loud before October is even over.
Could Fisch win a title in Gainesville? Beats me. But the list of things going for him include being a UF grad, having a tie to Spurrier specifically, not being a former Saban assistant (enough of those already!), and not appearing to believe that the way to success is found in running the ball to protect the defense.
So, that’s your outlook for the next year. I still maintain that I want Napier to succeed, because I always want the current head coach to succeed so we don’t have to watch even more rebuilding football.
Unfortunately, Napier isn’t doing what it takes to win big at the SEC level. He has some pieces but not nearly enough of them. Maybe he’ll pull a rabbit out of his hat with the staff and portal, and maybe having a 17th year senior in Graham Mertz passing the ball will make a big difference. I don’t know. But right now, the situation that appears most likely for 366 days from now is that new head coach Jedd Fisch will be trying to finalize the bulk of his transitional recruiting class.