In my article for the GC main site last Monday, I broke down the various dimensions of Billy Napier as a coaching candidate for Florida. The first section touched upon the fact that he was not a “splash” hire in the same way that Lincoln Riley was for USC. The piece published about a day before the other major earthquake of Brian Kelly going to LSU struck.
You can click that link if you missed it the first time, but the point I made in that section was that if some big-name coach who would’ve been a splash hire wanted the UF job, he easily could’ve made that known. I linked to a piece that mentioned how Chris Petersen’s agent called up now-LSU AD Scott Woodward to ask if Washington would be interested in his client. There are a number of less direct ways to get the word across, but sometimes agents just call up schools.
Last Friday, you may have seen a piece in Sports Illustrated about the two big splashy hires. Florida makes a cameo in it in a couple of places. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but the money quote is this:
“When Florida’s job opened, its officials were alerted that Riley and Kelly were willing to move, sources tell SI. The Gators were already set on their No. 1 target and the coach they eventually hired, Napier.”
It later says that former Gator football player and current superagent Trace Armstrong shopped Riley and Kelly “to the same schools and [let] it be known they were movable”, so it’s not hard to put the pieces together to figure out who “alerted” UF of those coaches’ availability. I’ll also note here that Mia O’Brien first reported that representatives of Kelly reached out to Florida.
So like I said earlier in the week, if a coach wanted his name to go in the hat at Florida, there were ways for that to happen.
Before going further, I’ve seen nothing that suggests Florida was interested to any degree in Kelly. I think he’s an easy no for the administration. He was found responsible for a student videographer’s death, Notre Dame was accused of covering up alleged sexual battery by a football player during his tenure, and he had to vacate wins in two seasons for NCAA violations. Any one of those would give the UF administration pause. All of them together makes it easy for the Gators to take a pass on him.
Which means really, it’s a question of whether Florida should’ve taken a run at Riley.
I’ve seen from a couple places that Scott Stricklin began kicking tires on new head coaches after the South Carolina game. Only Todd Grantham and John Hevesy got the axe after that game, but a lot of people in both the media and fan base checked out on Dan Mullen following that performance. It would seem that Stricklin at least began to check out on his coach at that same point; I can’t say as to whether it was yet a complete loss of confidence.
Anyway, Napier was one of the people that Stricklin and UF in general began to vet during that time. Which means once Mullen officially was let go, there had been two weeks of work on Napier and others done.
The SI report says that someone, almost certainly Armstrong or someone from his office, told UF of interest from Riley and Kelly when the job opened. That implies that the contact didn’t come until the Sunday of the firing at the earliest. It also implies that UF hadn’t used back channels to test waters with those two prior to that day.
What do you do if you’re Stricklin and you get that information?
Well for starters, you don’t assume that you are the only AD to get that info. Other big jobs were open, so if two big fish were willing to look for new ponds, you have to operate as though USC, LSU, and maybe others had gotten similar intel weeks (or even months in USC’s case) prior.
Now think about the guy who’s your first choice in Napier. Other schools, including a peer program in Auburn, have made runs of varying levels at him and come up empty. Napier over Kelly is an easy call, but Riley has a similar profile as a young offensive mind. He also has five years of running a major program with Playoff appearances, a couple of Heisman winners, and a third Heisman finalist. He’s someone you probably would take over Napier.
But operating off of this timeline, you’ve only just learned that he might be interested. And if you’re doing your job correctly, you or someone working on the search has seen the report from Bruce Feldman from a few days earlier saying that despite rumors, Riley wasn’t interested in LSU. Maybe those rumors were just message board fever dreams breaking contain, but Woodward has carefully built a reputation as a big game hunter. And sure enough, rumors about further contact from LSU to Riley appeared later that week anyway.
There are a bunch of reasons to prefer the Gators over the Tigers, not the least being the Title IX trouble that LSU is presently in. However Florida and LSU are similar jobs, and they’re also similar to what Oklahoma will be once it enters the SEC in a few years.
Add all of that up, and what seems more likely: that Riley really wants to jump to Florida, or that he’s looking to use open jobs as leverage for an extension with Oklahoma? The latter would’ve sure felt like the probable situation with the information we had at the time.
Go back again to Napier. If you’re going to really go for Riley, you’re going to have to slow play him for a least a day or two to really get serious with Riley. Napier has been around this block a few times, so he’ll probably know if you’re slow playing him while you talk to others. Word probably would get out too given how much smoke there was about LSU and Riley. Are you willing to risk having Napier walk away as he’s done so many other times in order to, chances are, help Riley extort a few more dollars out of Oklahoma?
Napier is not a splash like Riley would’ve been, but I highly doubt Riley would’ve have jumped to Florida. USC is a categorically different kind of job, being on the west coast in one of the country’s largest metro areas instead of a small college town in the southeast. We can argue about which is the best job out of USC, OU, LSU, and UF, but USC is easily the most differentiated of the four. Depending on what your priorities are, it could stand out far above the rest.
Therefore Riley moving to USC tells me that he wanted something that Florida just can’t offer. In that light, with Kelly again being an easy pass, then there probably isn’t a more splashy hire out there for Florida to have gotten.
As I write this on Sunday afternoon, there are reports that Mario Cristobal will soon be Miami’s coach, but he’s a big-time Miami (university and city) guy. Gainesville is in the same state as Miami, but no one would ever say the two locales are all that similar. I’m not sure Cristobal would’ve left Oregon for UF, but he was an obvious enough potential candidate that it wouldn’t shock me at all to find out that Stricklin back-channeled to Eugene during that initial two weeks and heard a polite no.
It’s all academic at this point since Napier is the sitting head coach at Florida. It all went so quickly and smoothly that his ascendance almost feels like a footnote to this year’s coaching carousel, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Florida got a guy who fits what Florida often wants: the younger up-and-comer ready to take off into the stratosphere. He’s a better coach than Zook, more offensively inclined than Muschamp, more organized than McElwain, and a better recruiter than Mullen.
Don’t worry about him not being a splash hire. A true splash hire almost certainly wasn’t in the cards, and UF still ended up with one of the best coaching candidates this cycle had to offer.