Ever since Billy Napier was hired, I was thinking of him as being from the Nick Saban tree. He spent more time working for Saban (five years) than anyone else in his career as an assistant, save Tommy Bowden (also five years). He talks to the press in the Saban-tree manner, and his process-over-outcome style rhetoric is also reminiscent of the Nicktator.
However the more time goes on, the more I think he’s much more constitutionally like the other national title winner he worked for: Dabo Swinney.
Swinney won his titles after Napier left, of course. Well, “left” is being kind. Dabo won his titles several seasons after he fired Napier. Billy was with Swinney on the Bowden staff for years, but he only worked with Dabo as his boss for two seasons. And then it ended badly.
So, it does seem strange to think of Swinney as being the bigger influence on Napier’s career for those reasons. It may still be the case that Saban is the stronger external influence, too. It might be that Napier is inherently wired a lot more like Swinney, and so he didn’t need Dabo’s influence to make some of the choices he has as the head coach in Gainesville.
This winter has really brought me around, however, to noticing how — no matter in what way nature and nurture balance out — that Napier is acting more like Swinney as time goes along.
There are two defining characteristics of Swinney’s leadership of a college football program. Well, okay, three. The one I was going to leave out is being excessively churchy, and while Napier is by all accounts a devout believer, he’s not as out-front with it as Swinney is. That’s how it should be: not every player is a believer, not every believer wants to hear amateur theology from a football coach, and Jesus certainly doesn’t care who wins football games and never puts His thumb on the scale for anyone.
Anyway, the two major characteristics of Swinney’s leadership are actually both tied into insularity: he doesn’t use the transfer portal much, and he doesn’t hire outside his personal network often.
For many years, Clemson was a conspicuous holdout from the annual transfer portal derby. Some Tigers would leave, but until this current cycle, the only incoming transfers that Swinney took were:
- Hunter Johnson, a quarterback who started his career at Clemson, transferred to Northwestern, and then went back to Clemson, and
- Paul Tyson, a great-grandson of Bear Bryant
Swinney was born and raised in Alabama and went to Bama for college, which is why the lineage of the latter player matters. Dabo has finally relented and landed three — a whole three! — transfer players in the present offseason.
Napier took relatively few transfers during his transitional period — three guys who followed him from Louisiana and three more to plug specific holes. Among the guys he didn’t already know, Jack Miller didn’t pan out as a quarterback depth piece, but Ricky Pearsall became a first-round pick and Jalen Kimber just started for the Penn State team that made the Playoff. Kimber was a good cover guy at UF at least, but his tackling left a lot to be desired.
Napier had no choice but to take a bunch of transfers in the following two cycles. After 2022, the roster flip he had deferred for a year caught up to him, and after the late-season slide in 2023, a bunch of recruits decommitted and left Florida with a lot of spots to fill. There was still a little bit of deferred roster flipping going on last year, too.
But then this year happened. DJ Lagway caught the imagination of a lot of the nation, and Florida caught fire down the stretch. Scott Stricklin gave Napier the needed vote of confidence before the Texas loss, and despite that drubbing, the later wins created real momentum that allowed Napier to load up his recruiting class if he so chose. And load up, he did.
There are three main schools of thought in the portal era. The majority one seems to be that you still need to build through recruiting to have a durable winner, but portal supplementation is not optional. An alternate one is that you should be more balanced with recruiting and portal work; this is where Mike Norvell and Lane Kiffin reside. A third one that mainly only Deion Sanders practices but that is gaining some mindshare in the media is that you should treat your roster like an NFL team: focus on the top 50-60 players, only sign recruits who can play very soon, and portal in everything else you need.
Dabo has been on his own in trying to keep it old school and just build through recruiting. Now that Napier had a choice in the matter of how to parlay his late-season success, he too went old school. There wasn’t a, “hey everyone out there, come play with Lagway” sign posted for transfers. There were some efforts that fell through — like Kentucky NT Keeshawn Silver, who went for a bigger bag at USC, and UAB safety transfer Adrian Maddox, who committed to UF but flipped to Georgia — but most of the Gators’ five portal landings aren’t likely starters. Punter Tommy Doman is, but J. Michael Sturdivant is a maybe at best, Kofi Asare is a project, and Harrison Bailey and Michael Carraway are definite depth pieces.
As for the staff hiring, Swinney has been about as insular as it gets despite his best assistants (Chad Morris, Brent Venables, Garrett Riley) coming from outside his network.
Napier has been fairly insular in his hiring too. Here is the list of prominent hires who he was with somewhere else before UF:
Rob Sale, Patrick Toney, Austin Armstrong, Ron Roberts, Jabbar Juluke, Keary Colbert, Darnell Stapleton, William Peagler, Mark Hocke, Russ Callaway, Chris Couch, Vinnie Sunseri
Here is the list of prominent hires who he did not work with somewhere else before UF:
Sean Spencer, Corey Raymond, Mike Peterson, Jay Bateman, Billy Gonzales, Will Harris, Gerald Chatman, Jonathan Decoster, Craig Fitzgerald, Tyler Miles, Joe Houston
The former list has more names on it, and it has everyone who’s had a coordinator or co-coordinator title on Napier’s staff.
Everyone in coaching has a network and likes to hire people they know, and I wouldn’t care so much if most of those names on the first list were great. Six of Urban Meyer’s nine assistants in 2005 were guys he worked with at some combination of Bowling Green, Utah, and Notre Dame, but three of those six went on to become head coaches, two others either were longtime established quality coaches before crossing paths with Meyer or now are, and, well, the sixth was John Hevesy. That kind of talent just isn’t suffusing Napier’s first list above.
Swinney has a couple of national titles to his name, so there are worse guys to emulate. However, his program hasn’t been the same in the portal era, and when you severely limit your hiring pool to half or more being people you’ve worked with before, it reduces your margin for error on each hire. You have to make sure you get exactly the right one and project your grad assistants and lightly experienced up-and-comers very well, and Napier’s got a mixed bag there.
All in all, I think it’s more accurate to say Napier is from the Swinney tree with Saban experience rather than the other way around. Like I said, maybe in reality Napier and Swinney are just very similar and Saban is the bigger external influence, but in terms of behavior and outcome, the Swinney-tree-Saban-influence description will get people a more accurate picture of how Napier runs his program.