There have been more changes to Florida’s coaching staff this month, making it three straight Februaries that UF has turned over coaches.
In 2022, it was Patrick Toney, Keary Colbert, and William Peagler leaving for the NFL. Last year it was Darnell Stapleton going to the pro ranks and strength coach Craig Fitzgerald leaving to reunite with Bill O’Brien. This year, it’s Will Harris leaving for Miami, though there has been speculation (the value of which I’m uncertain of) that he could end up on the New Orleans Saints staff. New Saints head coach Kellen Moore has only three defensive assistants at present, so there are openings available.
More happy, perhaps, is a change that came late last week: Billy Napier promoted Russ Callaway to offensive coordinator. This is different than last year, when he was promoted to co-offensive coordinator. That move resulted in Rob Sale having a title downgrade from OC to co-OC. Nothing further has been announced yet, but given Napier’s history of granting job titles, I expect Sale will continue to have the co-OC title to his name.
Napier confirmed last week that he will still call plays, a topic I’ve gone over plenty of times. In short, he says he does it because it helps him stay on top of the offense and because it’s the closest he’ll ever get to playing quarterback again. Even shorter: he does it because he wants to.
That last bit raises a salient point for a coach who last had a cool seat in the days after the Week 1 win over Utah in 2022. He unquestionably does things his own way: the deliberate rebuilding pace, the unconventional staffing choices, the lack of pursuing and landing superstars from the portal, the offensive construction and play-calling. Whether he succeeds or fails is completely on him. Sure, there have been some things outside his control as there always are for everyone trying to do any kind of job. However, the voluminous idiosyncrasies mean that the buck truly stops with him for everything.
Anyway, there’s been discussion on the Gator Country boards and elsewhere about how big a difference it could make to have Callaway as a full (i.e., not co-) offensive coordinator. There is one dimension with a somewhat clear answer, and another that is and perhaps will always be murky.
Let’s start with the one where there actually is something to hang our hats on. This dimension is regarding offensive architecture and play selection. It’s the one where, eventually, the results will be public because the games are all well attended and on TV.
You don’t have to go far to find a potential parallel here. Potential, because we haven’t even seen spring practice yet, but it’s at least something.
Dan Mullen was a play-calling offensive head coach, and UF always ran his offense. He had a couple of old chums who had co-coordinator titles in John Hevesy and Billy Gonzales. He also had a bright, up-and-coming assistant in Brian Johnson who earned a full offensive coordinator title after a few years.
Johnson got his OC title in 2020, and that year happened to have Florida’s best and most sophisticated passing game of the Mullen years. Yes, having Kyle Trask at the height of his powers helped a lot there, but it was noticeably different. It was a better pass attack than in 2018 and 2019 when Feleipe Franks and Trask were running the show — and that was even with the ’20 offense having a lot fewer regular targets than the ’18 and ’19 offenses. Obviously things declined a lot through the air after Johnson left for the NFL, but Emory Jones wasn’t near the passer that either Franks or Trask was. Ignore 2021 for the purposes of this discussion.
That was an example where elevating a non-play calling offensive coach to coordinator made a real difference. You would see it during games, and professionals in the field certainly saw it too because Johnson immediately got NFL attention. It also was still very much Mullen’s offense, and Johnson’s one season as an NFL play caller went badly enough in 2023 that he was fired after one season. Both of them together made something better than either did on their own.
That’s the sunshine-and-rainbows scenario with Callaway doing more with the offense. His knowledge of the Air Raid from having coordinated such an attack previously could help level up Napier’s screens-hitches-and-bombs passing game. He might even convince Napier to put more than three receivers on the field when it’s not even a Hail Mary scenario. You never know.
The other dimension that is more shielded from us is the actual coordination aspect of being a coordinator. Napier gave some non-specific statements about Callaway being in the room for a lot of meetings and doing a lot of organizing. He more or less said that Callaway will being doing things to take more stuff off of Napier’s plate.
If that is true to any degree, it’s probably a good thing. All college head coaches are control freaks, but Napier might’ve been the most extreme on arrival. He gave himself three coaching jobs — head, OC, and QBs coach — and he still monitored the defense, did lots of recruiting, evaluated tape for recruits both high school and portal, and then had the other non-football duties like schmoozing with boosters. More recently, head coaches were granted permission to talk with collectives, and revenue sharing is coming soon with the House settlement. It’s a lot.
Napier has been shedding some of that job overload over time. Last year was something of a breakthrough there with making Ron Roberts the so-called head coach of the defense, promoting Callaway to co-OC to handle some of those duties, and using the death of the coach/analyst distinction to make Ryan O’Hara a full quarterbacks coach. The hires of Nick Polk and Benjamin Eisner are in large part aimed at taking the financial haggling away from Napier — something which is not only good from a time management perspective but that allows Napier more freedom to make personnel moves without having been a part of compensation negotiations.
We aren’t allowed in practices or meetings, so we won’t learn anything firsthand about Callaway as full OC except whatever is shown in spring practice. If an OC can make a difference in stretching and basic drills, the coverage will be all over it.
There was a notion out there that Napier promoting Callaway to full OC was a big nothingburger, but I’m not sure that’s true. It might be, certainly, because Napier really does like to control everything. However, between offense design and organizational changes, it is possible that Callaway’s promotion does actually move the needle on some fronts. We’ll never know just how much, but it could come to pass.