Earlier this week, Paul Finebaum made an appearance on the Andy Staples and Ari Wasserman podcast. You can listen to the episode here if you’d like. The thing that Pawwwwwl said that got the hosts attention the most was his fairly strong negative sentiment about Florida and Billy Napier’s prospects this fall.
Andy mentioned that, living in Gainesville, he’s surrounded by a lot of optimism around the team. Wasserman was downright charmed by DJ Lagway last year and is a star-watcher generally, so between that and Staples’s sunny disposition towards the team, both have been fairly high on the Gators this offseason.
Finebaum wasn’t so much pessimistic as outright dismissive. The way he sees it, UF has an impossible stretch following the season-opening tuneups against FCS Long Island and USF. After getting to 2-0 in those contests, the Gators go to LSU, to Miami, host Texas, and go to Texas A&M. As he sees it, that stretch is enough to do in Napier as Florida’s head coach. He’s not predicting 0-4, but he thinks getting above 1-3 in those games will be extremely difficult for the team as composed.
I can see where he’s coming from, but I am also not ready to give up on the bit of optimism I have for this fall.
The biggest quibble I have is the Miami game. Yes, it’s on the road, but it’ll be in an NFL stadium with plenty of orange and blue to go with the orange and green. I don’t think the Hurricanes will be near as good this year as last, and I don’t think it’s particularly close.
A still-mending Carson Beck simply is nowhere near the quarterback that a healthy Cam Ward is, and I don’t think they have anyone capable of replacing Xavier Restrepo. Mark Fletcher could probably step up and replace Damien Martinez, but they won’t have the combo of Martinez and Fletcher to use. UM loaded up to make a run last year and blew it at the end, and they just haven’t loaded up the same way again this time around.
LSU loaded up in the portal, but I am still waiting for Garrett Nussmeier to be the all-everything quarterback people have been tabbing him to be for years now. He has always been the quarterback of the future, and maybe he always will be. The Tigers will be the favorite, especially at home, but I concede nothing there.
Texas will be one of the favorites to win the national title. I get that. The Longhorns also humbled a shorthanded Florida, including the defense that was about to look very good against the ensuing three opponents. That said, I don’t know if anyone outside Austin knows if Arch Manning can read a defense yet. We’ll all find out together come September.
And finally, Texas A&M. The Aggies handled UF last year, but that was before the defensive adjustments. It was also when QB Marcel Reed was a complete unknown. His numbers came back down to Earth against good defenses later in the year after teams got film on him.
Finebaum said in passing that he thought this year’s UF schedule would be harder than last year’s. It’s difficult to know exactly what he meant because Andy and Ari didn’t follow up on that. He might’ve been referring only to that four-game stretch, which may indeed be tougher than any four-game stretch from a year ago. He may also have only been thinking about how FSU almost certainly won’t go 2-10 again. I don’t know.
But Ole Miss is like Miami in that it loaded up for a run last year and didn’t load up similarly this time. Kentucky won’t be better. Tennessee probably won’t be better with questions about Nico still outstanding and the defense losing a lot. Heck, I’m not even sure that Georgia will be as good as it was last year.
Then again, Florida may not take the big step forward. Napier did well down the stretch, but his coaching blunders cost the team the Tennessee game, and no one looked prepared even considering the circumstances in the game at Texas. He’s yet to have a team in Gainesville that gets up for every single contest. There are starters like Lagway and Caleb Banks that the team really, really can’t afford to lose, but football is violent and anyone could go out hurt at any time. The receiving corps is leaning on a lot of projection.
The defense did improve in some ways in 2024, but we don’t know yet the mix of that being durable insights that coaches will continue to use versus the players figuring out how to play better together. With heavy turnover on that side of the ball, will the new unit gel as well as last year’s eventually did? And can the Ron Roberts bend-but-don’t-break scheme avoid breakage as much as it did in ’24 without Cam Jackson and Desmond Watson in the middle on critical short yardage plays? I’m not sure it can.
This, of course, is why they play the games, and it’s why we watch. It’s all so unpredictable. I know it’s the middle of spring ball when optimism runs highest, but that’s probably why Finebaum’s rain storm of an interview stood out so much. It’s far from guaranteed that UF won’t be searching for a new head coach next year, and it may only take six games for us to know that’s what’ll happen.
Or, Napier and Lagway may lead the Gators to a 5-1 start, giving them a clear path to the playoff with a mulligan in their back pockets. That’d be a lot more fun, to be sure. If nothing else, Finebaum gave the team some bulletin board material to help them make it through the offseason.