Anthony Richardson getting drafted so highly really feels like a missed opportunity for Florida. That he’s being drafted more for what he could be than what he has been is cold comfort, as it meant UF couldn’t maximize what it had in him.
It also feels bittersweet because there isn’t a great feeling about who’s coming after him. The last time UF had a first round draft pick at quarterback was Tim Tebow following the 2009 season; a legacy guy in John Brantley was next man up.
We didn’t know on draft night what a… let’s say, an adventure that would be. We just knew it was a born Gator who was a 5-star prospect coming out of high school who was going to be taking over. It helped make Tebow’s draft that much more of a celebration, believing the program was in good hands.
We don’t have that confidence today. The Gators have a dream of a prospect lined up in DJ Lagway. The more time goes on, the more impressive the guy appears. He looks as much the real deal as any high school quarterback short of a Trevor Lawrence could be.
But he still is and will be a high school quarterback all this year. He hasn’t even signed yet, much less enrolled.
Two bouts of very different kinds of bad news blew a hole in Billy Napier’s quarterback pipeline: Jaden Rashada’s aborted NIL deal and Jalen Kitna’s arrest and dismissal. The best the program has to go on is a pair of Big Ten transfers who’ve yet to look impressive for more than one game — that one game being Graham Mertz’s debut years ago.
The Jim McElwain comparisons for Napier are only magnified with his second-year signal callers looking indistinguishable from Luke Del Rio and Austin Appleby in terms of production and potential. Mac was a mentor for Napier, and both came in looking to succeed with run-first, spread-inflected schemes that qualified as whatever “pro-style” meant in the day. If it wasn’t for the vast improvement on the recruiting trail that Napier has overseen, the parallels would glow even brighter.
It’s impossible to look at the situation and not conclude that the quarterback acquisition struggles have delayed Napier’s timeline by at least a year. He can talk all he wants about how after evaluating tape that his staff thought Mertz was the best guy available in the transfer portal last winter, but that’s hard to believe with the likes of Devin Leary and Sam Hartman having been on the move. Maybe Hartman would’ve only left for Notre Dame; I don’t know. Leary was legit on the market, though, and it’s hard to find a way to make Mertz’s track record look better.
Florida has been a school with a quick hook for head coaches, so a delay of this kind may make you wonder what it means for Napier’s prognosis.
Well, he hamstrung himself in another way by making what pretty clearly looks like a mistake in his first defensive coordinator. Maybe the roster and culture on that side of the ball was a $#!% sandwich that some poor coach was going to have to choke down for a year before improvement could come, and Austin Armstrong running a very similar scheme means the 2022 season wasn’t entirely wasted.
I don’t know what would’ve come of Patrick Toney had the Arizona Cardinals not offered him a job. He could still be around. Napier giving Corey Raymond the entire secondary might be a sign that the head coach knew last year’s arrangement was suboptimal. It might also simply be a necessity with Armstrong’s background being in linebackers versus Toney’s in safeties. Napier will never tell us, because that’s not his style.
The thing to remember with UF’s constant cycling through coaches is that play on the field wasn’t the entire story. It was a big thing, but not the only thing.
Ron Zook was in over his head and had embarrassments like the frat house fight. Will Muschamp could never get his staff right, especially on the offensive side. The constant churn of assistants being fired showed he was flailing. McElwain hit his own ejector button with the death threats talk as he couldn’t hold up to the stress of the job. Dan Mullen reportedly lost control of discipline with players not being present during the 2020 covid offseason and began to mentally check out during 2021.
Napier hasn’t embarrassed the school. He hasn’t melted under pressure. He hasn’t lost control or mentally wandered. He has verifiably excelled in talent acquisition in every position except one.
It’s just that the one he’s struggled with is the most important one.
Anyone can have some bad luck, and much of the bad luck wasn’t in Napier’s control. He and the staff knew nothing about Kitna’s troubles, and Napier is such a good recruiter that he still got Rashada to sign despite the NIL deal already having gone bust. Florida thinks it has its NIL house in order now that the Gator Collective has become Florida Victorious under new management, so in theory that kind of bad luck won’t strike again.
Ultimately it really all is about process more than outcome. Zook, Muschamp, McElwain, and Mullen all haven’t distinguished themselves too much, showing that extra time didn’t vindicate their processes. Zook at least took Illinois to a Rose Bowl before everything fell apart. Muschamp had only two winning seasons in four-plus years at South Carolina, and McElwain’s been up-and-down at Central Michigan. Mullen is entering his second year of doing TV; not so strangely, no top tier program wants to hire a guy who tried to win the Mississippi State way at Florida.
Napier’s process is improving the program in a lot of ways, it just hasn’t in the won-loss column yet. He’s only had one crack at it, after all, and it takes time for recruiting success to translate to on-field success. And because of the bad luck with quarterback, it’ll probably take an extra year for him to contend for the division.
I think it’s more likely to buy him an extra year than get him the hook earlier. Too much is going right behind the scenes for one position to cause him to be fired. But it is the most important position, so it’d be playing with fire to not adopt a serious sense of urgency from here on out.