Billy Napier spoke to the Sarasota Gator Club last week, and Gator Country forum member ufgatordad was kind enough to type up some notes and post them to the insider message board. One thing that caught my eye on it was about Napier being frank about the situation he inherited and how it was less than ideal.
No one should be clutching pearls over this at all. It’s no secret that fired coaches often leave behind messes. If there wasn’t a mess, they probably wouldn’t have been fired.
Multiple former players have also either hinted or outright said that Dan Mullen lost the locker room culture in the summer of 2020. Former long snapper Brett DioGuardi I think spoke the most about it while he was employed by 247 Sports for a time across 2021-22, but I’ve seen comments from others. Basically Mullen didn’t know how to maintain discipline without the players in the building every day, so things started to fall apart. The offense kept it going for a year in 2020 thanks to strong leadership from veteran star players, but that petered out the next year too.
All throughout Mullen’s final year or two on the job, as recruiting success was just not accelerating to fans’ mounting frustration, a common refrain from the reporters on that beat was that Mullen needed on-campus visits to close the deal. He just wasn’t good at remote communication, so if a player didn’t schedule a visit, he probably wasn’t coming.
Those two details mesh with each other, so I tend to believe it. Mullen was never going to get Florida to the mountaintop because of his recruiting shortcomings, but the pandemic may have cut his stay short because it magnified some of his other failings at the same time.
So, Mullen dug his own grave by being Dan Mullen. I’m not asking anyone to feel sorry for him, as UF paid him many millions of dollars over the course of his tenure and then a bunch more to make him go away. He’s beyond all square with the Gators and the university.
Why that tidbit about the Gator Club speech stuck out is that Napier does not often talk about the mess he took over. I get why; it’s hard to thread the needle of throwing the previous coach under the bus without also making it sound like he’s trashing the players who participated under that previous coach. Even the summary of Napier’s comments that ufgatordad provided (which are not a transcript and may not be 100% accurate to the word) talk far more about culture problems than players simply not being good enough to compete.
The fact is, though, a lot of the players simply were not good enough. Mullen has always believed in his ability to coach up just about anything and achieve good results, and maybe he could’ve won more games without the pandemic undermining his ability to hold the team together. Anything’s possible, I guess.
Napier is not one of those coaches who can take his and beat yours and then take yours and beat his. Mullen fancies himself that way, and he is to a degree. Napier seems way more married to process and systems. He might take yours and beat his, but he’s going to need some time to mold yours into looking and acting like his first. It’s a fine strategy if it works.
In order for it to work, though, it needs time. And time is not something that a lot of Florida head coaches get in abundance. I do think Scott Stricklin’s job may be on the line with Napier given the many other issues within the athletic department that have happened under his watch on top of blowing his first football hire, so that alone could give Billy extra time. That said, the new university president Ben Sasse is a known sports fan, and football fan specifically, and he may decide to get more involved in athletics than Kent Fuchs was.
Last week’s episode of the Split Zone Duo podcast went over all FBS coaches heading into their second seasons. The hosts are SB Nation alums Steve Godfrey, Richard Johnson, and Alex Kirshner, and Johnson is both formerly of Gator Country and currently at Sports Illustrated.
Godfrey actually spent the most time on Florida among the hosts, despite Johnson’s UF degree, mainly because he has very strong feelings about Mullen based on his reporting in Mississippi. Godfrey did multiple large journalism projects about the tumult at his alma mater Ole Miss during the Hugh Freeze era, and Mullen shows up quite a bit because he was the in-state rival and also because he gave dirt on Freeze to the NCAA.
That’s beside the point for now. The main point that Godfrey wanted to make is that Napier probably should be more vocal about blaming Mullen for the program’s issues in getting back to where it should be. He contended that Mullen fundamentally doesn’t understand how to recruit high level talent or how to more generally run a program in the way the top achievers do.
Focusing on the last guy certainly would be one way for Napier to go about it, especially given the low expectations for 2023 after a 6-7 season in 2022. One of the Vegas books put out regular season win total lines earlier this week, and UF’s was at over or under 5.5 wins. The question isn’t whether the Gators will be contenders but whether they’ll even make a bowl. If I recall correctly, that’s one lower than last year when their line was set at over or under 6.5 wins.
I think the clock has run out on pointing a finger at Mullen, though. Napier talked optimism in the spring about how he thinks the offense will improve and how Austin Armstrong will invigorate the defense. If things go poorly this fall, talk of Mullen is going to sound like excuses instead of explanations.
Mullen’s recruiting issues aren’t news. His classes weren’t up to par at the time they signed, and most of the players who left after Napier’s arrival did not go to blue blood programs. Napier did a good job early on of trying to manage expectations, but I think he lost control over that after the Utah win where Anthony Richardson looked amazing. Napier himself said after the game that AR is so talented, even his wife could call plays for him.
Seldom did the team or Richardson look that good again. The Gators very nearly lost three straight after that, with AR looking a dud in the next couple of games and there being way too much drama in a close win over a very bad USF team. Expectations have adjusted, but downward adjustments following upward adjustments never feel good.
It can be frustrating seeing how some teams have radically changed their fortunes quickly with key portal additions, but that increasingly seems like a crapshoot. Mel Tucker at Michigan State used the portal to turn a 2-5 team in 2020 into an 11-2 team in 2021. In hindsight, a lot of that seems like lucking into Kenneth Walker being a star, and the Spartans crashed back down to 5-7 in 2022. They also have lost their top receiver Keon Coleman to the portal after spring.
Lane Kiffin has done a ton of portal work at Ole Miss. It’s resulted in a sharp lack of balance, with a potent offense paired with a dreadful defense. There is no way to win titles with half a team. Mike Norvell has made some hay in the portal at FSU too, but again it’s unclear whether he just found a way to top out at ten wins a year or actually contend for championships. Sonny Dykes’s deft portal work in his first year at TCU got the Frogs to the national championship game through a combination of luck and skill, but the title game result showed how far they actually are from being elite.
Napier has done a lot of portal work because he’s had to, and his deliberate process has likely meant UF has missed out on some good players. He’d contend that the process will result in only having good players who are good fits, and most of the transfer additions have been obvious upgrades already.
The way he’s gone about the portal is not a quick path to the top, but the teams at the top don’t rely on the portal anyway. They rely on recruits they develop, and Napier has drastically improved the recruiting. I expect him to scale back on transfers a lot in the coming seasons because his signees are in aggregate so highly rated.
The road Mullen took Florida down was a dead end. He set up systems and player pipelines following a particular vision. Unfortunately for the Orange and Blue, it was a vision that’s proper for Mississippi State but not a national title contender.
Napier had to turn the bus around and get back to the highway just to get to a place where he could build something properly. That takes more time than, say, following a Ron Zook who was an ace recruiter who just didn’t know how to game plan and execute.
So yes, I’m saying blame Mullen and be patient another year. It’s hard to wait, but that’s what it’ll take. And if it doesn’t work out with Napier in the end, he’ll at least have set up his successor with a roster brimming with talent that just needs a better hand on the wheel. Quite like Zook, actually, and again: that’s a better kind of guy to follow than a Mullen.