If you’ve followed my work for any amount of time, you know that I tend to be an analytical sort of person. I like to look at numbers and her data. Sometimes you have to make judgment calls about it, but I like to base comclusions in something firm and empirical.
I know that culture is not a small thing when it comes to sports. A collapsing culture has actually been a prime factor in the end of several recent Florida football head coaches’ tenures. Urban Meyer left behind a “broken” program by his own admission, Jim McElwain let players skip workouts if they weren’t feeling up to it, and Dan Mullen mentally checked out sometime in 2020 with that year’s collapse in defense being emblematic of the collapse of culture.
So, culture can be very important. It also can be pretty squishy. No one likes to talk about bad cultures as they’re ongoing. If someone does label a program’s culture as bad, it’s impossible to know whether the culture was indeed bad or if that one person was a bad apple getting bounced.
Billy Napier is a big culture guy. That’s one of the ways he follows closely in the footsteps of prior mentors/employers Dabo Swinney and Nick Saban. Both of those dudes are big culture guys too, though they go about it in different ways. Swinney is all about his guys and developing from within; Saban doesn’t care where you come from as long as you get with the program. Clemson is insular, while Alabama is awash in mental games and sloganeering at all times.
Napier seems more on the Swinney side of things so far, as he loves to hire from within his circle and doesn’t seem to use every public appearance as an opportunity to send messages to his players. It’s not important for this piece which of those two he takes after more.
What is important is that Florida didn’t have a great culture last year. Napier has talked about that in his post-spring speaking engagements. He doesn’t outright throw certain players under the bus, but he has talked about a general lack of unity and so forth.
The final month of the season is really where it showed up most. It was a very up-and-down period of time.
From a results standpoint, the team went from beating Texas A&M on the road and trouncing South Carolina by more than 30 points to losing to Vanderbilt. Then after that performance where they might as well have unfurled a banner saying “we don’t want to be here”, they nearly knocked off an eventual ten-win FSU.
Throughout, the roster was shedding players. News of Napier dismissing Brenton Cox broke on Halloween, and Kamar Wilcoxson and Diwun Black got the boot in November. Some guys announced their intentions to transfer after the Carolina win, which was Senior Day and the last home game. They didn’t participate in the final two games.
That was just what we could see from the outside at that time. It’s still largely anyone’s guess who wasn’t in the locker room exactly how things were going down throughout the season. Anthony Richardson’s play was highly variable, and so was the defense’s. Sometimes the team would look drastically different from one half to the next, like in the Tennessee or TAMU outings.
One thing that would really help the Gators is if they could find more consistency in 2023. A better culture is one of the things that gets you to more consistency. It’s hard to compete well week-in-and-week-out when players’ feelings about their coaches and teammates are all over the place.
After all, Florida was not a team that did well with success last year. After the big season opening win against Utah, the next two games against Kentucky and USF were duds. UF rebounded and competed well against Tennessee and won two straight against Eastern Washington and Missouri, but then the defense collapsed against LSU. The defense was awful in the first half against the Aggies, but then they allowed just six points in the next six quarters. The big victory over the Gamecocks turning into the loss at Vandy is something I already touched on.
If UF is going to outperform expectations next year, it doesn’t just need wins in games that some are penciling in as losses now. It needs to not get big heads over some of those wins and then drop games like the home tilt with Vandy or the late November road game at Missouri. The latter really scares me, because the Gators have never done well on the road in the cold. It could easily turn into a rerun of the loss to the Commodores from last year.
So while I normally don’t bank on culture because it’s something I can’t measure, it really does matter a lot to the team in 2023. If Napier is going to be the long term answer in Gainesville, he needs to come up big in an area he claims to care about the most.