Happy Labor Day to all you current and former fellow working stiffs just trying to make a living.
I’ll be honest: I didn’t watch the Florida-Miami game as closely as normal. I am visiting family this weekend, and I spent a lot of the game time chasing my kids around my parents’ house (where I still am as I write this). I caught enough to see where a some major problems were, and I have read a lot of coverage to get up to speed on the rest.
I won’t pretend like I’m going to avoid the elephant in the room, so let’s hit it head on.
The loss to Miami on its own was not a fireable offense. In general, if a single game is enough to fire a football coach then he already should’ve been fired. The choice has been made, but the AD in charge is just looking for an excuse to avoid doing the hard part of looking a man in the eyes and telling him he’s out. Unless you’re talking about a non-football thing like Woody Hayes punching a player, firing someone after a single game is bad process because anything can happen in one game.
That said, what happened in this one game strongly signals that Billy Napier has not done and will not do what it takes to get things turned around. The roster isn’t as good as he talked it up to be, and the in-game results were largely in line with the problems of the past two years. Pup Howard is a substantial improvement at the linebacker spot next to Shemar James, and organization on special teams was acceptable. Aside from those facts, what exactly stands out as better than last year?
The best-case scenario is that this was a repeat of last season when the team ran out on the field against Utah and completely laid an egg. That one game was close to their worst performance all year, so it wasn’t entirely reflective of the team’s quality.
Miami also has the one-game sample size issue for judging its quality, but that might just be a very good team. Mario Cristobal has had some game management gaffes and bad meddling in the offense in his past, but he also rebuilt Oregon into a power after the turmoil of the Mark Helfrich and Willie Taggart tenures. He gave Dan Lanning a massive tailwind that helped power Lanning’s 22-5 record across his first two seasons.
Cristobal might just be doing the same in Coral Gables as he did in Eugene. We’ll see if it ends up championship worthy, but he’s built the foundation for a winning program before. People like to joke about things like how he squandered Justin Herbert, and while he did to a degree, the Ducks went 12-2 and finished No. 5 in Herbert’s senior year in 2019.
Anyway, I can’t say with confidence that future performances will get better. Mainly it’s because, as I said above, Napier spent all offseason talking up this team. It clearly is not as good as he was making it out to be, even if this was at the low end of the spectrum for its potential.
It’s reductive to say that one of only two things is at play here, but it’s the day after as I write this and I’m still mad, so let’s go.
One possibility is that Napier was talking up the team as some kind of motivational tactic, trying to squeeze better play out of the team by getting them to believe in themselves. If that was the case, then it’s a bad strategy because it’s rank expectations mismanagement with fans and boosters.
The other is that Napier simply doesn’t know how to tell a good team from a mediocre or bad one. Just because someone worked at Apple, it doesn’t mean they can design the next iPhone, and just because someone worked for Nick Saban, it doesn’t mean they know how to assess what a real winner is. UF has gone through enough former Saban assistants by now to lay that one well and truly to rest.
I’m not sure which one’s worse. Both would be stunning displays of a lack of judgment, just two different kinds of bad judgment. That’s on top of sketchy decisions like tripling down on the same offensive and defensive schemes in the offseason and on Saturday periodically rotating out the team’s best offensive lineman (a finally healthy Austin Barber) against a superior front seven.
This really is feeling like a rerun of the Jim McElwain tenure, only with the overmatched head coach following a bad recruiter instead of a good one. A good defensive recruiter, anyway. Mac didn’t help himself much with a lot of out-of-date offensive designs, but he inherited a bad enough situation that Luke Del Rio was actually a bright light of possibility at one point.
But really: stale offense, stubbornly sticking to his own guys, making the same mistakes over and over, recruiting for size above skill on the lines… it’s all so very familiar. And yes, I draw the connection purposefully since McElwain was a mentor to Napier.
I haven’t committed anything to keyboard because it’s all I can do to get this newsletter out by Monday morning, but I have mentally begun writing the obit to the Napier era. I still hope I don’t have to write it because I do like the guy as a person, but something would have to change drastically to avoid that fate.
And not only has Napier refused to make changes in these critical areas over the course of three years now, but there’s precious little that can be done during a season. There is no trade wire to turn to, and one of the seemingly few NCAA rules that still exists is a limit to practice time.
The cake is already baked. He’s got what he’s got. Either he somehow makes this thing work as presently composed, or I’ll be covering yet another coaching change this winter.