If you’re reading this newsletter, you’re one of the most devoted Florida fans out there. It probably has weighed on you how much the team has struggled for the last half-decade. Given the way many threads on the message board go, there’s a good chance you are wondering why UF hasn’t fired Billy Napier yet.
I am not here in this message to you to tell you whether he should or shouldn’t have been fired by now. That is beside the point of this piece. I am going to try to explain why he’s not been fired as best I can by drawing on my own experience and what I’ve heard from national football media. National perspective is more important for this discussion than the viewpoint from the UF beat, and it’ll become clear as to why soon.
First, September firings are rare. They are more common than they used to be, but they’re still very rare. If they’re not for-cause, then the prototypical September firing might be Virginia Tech’s Brent Pry. He went 3-8, 7-6, and 6-7 in his first three years while beating no one of consequence from a final record standpoint. He was 2-0 against arch rival Virginia, but those were under .500 Cavalier teams. He started 0-3 this year, and getting rocked 45-26 by in-state G5 team Old Dominion was the third of those losses. That was quite the final straw: it wasn’t as close as the final score indicates, and it was Pry’s second loss to the Monarchs after also falling to them in 2022.
For reasons I’ll get into later, VT doesn’t have a lot of time to wait and see if Pry was going to turn it around. In his postgame presser following the ODU loss, he admitted that he’d failed in building offensive line depth. That’s the kiss of death from a program-building standpoint, and so there wasn’t much chance he’d have a breakout 2026 campaign. Therefore, the school let him go the next day.
UCLA was also blown out by a G5 program in a 35-10 loss to a first-year New Mexico coach, and Mike Gundy both lost by 66 points to Oregon and guided Oklahoma State to its first loss to Tulsa since the ’50s. Both of those guys got the boot because of those terrible showings on top of sketchy performance last year.
They couldn’t be more different in their backgrounds. Foster was a former position coach in his second year on the job who took the gig when Chip Kelly bolted to become Ohio State offensive coordinator in February ’24 but was nowhere near ready to be a head coach. Gundy, meanwhile, had been OSU’s head man for two decades. Either way, each had a rough 2024, and ignominious losses gave administrators the room to cut them loose in September of 2025.
Napier is not in the same situation. His 2024 record was not great by historic program standards, but he finished the season strong. He simply had a much better campaign last year than Pry, Foster, or Gundy did.
Napier’s loss to USF was also by two points, not twenty-something points. A lot had to go wrong for UF to drop that one, and while it sucks that all those things did go wrong, it was still a safety’s worth of scoring margin. And then as bad as the LSU and Miami games were for their own separate reasons, those were losses to current top 5 teams. And, the Gators were within ten (LSU) and six (UM) points in the fourth quarter of those.
You have to remember that Florida has barely gotten out of having a reputation for being “impatient” in the industry. That was a buzzword surrounding the job last time around. Jim McElwain was fired mid-season after two straight SEC Championship Game appearances, and Dan Mullen was fired mid-season after three straight New Year’s Six bowls and having a Heisman finalist. A big reason why Napier got a seven-year contract was the school wanting to signal to the outside world that it heard the “impatient” criticism and acted accordingly.
You and I know why those firing were justifiable, but people within the industry don’t look at the Florida job with the same level of detail as you and I do. At least, not unless they’re an alum or currently working there. Like anyone else, they may have one or two schools they follow obsessively and then take in the rest of the country’s status with about the focus of someone skimming Wikipedia pages.
Not firing Napier last fall did buy UF some credibility on not being extra impatient anymore, but firing Napier in September could easily re-light those fires. Waiting until the next open date when the team will likely be either 2-5 or 1-6 won’t cost them anything, but it will be an ugly enough record that the “impatient” label won’t be resurrected. You start a season that badly at a place like Florida, then yeah, everyone knows that you’ll get canned.
Virginia Tech and Oklahoma State also have incredibly important hires on their hands now. The settlement that ended FSU and Clemson’s lawsuit against the ACC changed the grant of rights terms such that schools leaving the league can take their media rights with them (the original grant of rights may have kept them locked to the league), and the fee drops from impossibly expensive now to a steady-state of $75 million in 2030-31. Which means the next round of realignment is coming early next decade, as FSU couldn’t be clearer that it wants out of the conference, and Clemson joined in on the litigation.
If conference affiliation changes really are hundred-year decisions, as then-Texas A&M president R. Bowen Loftin said when he took the Aggies to the SEC, they’re still often made with only the past few years in mind. If Missouri doesn’t win 10+ games three times in four years across 2007-10, there’s a good chance they’re still in the Big 12 today.
So if VT wants a golden ticket into the Big Ten or SEC, or Oklahoma State wants one for the SEC (the B1G will never take them), then they need to get their houses in order, fast. The Hokies have yet to prove that anyone but Frank Beamer can win there, and the Cowboys need to prove that someone other than Gundy can win there. The Man who was formerly 40 is by far their best coach ever, and now they have to do the near-impossible and nail the hire that comes after the legend.
Those schools need time to assess the landscape and find out where they stand in the pecking order, who’s interested in them, and who is not interested yet but would be if given a certain level of new investment. It’s very hard to do that when sticking to back channels when you still have a sitting head coach, and OSU especially couldn’t be seen going behind the back of its program hero like that.
The old Southwest Conference teams that didn’t get into the Big 12 are a cautionary tale of what happens when you get left out by realignment. Oregon State and Washington State are more vividly so since their downfall happened more recently, and what happens is the big vultures from around the nation pick apart anything good from the roster and hire away any good coaches. It took two years for them to go from feisty members of a P5 league to looking no different than a Mountain West program. Life does indeed come at you fast, and VT and Oklahoma State know it.
Florida is already in the SEC with a large fan base and a well developed booster network. Whatever the top level of college football looks like in 2035, UF will be a part of it even if whiffs on Napier’s replacement. Plus, no one is going to sign a head coaching contract at UCLA, VT, or Oklahoma State on October 1 unless it’s some internal hire. Florida will not be sniped by any of those schools because it didn’t fire Napier until the second open date instead of the first.
To sum up: September firings are still considered bad form unless it’s for-cause, the guy was nearly fired the prior year, attendance drops to dangerously low levels (as happened at UCLA this year), and/or a guy gets his doors blown off by a lower-level program. Napier only half-checks the hot seat item, as he cooled off his seat considerably last November. The rest don’t apply to him. UF also does not have to worry about jettisoning the coach now to ensure a lengthy coaching search can happen in the open. No one of Florida’s stature except maybe Auburn will have an opening this year, so the Gators will be able to select who they want with minimal competition outside of a guy just wanting to stay put.
And so that’s why Florida hasn’t fired Napier yet. Without even more drastic mid-season improvements than last year, it will get there. It just wasn’t ever going to be a September event.