Even though Billy Napier is still employed as Florida’s head football coach, everyone still believes he won’t be for too much longer. I am in that camp along with everyone, and so it was hard to follow all the games on Saturday without looking through the lens of who should be the next UF coach.
Based on what I’ve seen on the Gator Country boards as well as in parts beyond, Lane Kiffin is/will be a top candidate for the job. Even the people who are dead set against him expect him to be a serious option for whoever’s making the next hire.
I quipped on Twitter on Saturday that for all the Gator fans who want Kiffin but who are concerned about playoff timing, I had some good news. That news is something you’re already aware of: Ole Miss played poorly in a 20-17 home loss to Kentucky. You don’t have to worry about the new College Football Playoff calendar if Ole Miss loses enough games that it doesn’t make the playoff.
I don’t know if one game significantly changes Kiffin’s prospects. I would generally say it shouldn’t, because anything can happen in one game. Something significant as the investment required to fire Napier and buy out and then pay a replacement head coach should not be swayed by a single game. I mean, if one game was going to be powerful enough to do it, “couldn’t beat a Mark Stoops Kentucky team despite having the better roster” is up there on the list. But still, that’s no way to run a railroad.
The fact remains that, with extremely rare exceptions, you just don’t know who’s going to work out as head coach of a major college program. Nick Saban to Alabama and Urban Meyer to Ohio State are the exceptions that prove the rule. They were in their primes and were up-to-date with the sport’s state of the art. Not even former national title winner Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M is a counterexample. Jimbo’s offense was approaching its sell-by date as his time in Tallahassee was ending, and he flat-out refused to make any concessions to reality.
I mean, look at Florida’s next opponent. Scott Frost was better at UCF than Josh Heupel was. Graduate them to the power leagues, and Heupel is far better at Tennessee than he was in Orlando while Frost could never get out of second gear at Nebraska. Meanwhile, Gus Malzahn was very good at Auburn, going to a national title game and beating Saban more regularly than anyone else, but he’s not been the home-run-hire-for-that-level that he seemed when UCF landed him.
Lincoln Riley and Brian Kelly each coached up a Heisman winner at USC and LSU, respectively, but both had to fire their defensive coordinator and several other assistants after two years because they weren’t the turnkey hires as expected. Auburn hired Hugh Freeze to beat Saban. However, the Nicktator retired a year later and five games into Year 2, Andy Staples was fielding a question last Saturday night on his livestream/podcast about whether Freeze was already on the Napier-at-Florida path.
This is all part of why I’m not ready to write off Kiffin entirely for UF despite the loss to Kentucky in what was supposed to be a peak year for him. Maybe he’d be able to win at Florida in a way he can’t at Ole Miss. They’re two different situations. I tend to think he’d be another Dan Mullen-like hire given how Kiffin hasn’t been anything spectacular in high school recruiting. If it’s possible to build durable depth through the portal, no one’s yet figured it out. But who knows anything, really?
The free transfer era appears to have eroded teams’ abilities to load up on ridiculous depth, or for lesser teams perhaps any depth at all. Those programs that did it previously — Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State — have continued on momentum, but we’ll know more three-to-five years from now on whether super powered teams are possible without any barriers to transfer.
One thing that is fairly clear to me in this era is that you have to have a quick turnaround artist at a blue blood. No one’s waiting around for a slow rebuild anymore. The flood of decommits that Napier had last year was a sign, as was Trevor Etienne saying, in so many words, that he didn’t want to play for a bad team when he could transfer to a title contender.
So it’s for that reason I am thinking about Curt Cignetti, who’s got Indiana 5-0 and is blowing out opponents in a way that no UF coach has since Meyer. Maryland and UCLA are the best teams he’s faced so far, but again, this is Indiana. To quote Wikipedia, Indiana “has the most losses of any Division I football program (712), and also the third worst winning percentage of any Division I team with over 1000 games played (.419).” And yes, it’s been three cupcakes, a cratering UCLA, and a mediocre Maryland, but the Hoosiers have won their five games by a combined 244-65 (49-13 in PPG). Cignetti is older at 63, but almost no one coaches anywhere for a decade-plus anymore.
Anyway, I’m not going to turn this newsletter into a hot board this late in the game. This is not just a “hire the opposite of what you fired” sentiment, though. Florida needs to find someone who’s going to get it in gear right away. Alas, there’s just no way to know for sure who can and can’t do it.