Billy Napier addresses how college football has evolved across coaching career

Former Louisiana head coach Billy Napier takes over a Florida team in the midst of a new era in college football.

From expanded signing classes and the transfer portal to NIL, the landscape has shifted massively since Napier began coaching. The head Gator discussed the big change around staff sizes during a press conference last week with the media.

“I’ve been fortunate to see the evolution, we used to have nine assistants, two GAs, an ops guy and a high school relations guy,” Napier said. “Early in my career, one of the assistants ran recruiting, the whole operation. To see it kind of evolve a little bit here as we go, now, here comes more components. NIL, transfer portal, other areas where you have to have a strategy and specific people working in those areas.

“The game has always been evolving and it continues to evolve. I think we’re fortunate to be in a place where we’re given the resources to do things a certain way.”

Napier has continued growing his staff over the last week, including making a new hire for his director of football operations. He reunited with his former Louisiana director of recruiting Joshua Thompson. Thompson was at Auburn and Arkansas prior to rejoining Napier in Gainesville.

Napier discusses staff revamp

Florida is coming off of an incredibly disappointing 6-7 season. The Gators fired former head coach Dan Mullen, and hired Louisiana head coach Billy Napier as his replacement. Since taking over at Florida, Napier has made a ton of changes to the Gators’ coaching staff.

Napier hasn’t made the changes to Florida’s staff just for the sake of making changes. He understands that getting the right people in place out of the gate is the key to building a successful college football program. Napier also knows that the work is far from being over.

“I could probably tell you how many we have left to hire,” Napier said when asked if he knew off the top of his head how many people he’s hired to Florida’s coaching staff. “Probably more than we’ve hired. I know that we’ve tried to be intentional about building this the right way. I don’t know the number off the top of my head. We still have work. There’s work left to do here. We’ve tried to be really patient and thorough. A lot goes into this. It’s the most important thing that we do. So I think if you get it right in the front end, then there’s less issues going forward. So that’s what we’re trying to do.

“I’m really excited about the caliber of person that we’ve been able to attract here. Not only their character and integrity, but also their expertise in the area that we’re asking them to do work with, the team and the organization. And then obviously there’s the recruiting strategy and footprint is a big part of that as well. So each one of these is a big deal I think. There’s a lot of people that contribute your success in college football. I think we understand that.”