Billy Napier shares biggest difference coaching at Group of Five, Power Five levels

Billy Napier knows it’s a different ballgame in the Power Five compared to the Group of Five. With the obvious out of the way, the Florida head coach adjusted on the fly compared to Louisiana, his previous and successful coaching stop.

After a 6-7 Year 1, Napier had to find improvement somewhere, and it was on the recruiting trail. Now it has to translate to the field.

But at the very least, the changes he made throughout the offseason paid off so far.

“Yeah, pace of the recruiting calendar relative to the early signing period and the pace, the sped up evaluation and recruitment process,” Napier said at SEC Media Days. “That’s number one, without a doubt. So that’s where we’ve had to adjust you know, year one to year two and look I do think we made changes in our workflow. I think that we’ve been able to retain our people, and it’s leading to results, right? 

“So we’ve hired really well, we’ve got a lot of really smart, talented people, some older veterans with wisdom and then we’ve got some really young, bright future up and comers as well. So I think that’s number one on the list.”

Name, image and likeness are the issues everyone has to deal with and adapt on the fly as well. Napier knew as well as everyone to get Florida back to the mountaintop, you have to keep up, especially with other schools in the SEC.

“Now, you throw NIL, you throw portal, those are new variables in the game,” Napier said. “Certainly the combination of those last two creates issues. So three big takeaways here. Those are the three things. We’ve come up with really good systems for the final two, and I think we’ve adjusted in terms of workflow and job descriptions for recruiting.”

Recruiting is great, but fans and the school want results as a, well, result of that effort.

GatorsOnline’s Nick de la Torre hopped on On3 Roundtable with J.D. PicKell to discuss how to evaluate the success on the recruiting compared to the potential struggles on the field under Napier.

“It’s kind of the scales of justice a little bit,” de la Torre said. “If you’re only going to win six games, do you need a top three class? If you’re only going to win five games, can you get closer to Georgia in your class? I think most fans — and it might not be the fans that are most vocal on Twitter — but I think most fans realize this was a bigger rebuild than maybe anyone expected given the success that Dan Mullen had had.

“When you look back at it, you’re like well, he had success with Jim McElwain’s players and once he had to start coaching his own guys, the team’s success started to fall off.”