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Scott Stricklin admits fear he had 'misevaluated,' lauds Billy Napier for remarkable turnaround

FaceProfileby:Thomas Goldkamp12/12/24
Florida-Gators-Billy-Napier-Scott-Stricklin
Florida Gators athletic director Scott Stricklin (left) and head coach Billy Napier talk before a game against the Texas A&M Aggies at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. (Matt Pendleton-Imagn Images)

Florida‘s 2024 season might well be dissected for years to come if things pan out the way the Gator Nation hopes. Because for a brief period in the first month of the season it seemed coach Billy Napier was a dead man walking.

The team suffered losses against Miami and Texas A&M that weren’t particularly competitive. Chants of “Fire Billy” rang down at times from the stands.

Fast forward a few months and Florida is sporting a 7-5 record, guaranteed the first winning season of Napier’s tenure.

“Record is better than what we thought it was going to be after the way the season started,” athletics director Scott Stricklin admitted candidly on Another Dooley Noted Podcast. “It’s not where the Gators want to be, I think we all would admit that. The University of Florida expects to be competing in the playoff every year. But the fact that we finished the regular season with really good momentum and have a chance to go add to that with a bowl game into the offseason, that’s really important.”

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It sure wasn’t smooth sailing getting there.

In fact, Stricklin himself even admitted some doubts about where Florida was headed.

“I think going into the season, the way the team played for most of October and November is how we thought we would play the whole year,” Stricklin said. “So when they started the way they did you’re sitting there thinking, ‘Boy, we really misevaluated this thing.’ But then once they were able to kind of set things in a different direction you started to think maybe the preseason evaluation wasn’t all that wrong. We just got off to a bad start.”

Stricklin made perhaps the boldest call of all when he issued a public statement of support for Napier following the team’s competitive loss to rival Georgia.

A few days later Florida went out and got smoked by Texas, albeit with a third-string quarterback.

Surely some fans were thinking, ‘Here we go again.’

Because it’s not easy to snap out of a funk like that, for myriad reasons. Players can become disgruntled and stop giving their all. Coaches can tinker until even more things break. Fans begin breathing down the neck of the coach, further ratcheting up the pressure.

Stricklin outlined things clearly.

“Sports is so much about momentum. And when you have good momentum it seems like you can do no wrong,” he said. “The breaks all go your way, the ball bounces right. And the inverse is true. When you don’t have momentum you can’t catch a break. And reversing that is a really challenging thing to do.

“So once they started reversing that and they got a couple wins, they played playoff teams toe-to-toe when you’re looking at how they did against Tennessee and Georgia. And then to come down the stretch and basically end playoff chances for playoff hopefuls LSU and Ole Miss, and then cap it off with a win against your in-state rival, it creates momentum in a really positive way. That is really the most critical thing that we could come out of this season with.”

That momentum was easy to see in Florida’s remarkable surge up the team recruiting rankings over the final month before the Early Signing Period.

When the dust settled, the recruiting class checked in ranked 11th nationally.

Again, nothing to write home about, necessarily. The standards at Florida — the ones set by the likes of Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer — are a little higher. But it was a tremendous salvage job by Napier.

And now Florida enters the pivotal transfer portal period looking to further build.

It’s a wholly different story than the one being written several weeks ago.

“Again, I give Billy a lot of credit for taking accountability, for keeping everybody on board, locked in from a team standpoint, from a staff standpoint,” Stricklin said.