The Florida Gators have more than just a Billy Napier problem
There was no Sunday sacking after all. Despite another listless, dispiriting home loss — this a lopsided 33-20 defeat to a first-year SEC head coach at Texas A&M — Billy Napier will get to man the sidelines at least one more game at Florida.
Whether UF’s embattled third-year head coach makes it past Saturday’s tilt with Mississippi State is immaterial at this point, though.
The well-liked man from Cookeville, Tenn. is cooked as the head coach at Florida, and while he’ll be owed a ridiculous $26 million in buyout money, the Gators can’t afford not to fire him at this point.
Florida has lost seven-straight games to FBS opponents (five by at least two scores). Napier is 12-16, 6-11 in the SEC. He spent all offseason sunshine-pumping, insisting that Florida was “close” and “on schedule to some degree.”
“Change doesn’t happen overnight,” he told me during SEC Media Days when I asked him about his tenuous job security.
Then the Gators took the field against Miami six weeks later and got pasted in The Swamp. On Saturday, Mike Elko’s Aggies did the same thing, dominating Florida in the trenches and cruising to a victory with a backup quarterback.
Unsurprisingly, Napier’s ‘Wizard of Oz’ act was always an illusion — by commission or omission.
And yet, for all the on-field ineptitude (the self-immolating on defense and special teams, poor play-calling), the inexcusable losses and the underwhelming recruiting, the Florida Gators have more than just a Billy Napier problem.
Why a UAA housecleaning is long overdue
From 1992-2016, Jeremy Foley spent 24 years as Florida’s athletics director, ripping off a resume of hires as impressive as any AD in modern athletics.
Foley famously hired Billy Donovan (basketball), Urban Meyer (football), Tim Walton (softball), Becky Burleigh (soccer), Kevin O’Sullivan (baseball) and Mike Holloway (track and field), among others, all of whom won national titles with the Gators.
But Foley had his blind spots, too, particularly when it came to investing in UF’s football program. Because of Steve Spurrier’s unique success in the early 90s, the Gators ran their athletics department with an arrogance that they didn’t need things like an indoor football facility.
Florida was slow on change — with facilities, support, fund-raising and more — and Meyer (with a loaded roster and an incredible coaching staff) only further emboldened UF’s hubris with his two national titles.
The ‘Gator Way’ became a holy-than-thou rebuttal.
A dozen years (and four football coaches later) after Meyer abruptly resigned from Florida in 2010, Billy Napier was sitting at the same desk Meyer once occupied, with the same curtains and the same carpet inside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. Florida’s football players were making the same long walk across Gale Lemerand to the practice field before the school finally opened the Heavener Complex before the 2023 season — many years in the making, and still many years too late.
“Nothing changes around here,” a UF head football coach once said.
Foley retired in 2016, but he maintains an emeritus title with the university. The problem is the Ghost of Foley continues to walk the hallways of the athletic department. Scott Stricklin is now the AD at UF, but a large swath of Foley’s inner circle and top lieutenants remain in power positions within the university.
These are not bad people, but they’ve long had bad ideas. The Peter Principle doesn’t just apply to Napier. There’s a leadership vacuum and total staleness within the athletics department that has created the very outcome of having to hire four football coaches — now eying a fifth — in 12 years.
It’s been an endless cycle of rut. It was a surprise to no one in the know in Gainesville that Florida didn’t have it’s NIL house in order or was a step slow attacking the transfer portal.
If Florida is serious about wanting to produce a championship program again, they have to make serious changes above simply who is just roaming the sidelines.
It’s time to move on to a new era. A clean slate.
Stricklin shouldn’t be allowed to hire a third football coach, but it’s not just him. The entire UAA needs a housecleaning.
Florida was once a bastion for alignment, foresight and savviness. There’s none of that anymore.
These are the same folks who flirted with Scott Frost and tried to hire Chip Kelly (remember when UF sent six administrators including President Kent Fuchs to New Hampshire to woo the former NFL head coach?) before landing on Dan Mullen.
These are the same folks who hand-picked Billy Napier even though LSU had no interest in hiring a Sun Belt coach from their very state.
These are the same folks who ignored real red flags with Napier — from a record feasting on under .500 conference teams, to hiring a guy who planned to out “Process” Nick Saban and Kirby Smart even though he was starting from the basement and they were already in the penthouse.
Just two weeks ago, Stricklin told Paul Finebaum, “We have been patient at the university. That patience is going to be rewarded. I really believe Billy Napier is going to be the head coach at Florida for a long, long time.”
In the words of George Costanza, “It’s not a lie, if you believe it.”
The Gators will have a new football coach in 2025. But Lane Kiffin, Eli Drinkwitz or Jedd Fisch won’t suddenly fix what Napier could not.
A total reckoning within the UAA is long overdue.