UCF Collective selling 'Rural Central Florida' t-shirts trolling Billy Napier's postgame comments
The UCF Knights NIL Collective, The Kingdom, is taking advantage of recent comments made by Florida head coach Billy Napier by selling a t-shirt that reads, “Rural Central Florida” in an apparent effort to troll him.
It’s a reference to the comments Napier made following Florida’s Week 1 loss to Miami. He seemed to criticize Gators fans, saying the team can’t focus on what, “Some guy in his basement saying in, you know, rural Central Florida on social media” is saying about the team.
That came at a point of major criticism for both Billy Napier and the Florida Gators program. They lost to rival Miami 41-17. With that the Gators fell to just 11-17 under him in what is now his third season in The Swamp and the outside noise is continuing to grow.
Worse for Napier, the schedule isn’t getting any easier from here. Florida has one of the toughest schedules in the country and he needs to steady the course quickly.
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Of course, in the NIL era, teams are finding new ways to be competitive with one another. For UCF, now in their second season in a power conference, they’re looking for ways to keep up in terms of how much NIL they can offer. Selling t-shirts that take a shot at another coach in the state is just one way they’re doing that.
UCF’s NIL collective sells plenty of t-shirts. Most of those contain references to either the program or the collective itself, making this shirt unique in the collection.
On3’s Pete Nakos added, “For each Rural Central Florida shirt sold, $10 will go to UCF’s NIL collective. Over 70 have already sold.”
There’s some added interest to the UCF collective selling this t-shirt given that the Knights are traveling to The Swamp this season to play Florida. That game will come on October 5th and it’ll be interesting to see how many fans show up wearing this shirt.
Billy Napier’s on criticism from fans
Following the loss to Miami, Billy Napier shared his thoughts on how to handle criticism from fans.
“Sometimes you deserve criticism, you know, and I think that’s one of those things I would say, I have no excuses right? So we got to go get it fixed. It is probably one of the bigger challenges you have as a head coach, you know, in terms of turning the page. You know, how do you filter the results? How do you evaluate the game, especially when it’s negative? And I would tell you one of the other big challenges, when you do win, but maybe you were sloppy and you didn’t play well, that’s another big challenge. Because they’re all happy go-lucky,” Napier said.
“But reality is like, look, I can remember standing up here when we built Utah the first year, telling you guys like, look, everybody thinks we’re gonna win the Super Bowl this year, but we have things that we have to clean up as a team, right?”
Napier would go on to make his comments about those rural Central Florida fans on social media while talking about the character of his team and what they need to focus on moving forward.
“We got to go to work on the football part. And I think we got to become a more consistent team, and we have to execute better,” Napier said. “And if we can focus on those things, and not necessarily what some guy in his basement saying in, you know, rural Central Florida on social media, then we got a chance to get better, right? So I think that’s the key.”
Billy Napier and Florida will look to bounce back in Week 2 against Samford in The Swamp.