Florida Support Staff Army is Filled with Absurd Job Titles

We will never know the complete recipe to Nick Saban’s success, but we have learned one of his primary ingredients. That’s because Kirby Smart replicated that approach at Georgia. The secret? Manpower.

Alabama and Georgia rose to the top of the college football world by employing a support staff army. Programs are limited to ten full-time, on-field assistant coaches. There is no limit on how many off-the-field staffers one college football team can employ. All it takes is a big enough budget to keep up with the Joneses.

Billy Napier took notes at Louisiana and is bringing that same approach to Florida. Entering his first season as the Gators’ head coach, Napier will have 48 people on the Florida support staff. Some support staffers have familiar titles — graduate assistants, quality control analysts — while others use a more “creative” approach to define their job.

The Most Ridiculous Florida Football Job Titles

This year Florida will have a “Director of Speed Improvement and Skill Development.” It’s Napier’s fancy way of calling Tiger Jones something other than an assistant strength coach. Oh, and Florida has two more of those.

Chris Couch takes the cake. He is the “GameChanger Coordinator.” What exactly is a GameChanger Coordinator? He’s a Napier’s old special teams coach that didn’t have enough credentials to be a full-time special teams coach, so Napier gave him a job as a special teams analyst with a fun, made-up name.

Each position coach has its own quality control analyst, as well as an “Assistant of Quality Control” that leads that entire unit of support staffers. It’s unclear if the offensive and defensive “Personnel Analysts” fall under that umbrella, or if they’re organized into the same group as the “Assistant for Player Development.”

If you can’t keep up, that’s the point. Like a criminal money laundering operation, Billy Napier has created a complex organization that obfuscates its internal roles and responsibilities with BS, bureaucratic job titles.

Mark Stoops’ Subtle Shot at Florida

As much as one may want to criticize and poke fun at Florida, many of the job titles within Napier’s organization are focused on player development and recruiting. Like the Gators, Kentucky has nutritionists on retainer, directors of player development and recruiting directors/coordinators. Earlier this month UK hired Texas A&M staffer Danielle Braswell to aid the Cats’ recruiting efforts behind the scenes.

“I’m not saying I need an army of people like some people do, but you certainly need manpower — womanpower in this case — and people to help you in your organization,” said Stoops. “I’ve received that support and we need to continue to push and we gotta continue to grow.”

Kentucky will not immediately jump to hire a “GameChanger Coordinator.” However, it’s plain to see that enormous support staffs will become commonplace. You can only build so many new facilities with all of that SEC TV money. Surrounding a head coach with a large, talented support staff minimizes a program’s margin of error.