Billy Napier just watched his already short leash shrink even more. (Photo credit:)
As always, Florida-LSU provided much to talk about.
Throughout the offseason, even casual football observers had their eye on this game. Some billed the 2025 edition of the Florida-LSU rivalry as the Jack Pyburn revenge game. Some focused on the fact that it was both schools’ first SEC test. Some called it a revenge game for LSU, some just went all-in on the juicy quarterback matchup between DJ Lagway and Garrett Nussmeier, some salivated over LSU’s gold jerseys, and some simply labeled this as one of the first truly critical games of the SEC race. And to boot, there were not one but two pregame skirmishes between the teams.
All of that, though, wound up taking a backseat to the conversation that’s dominated Gator football for more than a year now: the job security of Billy Napier after yet another episode of “Watch Us Invent A New Way To Lose A Football Game”. That’s the storyline now– not even just in Gainesville, but across college football. People around the sport are wondering: what, exactly, has happened to the once-proud Gator football program?
And if the few supporters Napier has left can agree with the rest of the fanbase on anything, it’s that if nothing else, Napier has at least earned that much.
A week after Napier’s Gators plunged into a crevasse with an unacceptable 18-16 loss to USF, things got even uglier. DJ Lagway continued his alarming regression at Florida by throwing five picks– one of which was returned for a touchdown– to LSU in a 20-10 loss. It’s Florida’s sixth loss to LSU in the last seven meetings, and drops the Gators to 1-2 on the year.
Most infuriating about the latest loss to the Bayou Bengals was that LSU made more mistakes than you could ever realistically expect from a top-five ranked team. And it just didn’t matter. Because any tactic LSU tried to deploy to help Florida out, the Gators simply refused to take it.
For starters, LSU’s offense has been grossly out of sync so far this year and continued that trend last night. The Tigers didn’t even pick up a first down until the second quarter; they finished with just ten for the game. LSU also failed to generate 24 points or 370 yards of offense for the third straight game to start 2025 (sure, Florida’s defense deserves some credit here, but it’s also worth pointing out that one of those three games for LSU was against Louisiana Tech).
On the other side of the ball, LSU’s Whit Weeks started the game by playing two snaps and then promptly getting himself ejected for targeting on Jadan Baugh. That handed Florida’s offense a free fifteen yards to jump-start the drive, plus the added bonus of the disqualification of one of LSU’s best defensive players. The Gators could only partially capitalize on that, stalling shortly thereafter and kicking a field goal (to his credit, Trey Smack boomed it). But when LSU then spotted Florida more free real estate to start its second drive with an overzealous pass interference, it felt like Florida would have a real chance.
And it kept feeling that way throughout the night as LSU struggled mightily to get out of its own way. Presumed to be a first round NFL Draft selection, LSU QB Garrett Nussmeier missed several throws and had a couple more batted away at the line. For his teammates’ part, LSU gift-wrapped Florida 68 yards of terrain throughout the night on seven penalties. There was even one sequence late in the game where– driving to put the game out of reach– LSU’s Ju’Juan Johnson fumbled, the Gator defense missed a golden opportunity to scoop it up and possibly even score on it before LSU receiver Aaron Anderson finally fell on the ball for a 17 yard loss, and then on the very next snap, Nussmeier delivered the ball right into the hands of Florida’s Dijon Johnson.
In fact, LSU checked off all the boxes on the Self-Destruct Checklist short of literally scoring points for Florida and wiping their own points off the board. All Florida had to do to pull off this upset was be able to say the game. But alas, in true Billy Napier fashion, that wasn’t the case.
Facing a 3rd and 3 inside their own 20 and up 3-0 late in the first quarter, Lagway detected LSU’s secondary falling asleep and made them pay for the busted assignment, hitting Baugh for an 87 yard touchdown on a stunning momentum-building gift. But Knijeah Harris was flagged for holding on the play, nullifying the shocking early knockdown punch Florida had just seemingly landed.
In fairness to Harris, while by the letter of the law he probably did meet the threshold for a holding call on this play, he didn’t really do anything much worse than what happens on every single play. So it’s hard to actually fault him any more than the refs for deciding when to enforce the holding law almost at random.
But oh, just think about the sheer symbolism that holding penalty represents. It’s so deeply emblematic of Billy Napier’s entire tenure at Florida, in which on the rare occasions he’d start to build the slightest bit of positive momentum, it’s quickly counteracted if not outright negated by ensuing developments. And thus, the joy is short-lived.
Case in point: Florida didn’t commit a single penalty against LIU in the season opener. No sooner did the talking points begin to make the rounds that Florida was finally playing with discipline then the Gators committed a whopping eleven penalties against USF, including one for spitting at an opposing player. For an encore, how about, for an encore, a single penalty that costs Florida 87 yards and seven points– to highlight a game in which Florida committed seven more penalties and also had to burn a timeout to avoid a delay of game penalty because they weren’t ready to get the snap off in time.
But to be sure, the most costly piece of cannabalism came from Lagway, the former five-star QB signee who’s been on an alarmingly declining regression path this year. Down 13-10 midway through the third quarter, Lagway led Florida across midfield– and then threw the ball directly into the path of a cutting Dashawn Spears, who jetted through the open field for an easy 58 yard pick six to make the score 20-10. Neither offense could stop shooting itself in the foot long enough to mount a scoring drive in the remaining quarter and a half, so that became the final score.
And crossing that threshold of “let’s literally score points for the other team and strike our own points off the board” was the difference in the game. LSU’s offense scored a grand total of 13 points for itself, two field goals and one legit touchdown drive. One of those field goals came on drives that began inside the Florida 45 thanks to a Lagway interception, and the other came on a short field as well following Tommy Roman being forced to punt out of the back of his own end zone. In other words, LSU had already bypassed most of the work that’s ordinarily needed to maneuver into field goal range.
So, sure: in the context of this game and this game alone, the loss can be placed squarely on DJ Lagway. Harris is a lot harder to blame for the holding call due to the inconsistencies of that getting called, so, fine, go ahead and blame Lagway for throwing five picks. Hell, even if he just throws three– if he doesn’t throw the pick six and the one that set up short field for LSU’s Damian Ramos at the end of the first half, Florida still probably wins. Because that’s ten points LSU doesn’t have and probably three points tacked onto Florida’s point total since the Gators seemed to be playing for the field goal at the end of the first half.
Lagway, to be very clear, was simply horrid. Don’t be fooled by the 33/49 for 287 stat line, because the majority of that came on screens and checkdowns. I don’t know if the environment got to him, or if Billy Napier said something to him that got in his head, or he was afraid he’d get blindsided and re-injured or what it was, but he seems to have just totally forgotten how to go through his progressions and read defenses. Last night in particular, his progression would be as follows: primary route, safety valve, take off. That’s not how you’re taught to do it.
A deeper dive into the stats confirmed what I thought I’d noticed watching live, too: Lagway’s longest completion was a 25 yard gain, and that was a screen pass. The longest completion Lagway had on a ball thrown beyond the line of scrimmage all night went for 22 yards to Aidan Mizell.
If your identity is a ground and pound team that wins with its defense and asks its QB to do little more than protect the football, like, say, 2009 Alabama, then sure. Fair enough. DJ Lagway, however, carries infinitely more natural talent than Greg McElroy, and as he showed last year, he’s capable of hitting some beautiful deep balls. On that same vein, Billy Napier recruited guys like Dallas Wilson and Aidan Mizell specifically to provide Lagway the weaponry and the arsenal needed to take those long range shots. Yet that still has yet to materialize this year. Very few routes are even run beyond 15 yards downfield, and even when they are, Lagway– for whatever reason– aborts the progression sequence before they can even materialize.
If the excuse for all that is “well the offensive line is not holding up in pass protection for four seconds, how do you expect them to hold up for nine?” then that’s even worse. The unit with a returning All-American, two position coaches, three seniors, and a whole lot of promise from Florida’s head coach about how ready for battle it would be in 2025 is now incapable of functioning at even an average level. That’s no better.
But while the reality is probably a cocktail of all of that, let’s not get lost down this rabbit hole. All the blame game achieves here is distraction from the bigger problem. The fact is, too many people have been parroting that genre of blame far too loudly and far too adamantly for my liking in the aftermath of the loss.
Because this loss can’t be viewed in its own context. It doesn’t exist in isolation. It’s not an aberration; it’s the mode data point of Florida’s current coach.
Billy Napier now carries an appalling 20-21 record at Florida, the worst of any Gator football coach since Raymond Wolf went 13-24 from 1946-49. His record against the SEC drops to 10-15– also the worst since Wolf. And Napier has compounded the situation’s severity by adorning those terrible overall numbers with all sorts of humiliating firsts.
Making matters still worse yet, Napier has infinitely more resources and support at his disposal than any coach to lead the Gator football program before. To be the worst “anything” since the same decade that America deployed atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki is bad enough. And then you realize Napier has far more assistants, a much bigger recruiting budget, a glorified college football free agent market, the ability to recruit athletes by simply paying them, and the mere status of being the coach of a program that’s won three national championships at his disposal that Florida coaches 80+ years ago couldn’t have even conceptualized.
All that stuff is supposed to benefit the Gators. No, Florida’s booster base doesn’t have the deepest pockets in college athletics, but it’s pretty high up there on that list. And while money can’t buy everything, it could do a lot to make a coach’s job easier. All he has to do is know how to use it.
But Napier doesn’t, which is why he has a losing record after 3.25 seasons at Florida. And that, in turn, is why lambasting Lagway for costing Florida the game– as if Florida blowing multiple chances to win a very winnable game is anything new– cuts no ice with me.
Because Lagway is the specific scapegoat this time. Lagway’s five picks is the “avoid blaming Napier for this at all costs alternative” explanation for why Florida lost this game. How about the other twenty games Billy Napier has lost in three-and-change years at Florida?
See, here’s the bottom line: it’s always something. The number of people who still do this is dwindling, but among the few who do, there’s always some excuse for why a particular loss isn’t Napier’s fault. If it’s not Lagway throwing five interceptions in one game, it’s having the worst defense in school history in 2022. Or the defense giving up a school record 702 yards and then a fate-sealing 4th and 17 in back to back weeks in 2023. Or our two-position-coached OL unit being woefully unprepared to do battle in the trenches in a season opener. Or two players wearing the same jersey number and going on the field for the same play. Or Anthony Richardson just not materializing into what we thought. Or our special teams unit not being able to execute the basics of its job requirement and line up for a field goal correctly (twice). Or it’s the refs’ fault.
If Napier’s record at Florida was 120-21, I’d be much more willing to accept those additional details as valid explanations, because then the overall numbers would speak for themselves and illustrate the legacy of a winning coach as these explanations illustrate outlier results.
But Napier’s record isn’t 120-21. It’s 20-21, which means he’s lost more games than he’s won at Florida. That literally means Billy Napier is a losing coach, by its very definition. Losing is what he does, by any means necessary. It’s just in his DNA.
And when you need to deflect or redirect blame for a loss away from the head man after more than half the games he’s coached over a three-plus year sample size, they all lose their legitimacy and start to run together as the ill-informed ramblings of people who either don’t know what they’re talking about, have no vested interest in Florida, or both.
Anyway, as a result of Scott Stricklin joining that chorus of folks looking to blame anyone but Billy Napier for losses last season, this season is over three games in. Not even Stricklin can defend this product anymore. The only good part about that is it gives Florida more time to research and select its next coach, which has been a problem in four Florida coaching searches in a row. Of course, it sucks to basically just take a bye on an entire season and throw a whole 365 days of what could be the starting of the clock on a rebuild to begin with, but we’re here now.
And in a juncture of the season where we talk about what needs to get fixed, and how the fix it, that’s it. The problem is Billy Napier, and the solution is fire him. Anything more specific is just a symptom of the overarching problem and Stricklin’s reluctance to fix it.
And until that happens, to the dismay of Gator fans everywhere, that problem is going to keep plaguing Florida football with more nasty symptoms.
