Will Billy Napier ultimately make it as head coach of the Florida Gators? This offseason will tell. (Photo credit: David Rosenbaum, Icon Sportswire)
For Billy Napier, his tenure with the Florida Gators comes down to what he does this offseason. He’ll either make the changes he has to make, and the correct ones at that, or he won’t survive here.
This statement is one that had probably been percolating in the minds of many Florida Gators fans for years now, if we’re being honest with ourselves. The three-year test is traditionally one that doesn’t lie: if a coach doesn’t prove capable of reaching greatness in his first three years at a school, he probably never will. And now, after Florida lost 24-25 to rival FSU, Year Three begins for Billy Napier a month earlier than it should have.
All the same staples of the bad football team we’d learned the 2023 Florida Gators were sat there on full display in this game. Bad coaching? Check; a double reverse flea flicker that forced an awful offensive line to have to block for twice as long as it usually does on pass plays resulted in a drive-killing sack following a safety, completely shifting the momentum towards FSU. Portal misses on the offensive line dooming the Gators’ offense? Check; see prior issue (also, FSU held Florida to a paltry 232 yards of offense thanks in part to Florida’s inability to throw behind that anemic offensive line). Bad special teams? Check; a long punt return by Keon Coleman set up an FSU touchdown, and even the normally-reliable Trey Smack missed two field goals.
The only thing most fans probably didn’t count on was Florida’s defense holding firm, even against a backup quarterback. (Although, mostly independent of this issue, Jalen Kimber did not put a lot of great things on film in this game. Yet in the name of being fair, Jason Marshall did, registering a pass breakup and a sack.) But eventually, the dam broke and FSU’s offense figured things out, scoring 24 points and racking up 286 yards in the final 25 minutes of the game.
But zooming in and focusing too much on this game doesn’t achieve much. It’s simply another piece of data that illustrates the complete and utter failure that Year Two was for Billy Napier at Florida. And if history is any indication, one way or another, we’ll know for sure what Billy Napier’s fate will be within the next twelve months, because that’s when the window of the three-year test closes.
That three-year test is one that’s stood the greater test of time. Of all the coaches to ever appear in the CFP National Championship or the BCS National Championship Game, a span of time that goes back to 1998, exactly one of them took more than three seasons to get his program going— and it’s probably not who you’re thinking of. But I like surprises, so I’ll hold it until the end*. That’s a bit subjective, of course, so I’ll define it as such: in this context, “getting a program going” means the following: elevating, or re-elevating the program from the point at which you took it over to a point at which a reasonable person could logically construe it to be a national championship contender.
What does that mean, exactly? Well, here are some examples.
Dabo Swinney is a popular example of someone who didn’t start winning or even competing for national championships in his first three years, Napier defenders say. Swinney, the reasoning goes, didn’t have a team that finished ranked in the top five until his seventh year. There was no BCS Title Game or CFP appearance in Swinney’s first three seasons. So therefore Billy Napier should be given at least somewhat similarly long of a leash to figure things out.
But that comparison fails to actually study his third season at Clemson, in 2011. Clemson started the year with two ho-hum wins over lesser opponents— and then started taking down ranked teams left and right. #21 Auburn, #11 FSU, and then the newly #11 ranked Virginia Tech teams all fell by the wayside as Swinney’s Clemson Tigers raced out to an 8-0 start. The Tigers then faltered down the stretch in November, losing to a pair of 8-5 teams and a historically successful South Carolina squad, but recovered enough to sledgehammer Virginia Tech again, this time for an ACC Championship. Clemson then totally collapsed in the Orange Bowl, giving up an Orange Bowl record 70 points to a Tavon Austin-powered West Virginia team to end the year.
But you see? Clemson was, two-thirds into the season, a serious national championship contender. Sure, the team then fell to pieces in the final month, but the reason for optimism was there. There was logical justification for tabbing the Tigers as a real player in the national title hunt the following seasons. Yes, there were questions about how an 8-0 team could finish 9-3 (and 10-4 if you count the postseason) but there was no question that Clemson- which was 7-6 when Swinney took it over midway through the 2008 season- was in better shape than it was in when Swinney took command.
And without the case of Swinney, which itself is a bit of a gray area that could reasonably be used to argue for or against the three year test, the argument that a coach needs more than three years to get his program going wholly falls apart.
Nick Saban had Alabama at 12-0 and in a de facto national semifinal in his second year; the Crimson Tide won the national title his third year. Kirby Smart had Georgia in the national title game in his second season; that’s plenty of proof that he was capable of elevating the program from where it was when he took it over.
Oh, but I know, those are the two most successful coaches in the sport. So let’s go down a rung.
Mark Helfrich took Oregon to the national championship game in his second season in 2014; it turned out that he’d never even sniff that stage again, but the argument holds that he didn’t need more than three years to show what he could do. The same could be said for Ed Orgeron, who won it all with an all-time loaded squad at LSU win 2019, and Les Miles, who won it all in his third season at LSU in 2007. And it’s quite possible that this same thought process will eventually be applied to Sonny Dykes (TCU went to the CFP Championship in his first season in 2022) and Ryan Day (Ohio State went to the CFP in 2020, his second season).
And there are tons of other miscellaneous examples, like Mike Norvell taking over an all-time terrible situation in 2020 but guiding the Seminoles from 3-6 to 5-7 to 10-3 in his first three seasons. It turned out that FSU would need a fourth year to truly compete for a national championship- but again, here’s where we go back to the Dabo Swinney case. The promise was there. Even Jim Harbaugh took Michigan to back-to-back ten win seasons in his first and second seasons after the Wolverines had lost 18 games in the previous three seasons.
A reasonable person with basic knowledge of the game could look at those programs and see what was being built. The programs had, under those coaches, shown true progress from Year One to Year Three. To various degrees, each and every coach who is currently regarded as one of the best coaches in the modern era of college football had their teams show some signs of building toward national powerhouse in his first three years.
Billy Napier, to this point in time, has not shown us a damn thing.
Instead, the Florida Gators have gotten worse.
A 6-6 record in his first year at Florida touched off irritation and frustration among many fans, but the carnage was more or less expected after Dan Mullen openly refused to recruit in the back half of his tenure. The worst Florida defense since World War II was blamed on either Patrick Toney being the wrong hire at defensive coordinator or the stench of Todd Grantham’s ineptitude needing more than one year to be cleared out. Various other in-game deficiencies, like Napier’s ineffective play-calling and Florida’s jaw-dropping flair for botchery on special teams, were pardoned as just par for the course with a young first-time SEC heard coach.
But now, in Year Two, Florida actually regressed. A 6-6 record in Year One was met with a 5-7 record in Year Two. Florida’s offense stepped back from 38th in the FBS to 50th in terms of yards per game. The defense, which was 102nd in the FBS prior to the bowl game last year, did improve to 71st nationally; however, for perspective, Florida finished with a top ten defense in the country in 11 of the 12 years from 2005-2016. So, no, that’s still not even close to unacceptable.
If that all sounds too superficial, and you think a deeper look beyond those surface-level stats is warranted, that also cuts both ways.
Sure, go ahead and blame some of that offensive regression on not having a top 5 NFL Draft pick at QB in 2023, but there’s also no denying that various portal misses on the offensive line to fill the voids left by O’Cyrus Torrence, Ethan White and Michael Tarquin had just as much to do with that. Micah Mazzccua was fine, for the most part, but he never came close to filling Torrence’s shoes as a guard and Damieon George simply didn’t cut it at tackle. And while you can say that injuries to Austin Barber and Kingsley Eguakun really hurt the o-line, the task ultimately fell on Florida’s coaches- featuring two separate offensive line coaches- to develop depth. They did not.
Napier’s play-calling certainly didn’t help matters, either. You can write off the lack of a downfield passing attack as just another symptom of having a bad offensive line (which is a different Napier problem) but it doesn’t explain away a double reverse flea-flicker, forcing your offensive line to block for twice as long, in a game in which they have trouble blocking for three seconds on normal play-calls. Nor does it explain any of a rash of other bizarre in-game decisions, like throwing the ball three straight times when the opponent hadn’t stopped your running game all night (FSU in 2022), bleeding the clock all the way down and then thoughtlessly wasting a timeout (Utah in 2022), ordering a direct snap to a running back six yards behind the line of scrimmage on a fourth and less-than-one with a weak offensive line (Georgia in 2023) and so on.
On defense, while going from 102nd in the FBS to 71st is technically an overall improvement, the Gators rapidly got worse as the season went on. Florida surrendered 702 yards of offense to LSU- that’s easily the worst performance in a single game in Florida Gators history, and keep in mind that came with the new clock rules that take away two or three possessions per game- and then another 508 to Missouri the following week. And yes, Shemar James being hurt did this defense no favors, but the steep drop-off at linebacker behind him is ultimately on Napier too since he took three portal hoppers at that spot.
And then there are the special teams disasters- again. Head-scratching letdowns like having two guys with the same jersey number on the field at the same time, getting four kicks blocked (only two teams in the entire country allowed more) plus a punt blocked (a fate that half of the 130 FBS teams managed to avoid all year), a fatal leaping penalty to give Kentucky a first down (which then turned into a touchdown), and allowing 111 yards worth of punt returns on the season while three other SEC schools have combined to allow a grand total of four punt return yards on the season are all just part of a laundry list of self-inflicted wounds that made life harder for the Florida Gators than it should have been.
And now, in that three-year test analogy that’s told coaches’ fates for decades, Napier is down to one last shot. Mountains of evidence in 2022 that suggested he needed a true offensive coordinator and a special teams coordinator for 2023 were ignored, and thus the second period of that vital three-period window was wasted. That means, from both a historical standpoint and from a “Think About It, There’s No Way Florida Gators Boosters Can Tolerate A Third Straight Year Of This” standpoint, Napier has an 0-2 count against him. And we all know what strike three would mean.
You can come back from an 0-2 count and knock one out of the park, too. That’s still in the realm of possibility, and I’m not arguing that the third and final leg of that three-year test is destined for failure. It’s more that Napier is simply out of mulligans. He’s out of time to experiment, to learn on the job, to try things his way. And I’d wager that for a lot of fans, he’s either out of patience or close to it.
The good news is that, in today’s age of college football, with NIL and the transfer portal, fortunes can change overnight. Maybe Florida doesn’t have the most NIL-friendly AD in the world, but the resources- namely, the boosters with money- for a competitive NIL structure are there. And not even counting the guys that he brought from his own previous program, Napier has hit the jackpot in the transfer portal before, most notably with Ricky Pearsall and Graham Mertz, and arguably with Cam’Ron Jackson (who hasn’t been truly healthy most of this year) as well. So it can be done.
But now there’s no margin for error, either. Billy Napier has to hit the jackpot with every move he makes this offseason, not just with some (and we’ll talk about what those moves are later in the week). Spare me the song and dance about how difficult the 2024 schedule is, because at the end of the day you can’t have three losing seasons in a row at Florida and expect to survive. You just can’t. Doesn’t matter how bad a hand you were dealt. That’s what happens when you wait a year longer than you should have to make the moves that were obvious to everybody but you.
To that point, the dominoes have already started falling. Corey Raymond and Sean Spencer have already departed as Austin Armstrong goes about reshaping his defensive staff. And you can be sure that more dominoes are set to fall shortly.
All things told, I wish Billy Napier luck this offseason. I’m rooting for him to succeed as the head coach of the Florida Gators. I’d really rather not launch the fifth head coaching search since 2011. And even putting that aside, and putting the buyout aside, I want him to succeed because I do still think he has some of the CEO-ing skills needed to oversee a championship-level program, namely recruiting and hiring great assistants (like Jabbar Juluke, Keary Colbert, and Billy Gonzales).
And so it’s with that said that I’ll conclude this piece with the same statement I used to start it: for Billy Napier, his tenure with the Florida Gators comes down to what he does this offseason. He’ll either make the changes he has to make, and the correct ones at that, or he won’t survive here.
*Frank Beamer went 2-9, 3-8, and then 6-4-1 in his first three years at Virginia Tech. Yet even there, there is demonstrable year-to-year growth.
