The Billy Napier experiment has to end for the Florida Gators football program. (Photo credit: John Raoux, AP)
Florida Gators football players and coaches spent months talking about how they would shock the world in 2024.
Well, they weren’t wrong. Most of the world was indeed shocked by what they saw play out on Saturday in Gainesville. It just wasn’t in the sense the Gators had in mind.
What was billed as one of the most highly-anticipated season openers in decades for the Florida Gators– facing a top-20 Miami team in the renewal of an old rivalry to begin a make-or-break third season for Billy Napier– immediately turned into a disaster. Nine months of hyping up how things were going to be different as a byproduct of roster overhaul number two for Billy Napier went up in smoke in less than three quarters of football. Any and all conversations surrounding Florida Gators football under Billy Napier have been flipped on their metaphorical heads.
The Miami Hurricanes, visiting the Swamp for the first time since 2008, started the game by allowing one first down before forcing a punt. Cam Ward then deflated the Gator faithful with an 11 play, 84 yard touchdown drive to give the Canes a 7-0 lead that would quickly get worse– much, much worse. By the end of the 3rd quarter, Graham Mertz had been knocked out of the game with a suspected concussion, his final impression on the contest being an interception in the red zone that was returned 67 yards deep into Florida territory with the score already 38-10 Miami.
Somehow, the Florida defense actually held there and forced a field goal attempt, which missed. That turned out to be one of a very sparse collection of positives on a day where very little went right.
Miami finished the game with more than twice as many points (41-17) and total yards (529-261) as Florida. The one moment that felt like it could be a momentum-changer, a 71-yard Montrell Johnson touchdown run thanks to a great seal block by Austin Barber to trim a 17-3 deficit to 17-10, was quickly replied to with another clock-eating touchdown drive to make it 24-10 at the break. And just as 2023 Heisman Trophy winner Jayden Daniels did against Florida on a long touchdown run, if Ward indeed makes a trip to New York City for the ceremony, Gator fans can at least look forward to seeing their defense featured on his Heisman reel.
You want analysis? Sure. The Florida Gators were manhandled on both sides of the line of scrimmage by Miami’s superior trench talent. That’s a direct result of Miami beating Florida out in a lot of head-to-head battles on the recruiting trail, most notably a pair of five-star offensive linemen in Francis Mauigoa and Samson Okunlola, and running back Mark Fletcher, who scored two touchdowns.
Thus, it didn’t even matter what anyone else did. It didn’t matter that Florida had the best overall athlete on the field in Tre Wilson, or a walking mismatch in tight end Arlis Boardingham. Nor did it matter that Miami’s secondary has some holes that better teams will probably exploit down the road. The game starts and ends in the trenches, and if you ever doubted that, just go rewatch the game tape.
Those issues, of course, come from sources other than just Billy Napier. The Florida administration has made it abundantly clear they have little interest in doing anything more than constructing or renovating buildings. Never mind raising enough money to be able to offer competitive NIL deals to five-star recruits. As athletic director Scott Stricklin once told a booster at a meet-and-greet event in South Florida, “We’re the Florida Gators. We don’t need to overpay.”
And from a pragmatic standpoint, it makes sense. Why work hard and stress out about being competitive on the field when you can get paid to essentially just play Minecraft on the University of Florida’s campus? It’s certainly an easier way for Scott Stricklin to collect the $1.725 million he gets paid every year.
The problem is that playing Minecraft in real life, with real boosters’ money, while neglecting the actual quality of the athletes that go to work inside those buildings, isn’t doing your coach any favors. Florida has lost countless athletes to rivals like Miami and Georgia simply because of NIL, like the three mentioned above. And eventually, when the Gators meet their rivals on the field, they’ll lose– as they have eight of the nine previous times.
The popular talking point is that if you pick two football coaches and don’t hit a home run on either one of them, you don’t pick a third. Personally, I’d argue there’s a far more pressing reason to metaphorically blow up the administration. Because NIL is here to stay, and because Florida currently employs an AD who naturally balks at the very idea of NIL– even if you discount his two football hires– Florida won’t be set up to perform to its potential no matter who the next coach is.
But Scott Stricklin is an entirely separate nightmare, a form of a cancer that’s been slowly eating away at this program for years as opposed to the engineer of a rapid nosedive like Napier. Stricklin should have been fired three years ago as a direct result of the Alligator’s bombshell report that women’s basketball coach Cameron Newbauer— another of his coaching hires with a historically bad record— was physically abusing his athletes. But that’s a discussion for another day, because it’s a complicated one that features the vacancy of a full-time University president. Plus, while his firing has to come first in order to let a new AD pick the next football coach, we’re specifically talking today about how Billy Napier spent the entire offseason living in an alternate version of reality that he couldn’t hide in forever. In truth, there’s only one reality, THE reality, and in it, his football team just got walloped by a rival that hired its coach eight days after Napier was hired as the Florida Gators football coach.
The most depressing part of all this is that for the first time ever– or at least in three quarters of a century– a Florida Gators football season is truly finished before it even began. Florida hasn’t even played an SEC game, and yet those among us with addresses in THE reality know that this is over. There’s no hope now. Even if things seem to get better momentarily in the next few weeks, Napier’s first 26 games have conditioned us to understand that any flash of success is just a mirage until proven otherwise.
Florida can beat Texas A&M in two weeks, and I’d even argue they probably will because of the massive drop-off in natural ability between Cam Ward and Connor Weigman and the teams’ respective offensive and defensive lines, but it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference in the big picture. Napier can bullshit his way through press conferences blaming fans in the nonexistent central Florida basements all he wants, but nobody without either a vested interest in Napier plus an enormous level of arrogance or the ability to jump between dimensions in the multiverse can debate the point anymore– including those with money. The man carries a grotesque 11-15 overall record, including 7-15 against Power Five schools. So Billy Napier has to be fired, preferably sooner rather than later, possibly in mid-season so Florida can hand the keys to Ron Roberts or Russ Callaway and see what they’re made of on a trial run, and the search for a new coach has to begin immediately.
And that search needs to be conducted in a very different manner than the prior four, especially after the most recent one has just absolutely detonated the program. Historically, Florida has typically shied away from the big names, opting to go with the unproven rising star (and once, with Dan Mullen, the high-floor, safe pick). In other words, someone who isn’t a star yet, but that Florida envisions becoming a star in Gainesville thanks to better resources than they’ve ever had access to– and that approach lets Florida get away with paying its football coach less than its main rivals.
But just because that tactic worked decades ago with Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer doesn’t justify a fifth straight coaching search orchestrated with an end goal of not paying top dollar after you missed on your last four. School lifer coaches don’t exist anymore. Hiring the young, hotshot commodity in hopes of keeping him for 30 years as they build a machine like FSU did with Bobby Bowden or Penn State did with Joe Paterno just doesn’t happen these days. If you’re lucky, you can get 15-20 years out of them, the way Alabama did with Nick Saban, Georgia seems to be in the middle of doing with Kirby Smart and Clemson seems to be at the tail end of doing with Dabo Swinney. And even those are rarities.
No, this time, the people conducting the search for Florida have to A) be different than the people who conducted the prior four, and B) swing for the fences. And they’d better not miss. This time, it has to be a name that sends shockwaves throughout college football, a name that commands respect in the SEC because he’s had prior success at the highest level of the game as a head coach. Otherwise, you may as well just punt on the program entirely.
In the interim, the Florida Gators football team is forced to lick its wounds against Samford before Texas A&M comes to town. Short term, beating those two teams would be a nice reprieve from the years of abuse that’s rained down on an admittedly impatient yet loyal fanbase. But now, for the first time in a long time, it’s what happens behind the scenes that matters most.
And as is the case with most things in college football, we’re just going to have to wait and see how it plays out.
