The Billy Napier tenure in a single photo. (Photo credit: Zach Abolverdi, On3)
Where am I supposed to begin a recap of one of the most humiliating losses in Florida Gators history?
I guess we could start with the bare, plain facts. The South Florida Bulls, with a talent composite rating outside the top 60, came into the Swamp and stunned the Florida Gators, 18-16. That’s what the SEO wants me to say, so sure, that’s how I’ll start this.
And it would be disingenuous for me to get into all the things Billy Napier did wrong—which most reasonable people agree should mark the end of his tenure at Florida—without at least giving USF some respect. That means acknowledging that Alex Golesh has done a sensational job in Tampa, taking a team that was 1-11 the year before he arrived and transforming them into—and I quote myself from my season preview article here— “a legitimate threat to ruin your season if you mess around.”
Good for him. And good for his players, too. They earned this.
But frankly, USF and Florida are two programs on two different levels of seriousness right now. And that conclusion is drawn simply by knowing that Billy Napier is in his fourth year at Florida, and quite literally nothing about his operations have changed for the better.
There’s still no true special teams coordinator, which was a fun thing to have cross my mind as Rocco Underwood sent the ball flying over punter Tommy Doman’s head for a safety in a game that Florida lost by two points. I first called for Napier to fix this back in November 2022, when Jason Marshall brainlessly attempted to field a punt in his own end zone against Vandy and ended up fumbling the game-winning touchdown to the Commodores. But no, Billy Napier said he knew better than me.
Since then—with no full time staffer in charge of the unit—Florida’s special teams has routinely run onto the field with as few as eight and as many as thirteen players, had two players take the field with the same jersey number on the same play, failed to get the field goal team onto the field correctly not once (Arkansas 2023) but twice (Tennessee 2024) and thus trigger illegal procedure penalties that pushed the field goals back by five yards—both of which missed as part of the plots that led to overtime losses for Florida— messed up a routine field goal snap in a close game against Georgia last year, and now they’ve outright handed USF a victory with two free points that they didn’t have to work for. Among other things.
There’s still no true offensive coordinator, which was really awesome to think about as each of Florida’s first three drives stalled out deep in USF territory. I begged for Napier to fix this back in November 2022, when Napier ordered three consecutive passes—each of which fell incomplete—on back to back drives to start the second half against FSU, after Florida had gashed the Seminoles on the ground to that point. But no, Billy Napier said he knew better than me.
Since then—with Napier and Napier alone at the control panel of the offense—Florida’s offense has self-destructed with a fourth and three shovel pass design against Utah in 2023 that took five seconds to develop, a double reverse play that should have been aborted on the whiteboard and never seen the light of day but was instead rolled out against FSU in 2023 and nearly got Max Brown killed, a “trick” play against Georgia that fooled nobody when Trevor Etienne took the snap seven yards behind the line and was thrown for an enormous loss when his one passing route was covered and he had no Plan B on fourth and inches, fumbled the 2024 game away against Tennessee when by far the less physical of the Gators’ two QBs in that game tried to sneak it in at the goal line, and has just generally become so painfully predictable that opponents and fans alike have begun gloating that they knew what was coming before the ball was even snapped. Among other things.
And there’s still no functional brain activity that’s demonstrated in any critical game scenario, period, which was cool to see in the final three minutes of the USF game as Napier gave anybody who may have missed the last three years of Florida Gators football a chance to witness a real-live instant replay. I begged for Napier to fix this—specifically, task one of his hundreds of staffers with managing the clock for him on game day, go to clock management school for a month or two during the offseason, hire a clock management consultant, literally do something, anything— in September of 2022, when he mismanaged the end-of-game sequence for the second week in a row (this time in a loss). But no, Billy Napier said he knew better than me.
Since then, Napier has casually bled the clock down and showed no urgency down three scores in the fourth quarter against Kentucky in 2023, watched not one but two of his players get ejected from games for spitting in their opponents’ faces, been completely perplexed to watch his team fail to handle opposing crowds’ noise levels and earn pre-snap procedural and/or alignment penalties, and, well, copy and paste the aforementioned issues that a lack of special teams coordinator and offensive coordinator have caused here. Among other things.
So, then, Florida’s latest blunderful bit of clock mismanagement should be no surprise. After Nico Gramatica missed a field goal, the game went to commercial. Coming out of that commercial, Florida took the ball back over… and was so disorganized that they had to waste their first timeout because they couldn’t get the play off.
To reiterate, Florida was so disorganized coming out of a timeout that they then had to call another timeout just so they could run their next play.
Then came more bad situational play-calls, which of course is nothing new. Up one with 2:52 to go, Florida threw two passes, both of which fell incomplete, and spared USF from having to use a single timeout. This is after Napier stood behind the podium at pressers all offseason long and told us all what a strength his offensive line would be, which doesn’t exactly align with being scared senseless by a nine or ten-man USF box in a situation where you need to beat them down in the trenches for two or three first downs to finish off the game.
The two passes that DJ Lagway threw here actually could be argued to be high-percentage throws. Not because Billy Napier designed them to be that way, mind you, or because the routes are high percentage throw routes. But because he threw the ball to the psychoathlete that is Vernell Brown III against lesser athletes who play for USF.
In general, though, those are not high percentage throws. So, OK, Billy: if you want to admit you lied to us all winter, spring, and summer long and your offensive line is in fact not capable of bullying a Sherman tank like you led us to believe and you want to put the ball in the air to bypass the mass of humanity USF loaded the tackle box with, fine. Now’s your chance to roll out one of those bubble screens you love so much, and deploy it against a defense that isn’t in position to stop it.
There’s an explanation floating around that Lagway himself checked into the pass at the line of scrimmage, but in a way that’s even worse. We all saw the way Lagway was throwing the ball throughout the course of the game. His stat line looked good—23/33 for 222 yards—but a lot of that came on tunnel and sucker screens, and he was very inaccurate when going down the field. Why, then, does this player—talented as he may be—have the freedom to audible into a play that has him do it again when he hasn’t had a lick of success doing so all day?
As Adrian Perez said on our show Monday night, in baseball, you don’t deliver the “take” sign to a batter in hopes that he might do it. “No, that’s a direct order, bub. I’ve seen the way you’ve been swinging the bat recently, and I’m telling you as your coach to take a strike on this first pitch—and every subsequent pitch until you see a strike”.
Translate that into football terms, and the rough equivalent is: “I don’t care what you see on the defense, you’re not on today as a passer, so you’re going to hand the ball off on running plays until USF stops it for two yards or less.”
Last but not least, Napier’s mismanagement of the two timeouts he did hold onto finished the Gators off. After the second of the two aforementioned spitting incidents from the mouth of Brendan Bett, USF hit a big play with 1:54 to go to get to the Florida 32. Then, Byrum Brown hit Joshua Porter for a 12 yard gain to the Florida 20, reducing the clock to 1:45 to go. Napier then let the clock bleed all the way down 1:01 to go, when USF got its next snap off. Alvon Isaacs ran the next play for six yards, bringing the ball down to the Florida 14. Napier AGAIN chose not to pop a timeout, USF bled the clock down to :22 seconds, and that was followed by Byrum Brown taking the ball down to the 8. And NOW Napier decides to go through his timeouts, at which point USF began to just maneuver itself into position for what was basically a walk-off extra point.
And here’s Napier’s “explanation” for that sequence.
I put “explanation” in quotations because there is no explanation for this. There’s no explanation for pretty much anything mentioned here. Not because of the sheer head-grasping, hair-yanking horror it evokes to ever see it play out, but because we’ve seen the same exact types of things plague Napier’s Gators before that I cannot truthfully tell you I’m surprised by it.
In fact, there’s no explanation for Billy Napier continuing to be employed at the University of Florida. Savvy football fans noticed the problems with him in his first year. By the end of his second season, it was obvious to anyone above the age of toddler and not in a coma that Napier’s mismanagement of the game was killing Florida, and that he wouldn’t succeed if drastic changes weren’t made.
Yet here we are in his fourth season, and Napier has not done a damn thing to fix things. So frankly, I’m tired of the headlines about how shocking this loss was, and I’m really tired of Napier’s clipped verbiage at press conferences how uncharacteristic the mistakes his team made were.
Is anybody really shocked by this loss? Is anybody really shocked that the same man who lost to Arkansas for the first time ever in the Swamp, lost multiple times to Tennessee for the first time since 2003 and 2004, lost twice in a row to Kentucky for the first time since 1976 and 1977, lost to Vandy in Nashville for the first time since 1988, lost three straight games to Georgia by 14+ points for the first time since World War II, and has the worst overall record as a Florida head coach since Raymond Wolf from 1946-49 also lost to South Florida on his home field?
As for Napier’s claim that his team’s implosion was uncharacteristic, a simple LOL will suffice as my comment to that. No, Billy, it’s every bit as in character as Tony the Tiger snatching Frosted Flakes boxes off the shelves the way that you do with black polos off the clearance rack at Goodwill. Your team melting down before our eyes is not a malfunction of your program; it’s a feature of it.
So this is done. We’re not “waiting to see what happens.” We’re not “letting things play out.” We’re not “holding off judgment until the season is finished.” The season is already finished.
And no. The season is not over because Napier just led this program to its first ever loss to South Florida. This season is over because Napier continues to be in charge of it.
That’s not to say Florida won’t pull off a stray upset or two or even three as the season plays itself out. There’s still talent on this roster. They may even rally to make a bowl game. So by all means, we should continue to watch the games just in case the team does something hilarious, like beat Georgia or FSU or Miami or maybe even LSU this weekend. That’ll make for an all time hysterical night on social media.
But the preseason expectations we had—and in turn, the expectations for the ceiling that we hoped Napier could reach— are little more than smoldering ash now, the end result of a dumpster fire that incompetent people spent years tossing logs, paper, and gasoline into until they finally got bored and just walked away from it.
I do believe that despite its enormous inherent Billy Napier problem, one day, Florida Gators football will be elite again. I don’t believe that day will come with Scott Stricklin in control of the program, but he could theoretically get lucky once more the way he did with Todd Golden. But that day does await, somewhere, far out yonder.
In order to fix a problem, though, you have to admit you have one and be willing to call out its name. You can’t sugarcoat the problem or downplay its severity. You need to label it what it is.
And this Gator football program is not an active dumpster fire that requires the fire department. This is a restoration project that requires the cleansing of the ground that’s currently covered in several inches of soot from a grease fire that was allowed to rage on untouched for four years.
But until that restoration company comes along to fix it, we’re just going to be left here to stare at the previously inconceivable rubble and shake our heads at what’s become of what we love.
