Down you go. (Photo credit: Florida Gators)
There’s been much to criticize about Florida Gators coach Billy Napier since his arrival in Gainesville.
From the X’s and O’s side of things to the pure, cold, hard results, his tenure simply hasn’t been what many thought it could or should be. Florida’s failure to field an even competent defense, show urgency on offense down multiple scores late in the fourth quarter, or be unpredictable on the play-calling side of things has generated enormous frustration among the fanbase. That’s translated to bad results, leaving Napier with a horrendous 12-16 overall record just two weeks ago.
Somehow, though, Napier still has a job, even as the mega-boosters quickly garnered his buyout money after a terrible opening act in 2024 and continue to lurk behind the curtain, waiting to step out and yank the plug out of the wall at a moment’s notice. The bye week was a popular juncture that a lot of fans earmarked as the end of the road, but it didn’t happen. He got the chance to make corrections and fix things once more. And to his credit, it seems like he did— albeit against an overmatched opponent with an objectively terrible in-game coach, and only for one half of dominance.
Against Central Florida last Saturday, one half of dominance was more than enough for the Florida Gators.
It might not be this Saturday.
Florida opened the game by munching eight minutes off the clock and grinding out a 15-play, 75-yard drive that Graham Mertz capped with a touchdown pass to Elijah Badger to give the Gators a lead they would not let go of. Central Florida then drove inside the Florida 10 with one quick screen pass and then seven running plays in a row, when Gus Malzahn opted to put the ball in the hands of KJ Jefferson on back-to-back passing plays. This was despite the fact that Central Florida entered the game with 326 yards per game on the ground, the second-best running game in the country, and Florida came into the game with the 109th best rush defense. Jefferson, of course, completed neither of the two throws, and the Golden Knights kicked a field goal, putting them behind the eight ball for good.
Because then the Gator defense stiffened, allowing just one first down on the next three drives. Included in there was a three-and-out, Jefferson getting stuffed on fourth and one, and a drive-killing sack from Tyreak Sapp and RJ Moten. Meanwhile, Florida put two more touchdowns on the board, the second of which was set up by a gorgeous deep ball from DJ Lagway to Chimere Dike. For good measure, Florida tacked on a field goal at the end of the half, thanks in part to Lagway audibling into a running play at the line that gained 34 yards.
Things got frustrating from there. The game was never in doubt, but the latter two quarters quickly devolved into unbridled ugliness.
Florida was shut out in the second half and didn’t even really threaten. Their lone drive into Golden Knight territory stalled at the 35, and Trey Smack promptly missed a 52 yard field goal. The Gators would only touch the ball three more times, generating one first down on each drive and nothing more.
In fairness, part of that was Central Florida’s peculiar game management.
Down 24-3 to begin the third quarter, the Golden Knights took the ball and bled eight and a half minutes off the clock before kicking a field goal. Those three points adjusted the score from 24-3 to 24-6, meaning the Golden Knights spent eight and a half minutes reducing a three-possession game to… still a three-possession game. Billy Napier, for his part, was perfectly content to help the Golden Knights run out the remainder of the clock, playing a prevent defense and sitting on the ball on offense.
When it was all said and done, Florida had defeated Central Florida, 24-13, mirroring the score of the last time Gus Malzahn came to the Swamp exactly five years earlier to the day. That time, he was representing Auburn. This time, he was representing the school that beat Auburn in a non-CFP Peach Bowl, spurring a national championship claim that’s every bit as real as Santa Claus or the tooth fairy.
Thus, at long last, the Central Florida fans are humbled. Their high and mighty program, purportedly part of some “Big Four” in the state of Florida, lost to the worst Gator coach (by pure winning percentage) since World War II. When you factor in the resources Napier has at his disposal, and the fact that he’s still losing with them, he’s got a great case to be the worst coach in program history, bar none.
This game wasn’t without frustrations, either.
The lack of a killer instinct in the second half is highly annoying—Napier did the same thing a year ago against Tennessee—but it’s also understandable. This team is, for lack of a better way to put this, not very good. The more you ask them to do, the higher the risk of a complete implosion is. One missed block from the notoriously weak right side of the offensive line could lead to a strip-sack and a scoop-and-score. So I get that.
However, that doesn’t jive with the timeout he called at the end of the first half to get the ball back. Right after Montrell Johnson scored a second-effort touchdown to make it 21-3, Central Florida ran the ball on first down—and Napier immediately called timeout. The thinking here, too, is logical in isolation: get a quick stop, get the ball back, and score again. I get that, too.
Which means that Billy Napier still doesn’t really know who he wants to be. Does he want to be “Scared Money Don’t Make Money” Billy, be a riverboat gambler like Les Miles or Dan Campbell, and live with that risk/reward matrix? Or does he want to be cool, calm, collected, and mellow Billy, trust the talent that he’s recruited to make things happen, and play the “high floor, low ceiling” game? Whichever one it is, I’m honestly fine with—but he’s got to pick one. You can’t have bipolar methods of operation as a head coach, especially not within the same game.
That same piece of frustration is extended to the Florida Gators’ QB play. On one hand, you’ve got the ultimate “high floor, low ceiling” guy in Graham Mertz who protects the football and is gritty as hell, but also misses reads from time to time and doesn’t have the deep ball in his arsenal. On the other hand, you’ve got a true dual-threat guy in DJ Lagway who can make huge plays with both his legs and his arm, but we also haven’t seen him truly hit his floor yet because he’s a true freshman who hasn’t faced great competition yet. And the Gators are about to, starting with what’s likely to be a pissed off Tennessee team.
Which one does Billy Napier believe is the leader of this team? Because the answer cannot be “both.” Rotating quarterbacks is never a good move unless A) they’re so drastically different that the defense has to respect entirely different styles of offense B) the play-caller is an elite offensive mind and C) the offensive line can adequately block for both of them. It’s not that either quarterback is really bad, it’s just that you don’t want to tinker with one of the few constant positives you have on a team where just about everything around the QB position is crumbling to ash.
If either quarterback, for instance, gets hot against Tennessee, you do not pull him “just because it’s the other guy’s turn.” This is not rec ball. There is zero obligation to play anybody X number of snaps. Pulling a quarterback who just made that throw, just saw that look he liked and checked into a different play, just looked off the safety with his eyes, etc. and forcing him to ride the pine for a drive or two results in him cooling off as time elapses. Momentum is a real thing in football, and doing anything to mess with it while it’s on your side is like getting bored of cruising smoothly on I-95, so you drive your car over a nail on purpose just for the excitement of a little bump. The benefit is microscopic; the potential detriment is catastrophic.
So in short, Florida is still not in a great place right now. Beating Central Florida, a team we expected to beat, does nothing to undo the damage of blowout home losses to Miami and Texas A&M. Billy Napier still needs to pick off two of Texas, Tennessee, Georgia, LSU and Ole Miss to even have a chance of surviving beyond this season, and then it hinges on whether or not he can finish the year with a rivalry win over a horrible FSU team. (Reminder: Napier is currently 1-8 in rivalry games.)
Napier’s firing, of course, would trigger another wave of questions—does DJ Lagway transfer? Do half the blue-chips he recruited transfer? Does our high-society idiot of an athletic director really get to pick a third football coach?—and the program would remain in limbo. So yeah, not a great spot.
But at least we’re not where Central Florida is.
Never mind the 48-21 pasting Colorado handed the Golden Knights the week before they came to Gainesville. The big picture is even uglier.
The Golden Knights have a fraction of the resources as the Gators do, and they burned a large portion of them on KJ Jefferson—who simply isn’t very good. They’re stuck with Gus Malzahn now, who pushed all his chips forward to try to recruit his next Cam Newton—and failed. Whereas Florida at least has the money to fire its failure of a coach and start over, Central Florida cannot afford to do the same—even though Malzahn’s buyout ($12 million) is less than half of Napier’s ($25.6 million).
What’s worse, Golden Knight players are now opting out left and right to preserve their redshirt seasons, which players can do if they play four games or less. Starting receiver Xavier Townsend started the wave of opt-outs before the Florida game, thus beginning a snowball of resignations from the program. Have fun with that in the Big 12, y’all.
Central Florida fans now get to experience all the suffering of a former national champion to fall on hard times, but with none of the hardware to at least look wistfully back on. (Seriously, if a Golden Knight fan crows about their 2017 national championship, just ask them for a picture of the national championship trophy. Not the 2018 Peach Bowl trophy, because Florida has one of those too, but the national championship trophy.)
Anyway, the Florida Gators beat the Central Florida Golden Knights, which is great. It shuts up one of the most annoying fanbases in the country—and if you’d like to gloat at them even further, order yourself a walking reminder of that win right here.
The win, of course, is more enjoyable than it is helpful. It’s a mere stay of execution for Billy Napier’s tenure, not an acquittal of all the things he’s done wrong here. Napier is still in big trouble at Florida and very well may not survive the year.
But at least for one knight—for one golden knight in Gainesville— a piece of order was restored, with the Central Florida Golden Knights looking up at the Florida Gators as a peasant would the king. Even in this most atrocious of coaching regimes, in what still might be a terrible year that gets that coach fired, the Florida Gators have the bragging rights over their neighbors in Orlando.
And for all the data points that have left Billy Napier open to criticism, he will at least go to his grave having achieved one appreciable thing with the Florida Gators: he reduced an army of Golden Knights to Silent Knights.
