Billy Napier is done. (Photo credit: Matt Pendleton, USA Today)
At long last, Billy Napier has been fired as the Florida Gators’ head football coach. The move is one that fans have clamored for since the Gators’ embarrassing 33-20 loss at home to Texas A&M, but comes thirteen and a half months later after an ugly 23-21 win over Mississippi State. And it is effective immediately. He won’t coach another game.
The news was broken to Napier last night, according to multiple people familiar with the situation. Florida brass allowed Billy Napier to celebrate the Gators’ win for a few minutes, and then pulled him aside and informed him privately. The team was informed of the decision in a 2pm meeting today.
Wide receivers coach Billy Gonzales will serve as the interim head coach. Russ Callaway will call the plays for the offense.
Multiple sources inform In All Kinds Of Weather that Napier’s firing was the end result of Florida AD Scott Stricklin losing a power struggle with some of Florida’s higher-end boosters. Even as recently as Friday evening, Scott Stricklin still did not want to pull the plug on Napier’s tenure. Privately, Stricklin simply did not want to give credence to the growing suspicion that he just isn’t good at his job, which would be the result of him publicly admitting that he’d swung and missed on two football coaching hires– which I think any of us out there could have reasonably surmised anyway.
But the way the game against Mississippi State played out left zero doubt that Napier had to go. A third-and-one keeper that resulted in DJ Lagway getting crunched for a loss when Jadan Baugh plunging forward for two feet would’ve won the game low lighted a horrifying end-of-game sequence that nearly resulted in Florida blowing a two-touchdown lead and losing to a Mississippi State team that hasn’t won an SEC game since 2023. Thankfully, Blake Shapen made a terrible decision and threw a game-losing pick to Michai Boireau.
Also in this game: Napier drew up a third and seven QB power draw that predictably got nothing, watched Florida’s field goal unit take back-to-back penalties to push a field goal back 20 yards, rode the ground game to get near the goal line and then ordered three straight passes– all of which fell incomplete– screwed up another end-of-half sequence, and spectated yet another instance of his team failing to count to eleven, this time trotting out twelve players for a two-point conversion that could have made the score 21-7… which nearly cost Florida the game until Shapen threw the fateful pick.
As we begin to unpack the disaster in canonized fashion, the scale and scope of the damage becomes more and more clear. And it’s historic. Because the lows of the Billy Napier tenure are nauseating.
In fact, he’s got a great argument as the worst coach in the history of the Florida Gators program.
Between losses to Arkansas and FSU in 2023 and Miami and Texas A&M in 2024, Florida lost four home games in a row to FBS opponents under Billy Napier. That right there is more losses in the Swamp to FBS teams in the span of four home games that Napier coached than Urban Meyer lost in his first five years at Florida. Those four straight losses to FBS teams also makes one loss fewer than Steve Spurrier– the man the field is named for– suffered in TWELVE YEARS at the Swamp as the Gators’ head coach from 1990-2001.
Billy Napier walks away from Florida with a paltry 15-22 record against Power Five opponents. For perspective, Urban Meyer beat seven Power Five teams in his first year at Florida, a relatively disappointing 9-3 season.
Billy Napier also walks away with a 22-23 overall record– remember, three of those 20 wins came against Group Of Five teams and four more came against FCS teams– and that winning percentage of 48.89% qualifies him as the sixth-worst of the 24 full-time head coaches in Florida Gators history. Only Josh Cody (17-24 from 1936-39), Raymond Wolf (13-24) from 1946-49), Thomas Lieb (20-26-1 from 1940-1945) and a pair of coaches in the 1910’s, Alfred Buser (7-8) and CJ McCoy (9-10)) had worse winning percentages than Napier. And none of them had anywhere near the resources at their disposal that Napier did.
And now, Napier is going to walk away with about $20 million to not coach the Gators anymore, an infuriating statistic given how historically bad his tenure was.
There will be plenty more to unpack as time goes on. More info will be published on In All Kinds Of Weather as it becomes available. For now, though, just remember: at the end of every storm, a rainbow appears.
Here’s to better days soon, and more fun stuff to cover.
