Napier two years in
Most programs that eventually win championships take a big leap from year one to year two under a new regime.
Urban Meyer’s Gators went from 9-3 to 13-1 and a national championship. Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide went from 7-6 (and a loss to Louisiana-Monroe) to 12-2 with their only losses to Utah in the Sugar Bowl and Meyer’s Gators in the SEC Championship. Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs went from 8-5 to 13-2.
In fact, of the 13 coaches to win an SEC Championship since the SEC Championship game was introduced in 1992, 10 of them saw an increase in winning percentage in year two, one stayed the same (Les Miles went 11-2 in both seasons) and two (Phil Fulmer and Gus Malzahn) had a worse record.
Overall, future SEC Championship coaches went from 106-53-1 (66%) to 139-32-0 (81%) from year one to year two.
So when the team you cover goes from 6-6 to 5-7 from year one to year two, it definitely gets you thinking. It certainly makes clear why people are asking about Billy Napier’s job security. After all, if the goal at Florida is SEC Championships (at a minimum), he’s missing the average 15 percent improvement we normally see for those coaches.
Obviously Miles, Fulmer and Malzahn prove that you don’t necessarily need to achieve that jump to put a championship in your trophy case. Those three have combined for five of the 31 SEC Championships since 1992 and have won two national championships. They also combined for a 27-11 record in their second year, so it wasn’t like they were under .500 or anything.
But you do have to admit that there is something different between those coaches – who were considered good coaches, but certainly not transcendent – and the two guys who just faced off in the SEC Championship a few weeks ago. So what is that difference?
The significance of one-score games
Last year in the NFL, the Minnesota Vikings finished 13-4 and 8-1 at home in the regular season. However, the Vikings fell to the New York Giants in the opening playoff game. That wasn’t altogether unexpected, as the betting line favored the Vikings by only three points even though their record was way better and the game was at home.
So why the narrow spread? Even though the Vikings had a sparkling record, they had actually been outscored for the year. That sparkling record was built on the back of an 11-0 record in one-score (8 points or less) games. Winning consistently in those sorts of games just isn’t all that sustainable.
The same has been true in college football as well.
Jim McElwain went 7-1 in his first two seasons in Gainesville in one-score games. That number actually got up to 9-1 in 2017 before the pixie dust wore off, McElwain dropped consecutive close games to LSU and Texas A&M, and (alleged) shark pictures and death threats led to his departure. Dan Mullen went 6-1 in one-score games in his first two seasons in Gainesville before finishing his last two seasons with an 0-7 record in the same category.
Perhaps the best story associated with this phenomenon is Scott Frost. Frost was hired at Nebraska (and considered at Florida) on the heels of a magical 13-0 season for the fake 2017 national champion UCF Knights. The issue for those looking at one-score game results is that Frost had gone 1-4 in one-score games in 2016 and then 4-0 in 2017. His 5-4 record in such games wasn’t alarming, but the sequencing of the results made the 2017 jump in production look way better than it actually was (i.e. UCF should have lost 2 of those 4 games). Frost proceeded to go 5-22 in close games in his four-plus seasons at Nebraska, indicating that his close game performance in 2017 was a significant outlier.
The Frost example is an extreme one. Typically, in-game coaching makes a difference around the margins in close games. Of course, that means coaching matters more if you’re playing a lot of close games. That was the case for Frost, whose Nebraska teams played 27 one-score games out of 47 total during his tenure.
That leads to a pretty simple question really: are great college coaches great because they are better in one-score games? Or do they just avoid them altogether?
One-score game avoidance
As I mentioned above, 13 coaches have won an SEC title since 1992. Some of those coaches are relatively forgettable, like Alabama’s Mike DuBose. Some of them are legends like Steve Spurrier. And some of them are in-between, like Mark Richt or Les Miles.
But when I looked into their ability to avoid close games, a very clear pattern emerged.
The list of SEC-winning coaches is sorted by how often their teams participate in one-score games at the school where they won the title. Obviously Nick Saban shows up on this list twice, at LSU and Alabama.
But look at that list! The clear coaching savants are Saban, Spurrier and Meyer (when you include what he did at Ohio State, it’s really impressive), with Smart well on his way to becoming one of the greats. And those four coaches are the best in the SEC over that time-frame in avoiding one-score games altogether and it’s not particularly close.
What that means is that those guys don’t have to be spectacular in one-score games. In fact, Spurrier, Saban (at Alabama) and Meyer weren’t great compared to some others on this list when it comes to results in one-score contests. But they have been absolutely spectacular in the games that aren’t one-score games and have limited the opportunities for losses in close games along the way.
Look at Alabama last season. The Tide finished the year 11-2 with a Sugar Bowl win but the season was considered a disappointment. In many ways, that’s because it included two losses by four points total. Of course, the Tide also beat Texas by one, Texas A&M by four and Ole Miss by six, so it’s not like they were particularly unlucky. But in that specific season, Nick Saban’s squad didn’t avoid the close games and got clipped twice.
Compare that to recent seasons for Georgia. The Bulldogs played one close game (a 10-3 win over Clemson) in 2021 and two close games (26-22 at Missouri and 42-41 vs. Ohio State) in 2022. Both the Missouri game and particularly the Ohio State game could have gone either way, but Georgia was able to pull those out and a title was the result. And what was the score against Alabama in this year’s SEC Championship? Another one-score game at 27-24.
So where does Billy Napier stand if we look at these particular metrics? Well, not great.
None of these recent flops at Florida have really been all that good avoiding one-score games, with Dan Mullen performing the best. Napier falls right in the middle. But where other coaches have been able to make up the difference is by winning games that aren’t close (Mullen, Muschamp and Zook) or by winning games that are close (McElwain), Napier hasn’t been able to win either consistently. The coaching gaffes and discipline problems have been an issue in games, but Florida isn’t even winning the games that don’t depend on those sorts of decisions.
McElwain’s record at Florida in his first two seasons was 19-8, but that included a 7-1 record in one-score games. Had Napier produced at that level in close games, his overall record would be a much more palatable 15-10. But he hasn’t produced in those games, which makes the shortcomings in the other games much more pronounced.
Takeaway
What about if we look at Napier compared to his peers from the 2021 coaching carousel? Also, not great. Dan Lanning (30%) and Brian Kelly (26%) have done a much better job at avoiding one-score games than Napier (36%). But Lanning (95%) and Kelly (75%) have gotten the job done in games that aren’t close as well.
You can argue that both Kelly and Lanning had much better foundations coming in from Ed Orgeron and Mario Cristobal. I think that’s a fair argument to make. At the same time, Lanning immediately went out and hit on transfer QB Bo Nix and has improved Oregon on defense from 100th in 2022 to 22nd in 2023 in yards per play allowed. Kelly also hit on transfer QB Jayden Daniels and presided over the best offense in the country this season, though LSU obviously had its own problems on defense this season.
Napier himself has brought in transfer QBs in each of his first two seasons (Jack Miller and Graham Mertz), but the offense (his calling card) has either regressed from 2022 to 2023 (29th in yards per play gained to 57th) or stayed relatively level (0.262 EPA/play in 2022 vs. 0.279 EPA/play in 2023) depending on what metric you look at. Graham Mertz outperformed expectations, but certainly he did not have a Nix or Daniels type leap. When you combine that with the futility on the other side of the ball, you have a recipe for a regression from year one to year two.
Does this mean Napier is doomed? Not necessarily, but he’s running on borrowed time without one distinct thing going his way: D.J. Lagway absolutely, positively must be a star.
Dabo Swinney took over Clemson in 2008 midway through the season. If you evaluated him after his second full season at the helm, you would’ve seen a coach with a 19-15 record, a 40 percent win rate in close games and 44 percent of his games being close.
But from that point on, Swinney has only had 28 percent of his games within one-score, he’s won 88 percent of his non-one-score games and has won 76 percent of his close games. Essentially, he’s right below some of the greats from the chart above.
What happened? In 2010, Clemson went 6-7 with Kyle Parker getting the lion’s share of the snaps that season. But a heralded redshirt freshman named Tajh Boyd did get a few snaps that year and then took over as the starter the next season. Boyd’s reign then fed into Deshaun Watson (with a small transition from Cole Stoudt) who then fed into Trevor Lawrence (with a small transition from Kelly Bryant).
It is interesting that Boyd went 10-4, 11-2 and 11-2 at times when Clemson was starved for success, but it wasn’t until Watson took over fully that Clemson began its run with two consecutive 14-1 seasons and a national championship. That continued under Lawrence (39-3 from 2018-2020) but has regressed back to Boyd’s level of winning with 5-star QBs D.J. Uiagalelei and Cade Klubnik.
It’s not a coincidence that Washington is great with Michael Penix, Jr. pulling the trigger (finished second in the Heisman voting) and Michigan is great with J.J. McCarthy under center (finished 10th). Regardless of what happens next week, the only national champions of recent ilk with a recruiting profile like Washington or Michigan are the Clemson example above and 2010 Auburn, who had a guy named Cam Newton winning the Heisman.
Whenever a new regime comes into a program, you’re looking to see whether they answer some key questions regarding recruiting, player development and in-game coaching. Napier has already given us some answers with the team’s on-field performance in 2022 and 2023 and they don’t look great. Beyond just the on-field gaffes, we have his record in one-score games below .500 as well. Add to that the struggles we saw on early signing day and it’s an extreme needle Napier is trying to thread.
One thing to remember is that even if Napier does turn things around, there are likely to be some hiccups along the way. In Tajh Boyd’s first year at Clemson, the Tigers got embarrassed 70-33 in the Orange Bowl by West Virginia. And Auburn needed Newton and Nick Fairley (and a 7-0 record in one-score games) to win the championship after going 5-7 and 8-5 the two years prior.
Given Florida’s 2024 schedule, 8-5 would probably be a sign that things are pointing in the correct direction. That means Lagway playing the part of Boyd, or hopefully Watson, Lawrence or Newton. It means L.J. McCray playing the part of Fairley or Shaq Lawson. And it means avoiding getting into the one-score games that expose some of Napier’s flaws in game management to begin with.
That’s a lot of stuff that has to happen, but it’s the razor’s edge path that Napier has to navigate.