Is Billy Napier living on borrowed time?
How hot is Billy Napier’s seat? Some iteration of that question has been asked in every single interview I’ve done this offseason, whether it be Paul Finebaum, Hightop Sports, Gators Breakdown, Ali Peek, Shane Matthews or the guys over on 1010XL.
And given Vegas’ odds for Napier being the first coach fired this year, it seems like the betting public thinks he’s definitely on thin ice.
Odds on the first college football coach to be fired from @BetOnline_ag pic.twitter.com/xW1qCgQMuy
— Barrett Sallee 🇺🇸 (@BarrettSallee) July 24, 2024
My stock answer this offseason has been that Napier has to sell the fanbase that there is hope that he is the guy to turn things around. Whether that comes from wins this season or because D.J. Lagway lights things up the second half of the season probably doesn’t matter, but fans (and boosters) need to see a path to championships after year three.
Given the results we’ve seen recently – specifically LSU going 10-3 with Jayden Daniels in 2023 and Kyle Trask going 8-4 in 2020 – it seems clear that QB play alone isn’t going to generate that hope. It also isn’t clear how much Lagway is going to play given incumbent Graham Mertz being the starter.
That leaves selling the fanbase on wins, which leads to the natural follow-up question: how many does Napier have to put up to not just survive, but to give hope that he can thrive?
SEC Championship Coaches
If we look at the history of the SEC, we can get some feel for where Napier sits and what will be necessary to give Gators fans hope that he’s the right guy.
There have been 14 coaches who have won SEC Championships since 1990. That list is Gene Stallings (Alabama), Les Miles (LSU), Mark Richt (Georgia), Tommy Tuberville (Auburn), Gus Malzahn (Auburn), Mike DuBose (Alabama), Gene Chizik (Auburn), Phil Fulmer (Tennessee), Ed Orgeron (LSU), Nick Saban (LSU), Urban Meyer (Florida), Nick Saban (Alabama), Kirby Smart (Georgia) and Steve Spurrier (Florida). I count Saban twice since he built SEC Championship teams at both LSU and Alabama.
Here are some statistical markers from that list:
- None of the 14 coaches have a losing record over their first three seasons.
- Only 2 of 14 coaches have one season below .500 (Tuberville and DuBose in year one)
- The average time to win an SEC Championship was 2.9 seasons.
- 12 out of 14 won the SEC title within three years.
- Tuberville and Fulmer were the only coaches who took longer than three years, and both won their first SEC Championship in year six.
That doesn’t bode well for Napier. The average record for each of these coaches in their first year was 8.1-4.1, but that jumped to 10.6-2.5 and 10.4-2.9 in years two and three. That suggests two things: first, if things were going to work out with Napier and Florida, we probably should have seen a jump in quality of play from 2022 to 2023. Second, the winning percentage for these coaches is actually lower in year three, indicating that a turnaround with that timing is difficult to achieve.
Hall of Fame Coaches
But maybe that’s unfair just to look at the SEC. After all, there are other coaches out there who have built programs whose model Napier could be following, right?
To examine that, I looked at every Hall of Fame coach who spent time at a Power-5 school and whose career ended after 1990 (defining Power-5 as it was last year).
That means guys like Barry Switzer (finished in 1988) and Jimmy Johnson (1989) and Bo Schembechler (1989) are omitted, but someone like Tom Osborne (finished in 1997) is included. It also excludes guys like Saban and Meyer who will end up in the Hall of Fame but haven’t been inducted at this point in time.
As a reminder, the rules for a coach to be inducted in the College Football Hall of Fame are the following: 10 years of experience, coached 100 games, a .600 career winning percentage.
Of those coaches, 55 percent (21/38) had a winning record in their first season, 71 percent (27/38) had a winning record in their second season and 89 percent (34/38) had a winning record in their third season. Of those four coaches who didn’t have a winning record in year three, they can be divided up into two categories.
The first category is the coaches who had success in year one and two and then took a step back in year three. Mark Dantonio went 7-6 in his first season at Michigan State, then 9-4 in year two, before falling to 6-7 in year three when the Spartans lost five games where they led in the fourth quarter. Paul Johnson at Georgia Tech went 6-7 in year three after his starting QB was injured early in the year after going 9-4 and 11-3 in his first two seasons.
In both cases, these coaches had proven their mettle on the field already and were given grace because of what they had already shown.
That isn’t true for the second category of coaches: the ones who had a losing record in all three of their first three seasons. The first is Bill McCartney, the Colorado head coach who went 2-8, 4-7 and 1-10 in his first three seasons. McCartney came to the Buffalos after eight years as a defensive coordinator at Michigan and only had success at Colorado after switching to a wishbone offense after that disastrous third season.
Barry Alvarez is the other coach who fits that profile. Alvarez went 1-10, 5-6 and 5-6 in his first three seasons. However, in his third season, Wisconsin played in seven one-score games and lost four of those games. They also upset Ohio State on an early-season run. Alvarez came into Madison with a strategy to build a wall around the state of Wisconsin for recruits and to build a powerful walk-on program and was able to achieve both.
Other than that, every single coach who made the Hall of Fame had a winning record in year three.
Former Florida Coaches
You might say that holding Napier to a Hall of Fame standard is unfair. Perhaps you’re correct. But the problem with that argument is that we have a track record of what is and is not good enough as the leader of the Florida football program.
Steve Spurrier won 78 percent of his games in his first three seasons and was above .500 for all three of those years. Urban Meyer won 79 percent of his games in his first three seasons and was above .500 for all three of those seasons. Dan Mullen won 76 percent of his games and was above .500 for all three. Ron Zook won 62 percent of his games and was above .500 for all three. Jim McElwain won 65 percent of his games and was above .500 in years one and two. Will Muschamp won 58 percent of his games and was also above .500 in years one and two.
That means that every single coach – the ones we consider successful and the ones who were let go ignominiously – all had three-year records that were significantly above .500.
Mullen came to town talking about the “Gator Standard” and while that eventually became a punchline as things fell apart, that standard has been pretty strong, even for the coaches who haven’t worked out.
Even if we go further back in history, the comparison isn’t great for Napier. Galen Hall went 21-12-1 in his first three years (not counting his 8-0 start in 1984 after taking over for Charley Pell). Pell went 15-19-1 but had winning records his second and third year after going 0-10-1 to start. Doug Dickey started out 16-16-1. Ray Graves started 20-11-1. If we go back to 1950, Bob Woodruff went 18-13 in his first three seasons.
Since the Gators joined the SEC in 1933, the program has had 16 head coaches (non-interim). Only one (Josh Cody, 1936-1939) started his career with three straight losing seasons. Perhaps not coincidently, Cody went on to become the head basketball coach at Temple later in his career.
Takeaway
Billy Napier has currently won 44 percent of his games and has not finished either of his first two seasons over .500.
To get above that mark for his three-season total, Napier needs to go 9-4 this season. That would obviously be a significant jump for Napier and the program and given the schedule this season, would buy Napier more time. Note that 76 percent of the Hall of Fame coaches and every single SEC Championship coach since 1990 has had a cumulative winning record after three seasons so this seems like a pretty good marker.
Even if your argument is that Napier needs more time, I would still suggest that the data says that he needs to pull off a winning record in year three. That’s because the “he needs more time” argument is tied to the rebuilding challenge that Napier inherited from Mullen; that patience is warranted as he builds to something better than what Florida has had in the past.
But the problem with that if Napier is below .500 again is the coaches on the Hall of Fame list who had losing seasons the first two years at a program and then broke through with a winning season in year three.
That list includes Frank Beamer, who famously has talked about how he wouldn’t have survived at Virginia Tech in today’s environment because of his poor record starting out with the Hokies.
It includes Bill Snyder, the guy who took over a completely moribund Kansas State program and still went 7-4 in year three.
It includes Gary Pinkel at Missouri, Hayden Fry at Iowa, Grant Teaff at Baylor and Dick MacPherson at Syracuse.
You can’t possibly convince me that the Florida squad that Napier took over in 2022 is a bigger rebuild than Virginia Tech in 1987, Kansas State in 1989, Missouri in 2001, Iowa in 1979, Baylor in 1972, Syracuse in 1981, Wisconsin in 1990 or Colorado in 1982.
You’re not making the CFB Hall of Fame with the Gators unless you win SEC Championships and National Championships. That’s the standard at Florida, whether you take over a significant rebuild or not.
And history suggests that 7-5 is the bare minimum to give any sort of hope that Napier is headed in that direction, but that really 9-4 is what’s necessary to believe things are really headed towards a championship.
One month left to get the BEST Gators preseason magazine out there!
I’m hopeful that Napier can get to that 9-4 mark and to do that, he’s going to have to do a lot of the things we’ve highlighted in the magazine. Nick has a feature about how Florida succeeded or failed in the “middle 8” (the last four minutes of the first half and first four of the second half) and how that led to wins or losses. I have a feature about hidden points Florida is giving up on special teams that have nothing to do with the large blunders we’ve seen at times. And we also have a piece about how Graham Mertz can take a next step to drive this offense into the elite of the SEC.
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