Billy Napier out of answers as Gators dominated by Texas A&M
When Dan Mullen lost to Missouri in November of 2021, here’s what I wrote:
“It’s pretty obvious that Dan Mullen is done. It’s not obvious because he’s lost the team. It’s obvious because he has lost the ability to generate hope within the fan base. Once you lose that, there isn’t anything you can do to get it back.”
You can substitute Dan Mullen for Billy Napier and that rings true after Florida’s loss to Texas A&M.
The game against the Aggies was a repeat of the debacle from two weeks ago against Miami, but this time there aren’t any of the same excuses. A&M has a first-year coach and should be rebuilding much more than Florida in year three. A&M had a backup QB forced into action after a shoulder injury made starter Conner Weigman a late scratch. After playing conservatively and pinning A&M on their own one-yard line, the Aggies proceeded to embarrass the Gators defense with a 15-play, 99-yard touchdown drive that included 14 runs.
There’s not much more of a symbol of Napier’s failures than that drive. With reports that Ron Roberts is now calling defensive plays, this is the third straight defensive coordinator that Napier has brought in who hasn’t been able to get the defense to perform at even what we would call below average. The Gators are now ranked 122nd in yards per play (7.2) after ranking 124th last year (6.5) and 105th two years ago (5.9).
Napier is the common denominator.
And that’s without considering the failure on display at the most important position on the field. I was asked on last week’s Gators Breakdown about whether an every-other-drive rotation of D.J. Lagway and Graham Mertz would satisfy me and I said it would be worse than just starting Mertz and sticking with him. The reason wasn’t that I think Mertz is better. It’s that to be a successful CEO at any level, you have to make hard decisions. Alternating drives with each indicated that Napier couldn’t make the hard decisions necessary to be successful for the job.
And yes, Steve Spurrier rotated QBs, but he didn’t rotate them every other drive to make sure his QBs got equitable time. He played the guy who executed what he wanted to see on the field and yanked them off when they didn’t live up to his expectations. He certainly wasn’t interested in participation trophies and made being a QB in Gainesville hard.
But it’s the hard concept that is important here. That sort of environment develops the toughness necessary to succeed when things don’t go your way immediately on game day. It’s that sort of environment that builds leaders who will go hold teammates accountable when their level of play or effort doesn’t measure up. And it’s that sort of environment that pushes people out of the program who don’t have the toughness that’s necessary to win at the highest level.
And that’s really what we’ve found out about Billy Napier in the first three games this year and really, over the past two seasons as well. He may be a really nice guy, which means I’m happy he’ll have $26 million to figure out what to do next. But he’s also someone who has lost to backup QBs from Utah, FSU and now A&M in just the past two seasons. He’s someone who has lost to Vanderbilt once and Kentucky twice. He’s someone who is now 5-6 against Power-4 opponents in The Swamp.
And yet he still insisted in his post-game press conference that he sees a good team in practice. I know he was going to get killed for whatever he said afterwards, but I’d have preferred him attacking the fans to trying to tell us that his team is great when nobody is watching.
That means what we’re left with is a coach who puts a substandard product on the field, who doesn’t recruit any better than his predecessor, and who has made staffing changes that have had absolutely zero effect. For two-plus years now, this team has had no identity, other than to calmly receive the ass whippings in a way that reflects what we see from the head coach on the podium after each whipping.
There’s been a lot of chatter about the toxicity of the Florida fan base, but the reality is that this fan base isn’t toxic (excluding some bozos on twitter who go after players and families). It’s a fan base that knows what it takes to win at the highest level and holds its coaches to that standard, because if the coach wilts when the home-town fans amp up the pressure, they’re going to wilt against Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, or in front of the booster whose buy-in is necessary to secure the key recruit.
The fact that Napier wilted after a loss to Miami – calling out those fans for tweeting from their central Florida basements – isn’t an indication that you can’t win at Florida. It’s an indication that he can’t win at Florida.
That doesn’t mean that a panacea is on the horizon. When Mullen was let go in 2021, I also wrote the following:
“Are Mario Cristobal, Bily Napier, or even (gulp) Lane Kiffin going to do better? You don’t know and neither do I. They could crash and burn. That’s always the risk when you make a coaching change and you have to weigh that with the risk of keeping things the same.”
Napier has been objectively worse than Mullen. But that doesn’t mean making the change was the wrong move. It means that we have discovered that neither Billy Napier nor Dan Mullen had what it takes to win big in Gainesville.
Maybe the next guy won’t have what it takes either. Perhaps he’ll crash and burn just like Napier has, and Mullen has, and Jim McElwain and Will Mushchamp did. But at least we’ll have hope that he might turn things around, because if there was any ember of hope left that Napier might survive after the Miami loss, that was completely extinguished on Saturday against A&M. So bring on Lane Kiffin or Jedd Fisch or a redux of the Urban Meyer experiment. There will be plenty of time to debate and discuss exactly who should be the head coach of the Gators.
But taking this loss – and Napier’s entire body of work – into consideration, it’s abundantly clear that a new answer at that position is needed.