A deep dive into Billy Napier’s slow rebuild at Florida, and all the frustrations coming with it

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The 2006 national championship ring glistens in the sweltering September Gainesville sun.

It’s less than 3 hours before Florida, fresh off a win over then-No. 11 Tennessee, hosts Charlotte in The Swamp, and as fans dash by hurriedly with the kind of hustle reserved almost exclusively for autumn Saturdays down south, the man wearing the championship ring leans back in his folding chair, setting a plate of half-eaten brisket and collard greens on a table between us. Wearing khaki pants and a well-worn Gators polo, there’s a calm about him, a steadiness that comes from being completely at home — a bull Gator on the edges of his swamp.

He thinks before he speaks, a rare gift in the age of hot takes and quick clicks. He’s pensive and cautious as he answers my questions, ones he admits he’s “thought about many times in recent years as my most expensive hobby has become more and more frustrating.”

You wouldn’t know by looking at him or passing his unassuming tailgate on Florida’s oak-tree laden campus on any given Saturday, but this prominent Florida booster, along with his family and closest friends, prefer it that way.

“We’re fans like anyone else,” he says. “Football is about time with friends. It’s about getting something good to eat, enjoying kids and grandkids, being with those you love and trust. Of course, it’s great to win, too.”

It’s the winning, or the time it takes for Florida to start doing it at a big rate, that he, along with another friend and big-time Florida booster, who collectively have given millions of dollars to the University of Florida, have spared time with me on a gameday to discuss.

Along with five current or former SEC coaches, including a former head coach, these prominent Florida boosters were granted anonymity to freely chat about Florida’s continued football frustrations with Saturday Down South.

‘It changes every week and maybe, that’s the problem.’

We’re half a bowl into 4 Rivers banana bread pudding when the other Florida booster, sporting a 1996 National Champions hat and his own national championship ring, this one from 2008, speaks up.

“The week after Florida’s big win over Tennessee was a quiet one for me,” the man says.

It was Florida’s first rivalry win in the Billy Napier era, after the Gators dropped all 4 of their annual rivalry contests (Tennessee, LSU, Georgia, and Florida State) in Napier’s first season in Gainesville.

Both men are vocally supportive of the young Florida head coach. They both subscribe to the belief that Napier inherited a mess, and it may take some time for the 44-year-old Georgian by way of Tennessee to dig his way out of it.

“He inherited a big ol’ mess” one of the men repeats. “It wasn’t just a team coming off a losing season. It was a toxic culture, a lack of young talent on the roster, and you combine that with the fact that Florida has spent a decade playing catch-up on facilities and institutional commitment to winning, you know? He’s the first guy playing with a full deck, but what goes along with that is taking over a business that has been beat up and run into the ground a bit before he showed up.”

The other man grins, nods,  and takes a long pause before adding, “This is big business, right? Everything football means for a school, think about it? Admissions applications, big profits for athletic departments that build chemistry labs you put on your television commercial. It takes a whole level of institutional commitment. That’s why I call Gators football my most expensive hobby.”

After Florida’s convincing win over Tennessee, the Gators seemed to have proof of concept under Napier.

Florida beat the Volunteers by being more physical at the line of scrimmage, playing sound, tenacious defense, running the ball and getting their playmakers the ball in space offensively.

“That win was a check-the-boxes win,” a current SEC offensive coordinator told SDS last week. “Everything Billy wants to do down there, they did against Tennessee. It was huge for showing that his plan is the right one.”

The booster with the 2006 championship ring is known for vocal support of Napier. To him, the Tennessee game relieved heat on the young head coach, but only until the next big game.

“I would get all these texts or calls from people who wanted big changes after the Utah loss and they would say, ‘Hey, this Napier guy isn’t all that bad! Or, maybe you were right, maybe we just need to give the guy a chance,” he tells me. “I tell (the other fans) to keep an open mind, no matter what happens in the Kentucky game. I know it changes every week with this fan base. Maybe that’s the problem.”

A Bluegrass Debacle reminds Florida ‘winning is hard’

The “wait until the next game” sentiment proved prophetic.

Things did change for Napier after the Kentucky game.

Kentucky dominated the Gators, piling up over 300 yards rushing in a 33-14 win. The loss was Florida’s third straight to Mark Stoops and the Wildcats, and their fourth in six games. The biggest reason for the change in fortune of a game Florida won 31 times in a row from 1987-2017 has come at the line of scrimmage, where Stoops’ Kentucky teams have simply bullied the Gators. The debacle in the Bluegrass state was the latest reminder of how far Napier needs to go to rebuild Florida’s physicality, depth and toughness up front.

“The SEC is a line of scrimmage league, right,” a former SEC head coach told SDS this week. “Kentucky has figured out they can win in this league consistently by being physical and deep up front. Florida isn’t in that place right now. They are getting there, especially on the defensive line. But Stoops built that thing inside-out and Florida isn’t there right now.”

While Andy Staples and Nick de la Torre of On3 are undoubtedly correct that Napier is “safe” at Florida this season, largely thanks to his contract and huge buyout, the aftermath of Saturday’s blowout loss at Kentucky felt different.

For the first time in the Napier era, the Florida head coach seemed under collectively intense fire from both the media and fan base. Napier’s Monday press conference was uncomfortable, with the coach openly asking why questions were being asked that weren’t being asked after the win over Tennessee.

I counted 4 times today Napier said something along the lines of, "Some of these questions you're asking, you weren't asking a couple of weeks ago."
I haven't gone through all of his previous transcripts, but I certainly don't remember him saying that much in the past https://t.co/GMJxreFRv4

— Matt Baker (@MBakerTBTimes) October 2, 2023

Florida fans were especially loud on social media, calling for staff overhauls, staff terminations, and in rare instances, Napier’s dismissal. A smaller group of fans targeted Florida special teams analyst, Chris Couch, hurling vitriol so excessively toward Couch and his family that Couch left social media. These types of personal attacks were universally condemned by an overwhelming majority of Florida fans, but they speak to the toxic influence of social media in high level college athletics. When things go south, social media assures it gets loud quickly.

Billy Napier is fond of the expression “winning is hard.”

The issue Saturday in Lexington, to some extent, was Florida didn’t seem up for the “hard” part of winning. Florida didn’t seem interested in embracing the physical challenge of Kentucky. This is not a new problem at Florida, according to a former SEC head coach, who suggested Florida’s physicality issues transcend multiple coaching staffs.

“Florida was soft under (Jim) McElwain, nowhere near physical enough on the offensive line,” the coach told SDS. “They were soft the last 2 seasons under (Dan Mullen), too. That Orange Bowl team was tough as hell. They would punch you in the mouth and laugh when they were bleeding. Then they got soft and played finesse ball for 2 years and if you could hit them over and over, they’d wilt. Look at some of the losses: at Texas A&M and the Cotton Bowl in 2020, LSU in 2020 when they lose their edge on defense and their cool late in the game. That type of stuff is cultural. It’s not an easy fix.”

Physicality also reflects buy-in, another SEC coach told SDS. How much do you want to win?

“Sports are hard,” a current SEC defensive coordinator said. “Napier knows that, and these kids, most of them heard that somewhere. But who is the messenger reminding them of that as they build with a young team? It can’t be the head coach. You have to have leadership that does that work when (Napier) isn’t around.”

Is Florida making progress in fixing its physicality? Is Florida making headway culturally? At least one longtime former SEC assistant who spoke to SDS felt like they were.

“I think (Napier) has buy-in down there, no question. They played really hard last season. There’s effort, there. But against Kentucky, you saw how much harder it is on the road. They have good edge defenders, and even those guys weren’t interested in holding the edge in the run game when it got hard. You can’t take a week off when you are building something. But you have to sell that to 18–23-year-old kids.”

‘A talent accumulation issue’

The Kentucky game was a stark reminder of Florida’s toughness and physicality deficiency.

Many Florida fans lamented the offensive line coaching of Darnell Stapleton and Rob Sale, Florida’s two offensive line coaches. But a season ago, that duo coached an offensive line that had a consensus All-American, a freshman All-American, and the Gators were a semifinalist for the Joe Moore Award, honoring the nation’s best offensive line unit.

Did Sale and Stapleton forget how to coach?  It’s more complicated than that, according to longtime college football and recruiting analyst Corey Long, who has covered the sport and recruiting for SDS, ESPN and the New York Times.

“It’s a talent game,” Long told SDS this week. “Sale and Stapleton can coach technique and develop players. Their coaching is not the problem. But they also have to accumulate talent and that’s part of the equation. As a coach, Sale and Stapleton have to know their room and they need to make the personnel moves necessary.”

It’s fair to criticize personnel choices by Sale and Stapleton.

Florida lost 3 potential starters with SEC experience this offseason when tackle Michael Tarquin, a former 4-star recruit, and guards Ethan White and Josh Braun hit the transfer portal. Tarquin’s absence hurts terribly, as he is now starting at Playoff contender Southern Cal. Braun, a fantastic run blocker, also is missed.

“I don’t know if they pushed the Tarquin kid out or what,” an SEC offensive coordinator told SDS. “I do know when he hit the portal it was an eyebrow raising thing. It was a, ‘I better pick up the phone and call the kid before my boss asks me why I haven’t yet thing.’”

Without those three pieces, Florida’s offensive line features All-SEC center Kingsley Eguakun, Austin Barber, the former blue-chip tackle who was a freshman All-American, and a host of transfers and youth. Somewhat shockingly, of Florida’s 10 offensive linemen on the 2-deep ahead of Saturday’s tilt against Vanderbilt, only Barber and Alabama transfer Damieon George were blue-chip recruits (4- or 5-stars). That’s a high-end talent deficiency, and Florida has to win recruiting battles to address it or get more aggressive in the transfer portal.

“Sale and Stapleton are decent recruiters, not bad ones. If they have the dudes, they’ll coach them well, like they did last year,” Long told SDS. “But if I could fault the Napier regime to date with one big thing, it’s that they lack a no-frills recruiting machine on staff. I’m talking about a guy who you can make the tight ends coach or whatever and he goes and gets players at any position in any region against any school recruiting the kid. Urban had that guy in Doc Holliday. He had no boundaries as a recruiter. Florida needs that guy right now because they aren’t landing them on the offensive line.”

‘A slow build? In the SEC?’

Will the loss at Kentucky, along with other likely losses to come, including to archrival Georgia and bitter in-state rival Florida State, force changes under Napier? Is it time for changes?

The sources SDS spoke to over the past month were split on what comes next in Gainesville. One thing that did seem to generate consensus was that this is not a quick fix, rebuild.

“They have been down a long time,” one former SEC coordinator told SDS. “They haven’t won the SEC in over a decade. They had 2 teams under Mullen that could have, but those teams lost games they should have won like in 2019 to Georgia and didn’t get it done. They have great resources. But it’s not an easy lift.”

The former SEC head coach who spoke to SDS agreed.

“A slow build? In the SEC? I think with the portal, you can turn it quick. I also think you better be recruiting at a high level or that quick turn becomes a quick collapse. I think Napier wants sustainable success. That’s harder,” the coach said.

That reality doesn’t register with many Gators fans, who see the fast start Coach Prime is having in Colorado, which won 1 game a season ago, or look at the way Kirby Smart had Georgia playing for a national championship in Year 2 as signs that you can flip something in a hurry. Never known for patience, many Gators want to win now.

One current SEC coach told SDS that comparing Smart’s situation to Napier’s shows a lack of understanding of the reality of the situations.

“Kirby inherited a culture where they had stability and won 10 games the year before he took the job and competed for SEC championships constantly. He was hired to bridge the last gap between being really good and winning championships. Billy is what, the fourth or fifth guy since Tebow left? That’s apples and oranges.”

That might be accurate, but one of the Florida big-money boosters warns against discounting impatient fans as loonies who simply expect too much.

“Rank and file fans and boosters’ matter, too,” he tells me, pointing around at various tailgate scenes and adjusting the brim of the ’96 title hat to shield the late afternoon sun. “People always talk about the money I spend to help Florida, but you see all these people? They work hard, too, and they spend their money so they can come with their families to these games. You can’t ignore that that. It’s passion and why coaches make $7 million a year to coach a game, you know? That money is possible because those people want to win. The best coaches understand that’s who they are accountable to and why they get to own a home at Lake Burton or vacation in Baker’s Bay.”

How bad has it been at Florida of late? Is Florida a slow-build situation more akin to Clemson, where Dabo Swinney needed years to build an established winner after Clemson spent nearly 2 decades playing for second behind FSU in the ACC?

There’s value in the perspective of a visual.

The Gators boast one of the SEC’s four winningest programs since full integration came to the SEC in 1972, ranking third behind Alabama and Georgia in win percentage over the 51 years of fully integrated football. But Florida hasn’t won the SEC since 2008, has posted 3 losing seasons since 2017 after having none from 1980-2016, and is coming off their worst decade, from a win percentage standpoint, since the 1970s. Things have not been good, and turning that around immediately might not be realistic, no matter how many posts are fired off on Twitter about “Coach Prime.”

*includes interim coaches

** Florida’s 1984 SEC Championship was stripped by the SEC after Florida won the league. The 1985 and 1990 teams were also ineligible due to NCAA infractions under the Pell and Hall regimes.

Does Florida’s recent downturn matter to recruits?

The former SEC head coach who spoke to SDS thinks it does.

“The main thing is the kids don’t remember a time when Florida was elite. They know Alabama, Georgia, Ohio State, LSU or Clemson. They don’t know that Florida beat the pants off Georgia for 25 years. They were in diapers when Tebow won all those games. You have to sell kids on now. Fans remember the other stuff.”

Selling kids on Florida may make a slow build even harder, but so does the quick fix age of the transfer portal. But even the portal doesn’t guarantee overnight success.

Take Mike Norvell for example, who has used the portal beautifully to address his roster deficiencies at FSU. Norvell started 7-11 at FSU, two wins worse than Napier’s 9-9 at Florida. He was 0-4 with a loss to Jacksonville State in his second season. But given time to build his program from the ground up, he now has FSU positioned for a second College Football Playoff berth in program history. Florida, of course, has never been to the College Football Playoff.

Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned about patience in Norvell. Perhaps comparing a slow build at Florida State, a program in the ACC, is not a good data point for a program like Florida, which plays in what is traditionally the best conference in the sport.

SEC passion, and the age of social media, where a loud minority’s anger can quickly snowball into a dull roar of anger and marching pitchforks, is also a factor.

“In the age of SEC football being king and the influence of social media, attempting a slow build in the SEC landscape is a challenging task,” Dave Waters, the host of the hugely successful college football podcast Gators Breakdown told SDS via email this week. Waters cited the reliance on young players, who often make mistakes, as one issue with a slow rebuild, and aptly pointed out that to rely on young players successfully, you better recruit at an elite level, which Napier has not done until this season, when he is expected to land his first top-5 class.

“The transfer portal introduces another concern when trying to execute the slow build strategy,” Water wrote. “A slow rebuild typically entails early losses. You have to maintain the investment of current players and as a program you have to effectively sell recruits on the future potential and the opportunity to make a difference. That is easier in the early stages of a tenure, but sustaining the recruitment process becomes more challenging as losses continue to accumulate.”

Does Florida have the patience for that in a world of quick take hot take media and mob mentality social media?

“You have to consider it,” Waters wrote of social media. “Major programs with championship expectations like Florida cannot afford to accept mounting losses. The constant exposure on social media is a blessing and a curse, but at Florida, where a huge rival is winning championships and another (FSU) is competing for them now and is consistently ranked, that creates restlessness.”

The restlessness gets loud. Does the restlessness and constant turnover create fatigue in fundraising, too?

The big dollar boosters who spoke with SDS pushed back against that idea, but with one big caveat: They think stability at Florida has been missing and has merit.

“There’s this one quote from (former UF Athletic Director Jeremy Foley) that gets misused so much it makes me ill,” the man with the 2008 title ring tells me as we walk together toward The Swamp entrance ahead of the Charlotte game.

“Jeremy said what must be done eventually should be done immediately, and Florida fans use it to fire every coach who loses a tough game. The truth is Jeremy believed in stability, too. That’s how he built the best athletic program in the SEC at Florida. Hire good people, live with growing pains, let them flourish. Mary Wise. Billy Donovan, Bryan Shelton, Becky Burleigh. None of them won immediately. It takes time. If you run a business and you change leadership over and over, you can succeed in spurts, I guess. My business model was always about culture and stability. Jeremy’s was too. Mine worked. Jeremy’s worked.”

‘Winning is a habit’

None of that means Florida should accept another decade of losing, or Napier shouldn’t make changes.

Vince Lombardi used to say, “winning is a habit,” and it was a favorite phrase of Florida’s favorite son, Steve Spurrier.

The ball coach reflected on the phrase during the summer, when SDS asked him about Napier.

“When I left Florida in 2001, at least they weren’t calling us losers anymore. They called us other names— cocky, brash, whatever, instead. But losing is a habit, too. Obviously, 6-7 isn’t what we’re looking for at Florida. But Napier has done a good job cleaning up things and he improved his staff after Year 1, I think.”

The staff improvements referenced, including young defensive coordinator Austin Armstrong, appear to be paying dividends in 2023.

Will Napier continue to be reflexive and make changes again after Year 2?

One former SEC coordinator thinks he needs to, starting with who calls plays.

“Napier calling his own plays is lunacy, OK? If you are a genius, maybe you do that. But his offensive scheme is just OK. They were good on offense last year with a great offensive line and a stud at quarterback. But that scheme isn’t brutally hard to prepare for and every second Napier spends game planning, he can’t do something else. That tradeoff isn’t worth it for that scheme.”

On a radio show with Steve Russell of WRUF this week, Spurrier seemed to agree. When Russell mentioned Missouri’s prolific passing game, Spurrier went right to the heart of the matter — who was calling plays.

“Eli Drinkwitz, he gave up play-calling and hired him an offensive coordinator and they’re 5-0,” Spurrier said. “Jimbo Fisher gave it up and brought in (Bobby) Petrino, who’s an excellent play-caller.”

Multiple sources told SDS this week that Napier will make a change in the offseason and bring in his own coordinator. Time will tell if that is impactful, but first and foremost, Napier the CEO has to get the hire for who replaces Napier the coordinator right.

While they wait for that, Florida has 7 games to play, chasing the program’s first winning season since 2020.

Where does that leave the Gators?

“Beat Vanderbilt,” one of the boosters tells me. “I know where I’ll be Saturday afternoon. It would be nice if Coach Napier and the Gators made that trip fun, like it has been so many Saturdays before.”

Neil Blackmon

Neil Blackmon covers SEC football and basketball for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.