The Alligator Awakens: After patient rebuild, it’s time for Billy Napier to win
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ATLANTA — It was none other than Bear Bryant who said the truest thing there is to say about Florida football.
Sure, Bryant was speaking eons ago, a generation before Steve Spurrier’s Fun-N-Gun offense dragged the SEC kicking and screaming out of the 3 yards and a cloud of dust doldrums of the 80s and 2 generations before Urban Meyer, Tim Tebow, Percy Harvin and the boys marauded and mangled all comers in the mid and late 2000s.
But there’s truth in what Bryant told the Miami Herald in the 1970s, when he asked whether Florida would ever win and win big in the cutthroat world of big-time southern college football.
“There’s a sleeping giant down there,” Bryant growled. “Don’t poke that alligator. It’s asleep. You won’t like them when they wake up.”
In other words, to borrow from the parlance of the times: Don’t let the Gator Boys get hot.
The Gators woke up, of course, and got hot. Florida won 8 (that they count, and 3 that they don’t) SEC titles and 3 (that they count, 1 they don’t) national titles between 1980-2010. Florida also won more games than any program in the SEC in that 30-year span. Then Tim Tebow graduated, Urban Meyer decided to spend more time with his family or work on his health as the head coach at Ohio State, and the Gators slipped into a swampy hole somewhere in the college football shadowlands.
For the better part of the last decade and a half, the Gators have rarely roused from an extended slumber.
Sure, Kyle Trask and a salty defense won 11 games and an Orange Bowl in 2019, and there were one-dimensional outfits in 2012 (strong defense, bad offense) and 2020 (elite offense, bad defense) that came within an arm’s reach of playing for the national championship (2012) or winning the SEC Championship (2020). And yes, millennial Florida fans — and we’re not just talking about the rural central Florida basement dweller variety — will sing standing from their swampy skiff boats and tell you that if Will Grier didn’t need to shop at GMC to feel good about the program’s strength and conditioning program, Florida would have waltzed to a national title in 2015.
But none of those teams won anything better than a couple of SEC East divisional titles and the 2019 Orange Bowl championship. The count since Meyer and company won the national championship in Miami on a January night in 2009 is glaring: 0 SEC Championships. 0 BCS Title or College Football Playoff appearances, 0 national titles. In fact, since 2010, Florida has had more losing seasons (5) and head coaches (5) than SEC Championship Game appearances (3). This is a staggering descent to mediocrity from a program that went 33 years without a losing season from 1980-2013, winning a quarter of the SEC Championships (and 3 more they don’t claim) in that era.
Florida fans are filled with explanations for the downfall, from facility arms race fiascos to recruiting mishaps to bad coaching hires to banning the “Gator Bait” cheer to the curse of the Swamp Kings to the rise of Nick Saban’s imperious Alabama to Kirby Smart’s Georgia death star. Whatever the reason, Florida football, a SEC program at the flagship university in the most fertile recruiting hot bed in the sport, has not been good enough.
Which brings us to Billy Napier.
I wasn’t exactly Jon Snow fighting off the emerging horde at The Battle of the Bastards a season ago when I wrote that Florida was a long rebuild and that embattled athletic director Scott Stricklin (what a difference March Madness makes) was right to give Napier time — as in more time than the typical high church Episcopalian 10-minute homily customary among SEC programs — when he doubled down on Napier last autumn despite a dire September and a record of 4-4 entering November. Florida won its final 4, though, including thrilling home wins over rival LSU and a top 10 Ole Miss, all signs that suggested Florida might finally be stirring from hibernation.
It helps to have a difference maker and program changer at the most important position in sports.
DJ Lagway was 7-0 in games he started and finished in 2024 and was leading the Cocktail Party against Georgia when he exited due to a leg injury. Playing on essentially one leg and with a dinged up shoulder through the month of November and the Florida’s Gasparilla Bowl win, Lagway outdueled Garrett Nussmeier in the LSU win and was better than Ole Miss star Jaxson Dart in multiple advanced metrics (yards per completion, average depth of target, big time throws, fewer turnover worthy plays) and on the scoreboard in Florida’s playoff-spoiling win over the Rebels. Lagway’s ability to make throws few humans on the planet can make, coupled with the prospect of another year in Billy Napier’s offense and strength and conditioning program has scouts and fans alike salivating.
“It is not just hype,” one SEC defensive coordinator told me of Lagway this winter. “He simply elevates the level of their football team. He makes them more multiple because of the windows he can throw into and the way he essentially forces you to play two high by being remarkably accurate on the deep ball. He’s as good a young quarterback as I’ve seen in our conference.”
In fact, the consensus among SEC coaches and scouts SDS talked to this winter was that for almost every question about Billy Napier’s offense and scheme, Lagway offers an answer.
Lagway’s health, of course, is a huge caveat. Florida will face arguably the nation’s toughest schedule for the second consecutive season and Lagway, plagued by nagging injuries throughout last season and the spring, will need to avoid injury for Florida to reach its lofty potential.
But there is potential, which is a testament to what made Napier worth keeping.
Napier has recruited well, building a team from the line of scrimmage outward.
The Gators boast perhaps the SEC’s best offensive line, anchored by returning First Team All-American center Jake Slaughter and All-SEC left tackle Austin Barber. Four starters with a collective 98 starts return and the Gators are deeper up front than any unit they’ve had since the early Muschamp era. That group, which surrendered the fourth-fewest pressures and third-fewest sacks in the SEC in 2024, should help keep Lagway upright. They should also pave holes for a ground game that features returning All-SEC freshman Jadan Baugh, bowling ball Ja’Kobi Jackson, and a host of blue-chip talent behind them.
On defense, Florida returns 7 starters, including bona fide NFL prospects in Tyreak Sapp and Caleb Banks from a defensive line that ranked second in the SEC in havoc and pressures last November (Ole Miss). The secondary, long a skeleton of the “DBU” years of Florida’s heyday, is loaded, especially at corner, where Florida returns 4 players who graded out in the top 100 of PFF in coverage.
Napier’s mindful evaluations, player retention program, and recruiting mean the cast supporting Lagway, the former 5-star Gatorade National Player of the Year in high school, is as good as it has been in Gainesville in a long time.
In other words, it’s time for the mean alligator to shake off the cobwebs and slink out of the Swamp to hunt.
Championship windows in college football are small. Blink and the window shuts. Don’t believe me? Ask Urban Meyer, who admitted the Florida program was a bit “broken” when he left in 2010. Ask Dabo Swinney, who would dispute that his window has shut and may be right, but will have a harder story to tell if the Tigers can’t summit the mountain this season, with Cade Klubnik in year 4 under center. Ask Les Miles, whose grass chewing went from an indelible and affable trait of a winner to frustrated and listless musings of a man who the game left behind in just a few short seasons.
For Billy Napier, it will never get any better than now.
Lagway knows it. He seems to be embracing the pressure, which he called a “privilege” on Wednesday in Atlanta.
Napier? He’s seen the schedule. His reaction (below) will either be remembered as iconic or travel the same sad trajectory as Butch Jones’s “Champions of Life.” Time will tell.
But he knows the talent is there. He’s not making any excuses or talking about process. The process has reached the moment it built for, which begins on August 30.
“At the end of last year (4 consecutive wins), you could argue we were playing as good as anyone in the country,” Napier said Wednesday. “Our development process is working. The organization as a whole is working as well as it has as long as I’ve been a head coach. This is the most talented team we’ve had in Gainesville.”
It certainly is.
Now it’s time for Napier to do what teams this talented are supposed to do.
Win.
Neil Blackmon covers Florida football and the SEC for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
