Billy Napier hot seat: 'Inevitability' Florida coach loses job following Miami loss

In almost every sense but officially, it’s over for Billy Napier at Florida. The Gators fell flat for the third straight week on Saturday, losing 26-7 at the hands of No. 4 Miami.

That brings their record to 1-3 already this season with perhaps the most difficult schedule in college football remaining. Six of Florida’s remaining eight games are against ranked opponents, and one of the other two is a battle with Mississippi State, which is currently undefeated.

That sets up for a season that is trending toward another losing record, which would mark the third time the Gators finished under .500 in Napier’s four seasons. Given that the coach narrowly avoided a firing last season before reeling off , college football analyst Josh Pate believes the writing is on the wall.

“I assume that this is it for Billy Napier,” he said on Josh Pate’s College Football Show. “I assume that he will lose his job, which I hate because I love Billy Napier, but it is what it is. Bottom-line business and he has not gotten the job done there. Florida deserves better. They invest to the degree where they have the right to think they deserve better and they’re not getting it right now.

“This is a major story. These jobs don’t come open very often. We thought maybe it would happen last year. It didn’t. I just don’t think you avoid that trap door twice. So it sounds like an inevitability that this is gonna happen. The thing about that is, OK, when?”

Florida’s offense once again looked dismal on Saturday, one week after quarterback DJ Lagway tossed for five interceptions in a loss against LSU. The Gators avoided committing turnovers, but managed a paltry 141 yards total as Lagway threw for only 61.

So it seems that Billy Napier will be on his way out, but whether that comes in the middle of the season or at the end of the year is yet to be seen. Florida would owe him $20.4 million if it waits until the end of this year to fire him, per On3’s Pete Nakos.

Although the Gators will certainly be willing to pay that given the way Napier’s tenure has gone to this point, Pate also argued that such a move can be more difficult to get over in the current age of NIL. Florida will also have to come up with money for a new coach and manage the NIL of the players on its roster, but that’s the price they must pay to get the program back to being a national contender.

“We are in the modern age,” Pate said. “The age where your roster can disintegrate if you fire a guy and then hire another guy and those guys don’t like that guy. So it’s a very, very different age. It’s also the age where money is real and has to be treated as such. It used to be, ‘What’s his buyout? $20 million, $40 million. Oh, who cares?’ Well, you better care now.

“You’ve got to treat that money like it should be treated because it has to be treated. You’ve gotta buy a guy out and buy a staff out and then go pay a new staff. That’s a lot of money. Maybe they want it bad enough, but that’s a lot of money.”