Billy Napier has a plan but are Florida fans willing to accept some growing pains in Year 1?
A couple weeks ago, Billy Napier opened his preseason press conference quizzing a room full of reporters on a word you might see watching the Scripps National Spelling Bee.
“Propinquity.”
“I challenge you in the next press conference we have, you can give me the definition of that,” Florida’s new first-year coach joked.
It means closeness. Kinship. Togetherness.
Think, the exact opposite of what the Gators’ football team devolved into under former head coach Dan Mullen. Propinquity? By the end of the 2021 season, Florida was divided, disconnected and undisciplined.
The Gators lost nine of their last dozen games against Power 5 opponents under Mullen, who was fired despite multiple 10-win seasons because a fractured foundation was completely exposed by the end.
So in steps Napier, who brought to Gainesville a meticulously detailed plan with him from Louisiana where he transformed a middling Sun Belt program into a perennial conference contender.
Can he engineer a similar turnaround in Gainesville? And more pressing: Will the ‘Bama blueprint coupled with the Clemson family feels return the Gators back to contender status?
One way or another we’re going to find out.
Step 1 for Billy Napier: Florida’s culture change
While much of the Florida fan base’s focus this offseason has been on Napier addressing UF’s talent issue for the future (a 2023 recruiting class that’s run cold and then white-hot recently), Florida’s first-year head coach has doggedly gone about instituting a significant culture change within the program over his first eight months.
Florida’s culture was rotten by the end of Mullen’s tenure, with players clearly withholding effort and a selfishness permeating from the top down. This wasn’t about one thrown shoe in a wild 2020 loss to LSU. It was a pattern of concerning behavior. When Napier got to Gainesville, his first goal was to instill his family-first environment, so he took 100 college football players back to grade school in an effort to create connection and chemistry.
How to dress. Musical chairs. Pop quizzes.
“It all matters,” Billy Napier said.
Over the course of training camp this fall, Napier believes what happens off the football field for the Gators is as important as the team’s 22 practices. UF concluded its first preseason scrimmage Saturday, and while Napier continues to combat Florida’s penalty problem (something that was again an issue in scrimmage No. 1) and lack of playmakers, off the field, the first-time SEC coach is looking for every way to spawn connection within the locker room.
“There’s a human element,” he explained.
“When you have a relationship with the people that you are competing with, when you know their story, when you’ve had in-depth conversations, when you know what to say to motivate, you can push a button. I think it’s critical for the leadership on our team going out of your way to connect.”
You can’t fake unity or loyalty on a football team, but by making every player learn each other’s name and hometown, Napier hopes a single, small gesture can grow into a tight Orange & Blue vine.
It’s easy — natural honestly — to be dismissive of a coach seeking to highlight his own culture change. Almost every new head coach comes into a program and looks to strip the studs from the previous regime.
Napier is no different.
On the surface, Napier’s insistence that every Gators player is mandated to wear white socks is corny, but to him, it serves a purpose. Napier is adamant no detail is too small or unimportant within the organization.
It’s why he plans to shuffle the locker room a couple times a year, even during the offseason. It’s why he paired roommates during training camp between players who didn’t really know each other. Napier understands true brotherhood can’t be forced, but through that propinquity, something just might spark within a locker room.
“It’s a team sport. I think as much as we can do to create that culture, the better,” Napier said. “Individual players don’t make a great team. … I just think that puzzle, the reality that, ‘Hey, look, I’m nothing without the others.’”
While I’m skeptical white socks will serve as some kumbaya moment and suddenly galvanize a previously selfish Gators football team, Napier’s insistence that “the gray is the enemy” should be music to Florida fans’ ears after two seasons where Mullen ignored every red flag within his program.
No excuses?
This is what Nick Saban’s famed Process looks like. Structure. Vision. Communication.
Under Napier, the Gators have direction now — from a more organized strength and conditioning program, to an optimized training table, to a shiny new $85 million football-only facility. They have a head coach who willingly dives head-first into recruiting, too.
“You’re losing any and every excuse,” said S&C coordinator Mark Hocke recently, who came with Napier from Louisiana-Lafayette.
Only that’s the next challenge for Napier as the 2022 season nears.
With his CEO-style vision, Billy Napier has transformed Florida’s infrastructure over the first eight months since he took the job. He’s hired his army of assistants, support staffers and recruiting personnel. He’s built some goodwill on the recruiting trail. He has his fancy facility. But now actual football games are about to happen, and Napier can’t immediately fix Florida’s thin defense or snap his fingers and suddenly have actual playmakers on the perimeter.
The 2022 Florida Gators have a lot of lingering questions. Anthony Richardson has tremendous potential, but his one career start was a disaster. Is he actually ready to make a leap and become a true QB1?
The schedule, especially to start the season, is unforgiving, and what happens is the offensive line suffers even a single major injury?
Billy Napier may have the blueprint for future success, but Florida fans better be willing to accept some Year 1 growing pains in the present.
This is not a Shane Beamer-like situation at South Carolina. The Gamecocks’ head coach impressively pulled off a quick cultural change in Year 1 — but he did so with zero expectations and a fan base united behind him.
Napier also inherited a broken locker room — only he’s saddled with folks wanting results now. Even the last three fired UF coaches won at least seven games in Year 1.
Napier’s Clemson 2.0 cultural chemistry experiment needs time to marinate, but this is a W/L profession, and Florida fans mostly care about what they can see. It’s hard to talk about returning Florida back into a championship contender and then miss a bowl game in Year 1 — but that’s a possibility this fall.
Gators’ diehards are notoriously hard on their coaches, and although Napier has done his best to preach patience, that word doesn’t exist in a UF fan’s vocabulary.
“I’m a lifelong Gator fan, so I feel like I can say this, but our fan base has become the worst in terms of criticism and a lack of patience,” said former Florida All-American wideout Chris Doering in an podcast interview with Jake Crain just last week.
“Napier hasn’t even coached a game yet and his popularity has been up and down because of recruiting. I just don’t think people understand the disarray (Napier) inherited. The lack of elite SEC talent on the roster. Florida fans need to understand where they are right now.”
Where they are is with a first-year SEC head coach looking to out-Alabama and Georgia — only with UF starting miles behind. Napier’s plan may very well be what unlocks Florida’s future potential, but in 2022, he’s rolling a boulder up a mountain on skates.
”We all understand what we’re getting ready to take on from a challenge standpoint,” Billy Napier said just weeks before Pac-12 favorite Utah comes to town for UF’s season opener.
“We want to have a tough-minded team that can handle adversity and overcome obstacles. I think that’s one of the things that’s critical is that we galvanize the team and we prepare to play through and practice through the gauntlets in front of us.”