Florida head coach Billy Napier was already facing an uphill battle, Steve Spurrier's comments only make his job harder
Facing mounting pressure and an impossible 2024 schedule, Billy Napier was already entering next season in a must-win situation, and then the call came from inside the house.
In an interview with Gene Frenette of the Florida Times-Union, the most famous and beloved Florida football alum torched Napier’s program, as Steve Spurrier tossed the chum in the water on the Gators’ embattled third-year head coach.
“Billy [Napier] is a good guy who works his tail off. I like Billy, good family man. But we do wish the organization was a little bit more tidy,” said Spurrier, WHO STILL HOLDS A PAID AMBASSADOR TITLE and office in The Swamp.
“There’s a feeling around the Gators of ‘What the heck are we doing?’”
“There’s a lot of questions that I don’t have the answers to about organization. Just because you hire the most people doesn’t mean you’re going to win. All these extra people, I question how much that really helps.”
In the interview, Spurrier also criticized UF’s NIL methods, praised Georgia’s roster-building philosophy and questioned, “How many Gators growing up would think we’d lose our best running back (Trevor Etienne) to Georgia?”
When the Head Ball Coach speaks, people pay attention — especially in Gainesville. When Spurrier adds to the hot-seat ammunition with biting comments riddled with ‘we,’ he’s speaking for more than just the Head Ball Coach, too.
Typically, Spurrier’s pithy one-liners are reserved for UGA, Tennessee or Florida State, but Florida’s football program has spiraled to such disappointing depths the last few seasons that the former Heisman Trophy winner and national championship head coach simply couldn’t help himself.
Considering everything else Napier was already up against, Spurrier’s comments may be the official beginning of the end for the otherwise well-liked coach.
Why Napier faces a critical must-win season in 2024
The Jaden Rashada fiasco was not Billy Napier’s fault, but pretty much everything else that’s happened during his tenure has gone wrong.
Napier was hired on a promise he could raise UF’s roster talent, assembling an “army of staffers” who would recruit, develop and coach the team into a championship program akin to rivals Georgia, Alabama and LSU. He was billed as an amalgamation of Nick Saban’s detailed process with Dabo Swinney’s rah-rah attitude. He had a proof of concept at Louisiana-Lafayette.
Or so he thought.
Napier has managed to recruit at a lesser (or similar) level than his predecessor Dan Mullen (classes ranked 10th, 13th and 20th nationally), only with much, much worse results on the field.
He’s just 11-14 in his two-year tenure as UF’s head coach — and the football on the field has been as dispiriting as the overall record.
The Gators have been historically terrible defensively the last two seasons. Their special teams have been embarrassing, costing them multiple wins. Offensively, Florida has been better than many of Napier’s harshest critics will admit, and yet considering all the issues around the program, it’s fair to question why he refuses to cede play-calling duties to allow more time to focus on such problems.
Somewhat admirably, Napier has not shied away from shouldering the blame for many of UF’s struggles. As he told me last summer, “I’m up for the challenge. … There’s no magical position here. We’ve just got to do the work.”
The problem is Napier also believed his team was “lightyears ahead” after a frustrating (and mostly unpleasant) 6-7 season in Year 1 … and then the Gators stumbled to 5-7 last season — losing five straight to end the year to miss bowl eligibility.
Since taking over the program, Napier has routinely preached patience and process, but in today’s college football economy, that just doesn’t sell.
A program as tradition-rich in a state flush with so much blue-chip talent not be staring at the real possibility of a fourth-consecutive losing season — something that hasn’t happened at Florida since before World War II. Not with the transfer portal or NIL.
And yet Florida, with a schedule that includes as many as nine potential preseason Top 25 teams, has a (way-too-early) preseason win-total at 5.5.
UF’s offseason got off to a rocky start when explosive tailback Trevor Etienne transferred to Georgia and the team’s top pass rusher Princely Umanmielen bolted for Ole Miss. Still, Napier has worked hard to change the narrative that his program is a sinking ship.
He held onto 5-star quarterback DJ Lagway and convinced 5-star pass rusher LJ McCray to sign with the Gators, too. He has overhauled his coaching staff, delegating more responsibilities to other assistants and changing the team’s strength and conditioning approach.
But what did Taylor Swift say about band-aids and bullet holes?
Why Spurrier’s comments are so damning for Billy Napier
Since Steve Spurrier roamed Florida’s sidelines nearly 25 years ago, UF has become a program that gobbles up coaches like gators eating fish in Lake Alice.
Florida’s three previous head coaches (Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain and Dan Mullen) all had 10-win seasons by this point in their tenure — and yet none survived through Year 4.
So while athletic director Scott Stricklin remains Napier’s biggest ally and is adamant that the coach isn’t on any hot seat, history strongly suggests otherwise — and Stricklin very likely won’t make that call anyway. No modern AD gets to hire three football coaches anymore.
And that’s what makes Spurrier’s comments so scathing.
He’s in the building too and he cut into the core of Napier’s supposed greatest strength as a head coach — his massive flow-chart and detailed blueprint to return Florida to excellence.
“Just because you hire the most people doesn’t mean you’re going to win.”
Napier clearly hasn’t done a great job of hiring the right people (just three of his original 10 on-field assistants remain in the program), and the ones he did nail are leaving for jobs to other SEC programs (his recruiting director Joe Hamilton, linebackers coach Jay Batemen). He certainly hasn’t won enough games to engender any sort of sympathy from an agitated fan base, either.
Billy Napier was already facing an uphill battle to change the direction of Florida’s program in 2024, and now one of the most influential voices in the building is publicly questioning his ability to do the job, too.
Good luck with that.