Beating Kentucky helped Billy Napier flip the switch at Florida

Florida enters the 2025 season as a College Football Playoff dark horse. Despite staring at a treacherous schedule, the Gators have a young phenom at quarterback and stability as play-calling head coach Billy Napier enters his fourth season in The Swamp. Many are high on this football team after the 2024 year ended with November wins over LSU and Ole Miss.

Beating Kentucky last October was a big reason why.

“There was a critical stretch right in there around Tennessee-Kentucky where all of a sudden
we flipped the switch, and there’s a confidence and a belief that we could play with anybody,” Napier said at SEC Media Days on Wednesday.

Florida started last season with a disastrous home loss to Miami and then followed it up with another double-digit loss to Texas A&M at home in Week 3. The walls appeared to be closing in on Napier and a decision on what to do with his big buyout felt inevitable. But then the Gators found some solid footing by winning on the road against Mississippi State and handling UCF at home.

That led to a road game against Tennessee as a two touchdown dog. The Gators lost starting quarterback Graham Mertz to injury in that game but that opened playing time for five-star quarterback DJ Lagway. The Gators took Tennessee to overtime in Neyland Stadium and then thumped Kentucky the next week in Gainesville when Lagway averaged 18.5 yards per attempt on 14 throws. The Gators also rolled up 208 non-sack rushing yards and five rushing touchdowns in the 48-20 blowout win as a two-point home underdog.

From that point, Florida took off like a rocket ship finishing the year with five consecutive wins in games that Lagway started and finished. That has set the bar high for this football program when setting expectations for the 2025 campaign.

“I think that’s where we really took a big step in the right direction last year is we found a level of confidence that we could go toe to toe with any team in the country any place, anytime,” Napier said. “You spot the ball last year — at the end of the year, you could argue we were playing as good of football as anybody in the country.”

Florida used that Kentucky win as a launching point. That loss for the Cats came just a week after a home loss to Vanderbilt that caused a true spiral for the program. Outside of some moments against Tennessee and Texas, Kentucky played a lot of uncompetitive football down the stretch and Mark Stoops was forced to reset his program. A true roster flip came to Lexington in the offseason when the Cats hit the transfer portal extremely hard and made some culture changes within the program. Meanwhile, Florida is humming and that hot seat chatter around Napier has seriously quieted.

Things can change quickly in college football. One result can flip both a season and the outlook for a program. Kentucky will be looking for its own launching point in 2025.