Post Bowl Game Thoughts on CBN

The clunkers were due to the stink of the old regime rearing its head - the Mullen-rented players got big heads including AR and already were thinking about how to cash out. If I had been Napier, I'd have purged the entire roster of Mullen players and lived with a possible 0-12 season. You can't build a program around players who learned from Mullen. He should have sat all of them down last January and pointed them to the portal. I also think he should have sat all of Mullen's players early in the season and played his players even if it meant some of them playing both ways. 0-12 isn't far from 6-7. I would stay away from the Youtube channels that were propping up Gator football after the SC game because it ain't pretty.

 

Every fan base is the same. Ryan Day is 45-5 & there OSU fans who want him fired after losing two straight to Michigan.

Auburn fired Chiz two years after he won their first NC since 1957, Alabama fired Bill Curry after a 2-loss season because he lost to Auburn.

 

Except for Vandy all of our losses were against winning programs. You mention LSU but Kelly had more to work with than Napier. We lost 90% of our offense when Grimes and Copeland decided to transfer leaving AR to throw to the one guy that Napier grabbed from the portal. The 2 best players on offense he poached when he left Louisiana. Getting ETN was a boon. The issue on defense is Grantham's stink still on all of those players Napier got stuck with. You can't fix stupid and we were the Kings of Stupid. As I said in my latest reply, Napier should have purged the roster of all Mullen/Grantham players and start there. He was hired too late to hit the portal with full force, but we might be able to grab a few guys in January. In order to build a program like Bama's, it won't be done in Year 1. LSU wasn't left in shambles, hell they just won the CFP 2 years earlier. We on the other hand, have had 12 years of mediocre play with a couple of seasons that gave us false hope.

Next year is when we start seeing if Napier is the man. Who knows? Look at FSU. Remember the last 2 seasons? Makes our season look like we won the CFP. Won almost as many games this year as FSU did the prior 2 years combined. They were patient and now it appears Norvell has his foundation set. That's what we need from Napier. You can't build a mansion on a landfill no matter who you get to build it.

 

Tegator, it is posts like these why I take your posts seriously. Very well done....

 

We can disagree on Kelly. Started with maybe 40 scholarship players. Hit the portal hard, recruited great, and coached even better. I’d say the culture and lack of discipline at LSU when Kelly walked in was worse than Florida.

 

I'd take LSU's 40 over our 65 any day. They have out recruited us for over a decade.

They have a chokehold on a pretty talented state and have success poaching Texas and Florida kids.

Throw in the fact that Kelly has a name and winning reputation over a relative unknown and that was going to make their transition easier.

Now you may ask why they have Kelly and we don't..... $$$$$ Our administration won't pay what LSU and others will and haven't done so for a long time. Kelly, despite some rumors, was more interested in LSU and thought he could win a National Championship there quicker. Can't say I'd disagree with this logic.

 

The statement that “Gator fans have never been patient” has been repeated so much that it seems most of us have forgotten that the last time we had back-to-back sub-0.500 seasons was 1978-79—back when “better luck next year” was our official motto so it seems. Even though a lot has changed since 1979-1984, Gator Nation really has no choice but to have the kind of patience we had with Charley Pell because the lack of patience we showed with Champ, Mac, and Mullen is only making things worse. Napier is trading short-term wins for long-term wins, so we should show a kind of patience we have not shown in 40 years. What choice do we have? Keep repeating the same mistake of firing coaches at 3-4 years? As long as Napier shows he is doing something different from his three predecessors he should get more time to do the complete rebuild. His predecessors traded away long term success for short term success. The bowl game showed us that having the more talented roster on paper does not equate to beating better built and better coached teams that have year-over-year buy-in like Oregon State. Napier’s teams at Louisiana looked like a G5 equivalent of Oregon State, so there is a sign that he can apply that template to Florida over time. At Louisiana it took him a year to turn the roster over and rebuild a program that was under NCAA sanctions. Ray Graves never won a championship but his teams were just below championship level and it took Charley Pell 6 years to fix 9 years of Doug Dickey’s mediocrity. I think it would be reasonable to give Napier more than 4 years to fix 12 years of mediocrity and incompetence. Going back to Oregon State, Jonathan Smith basically applied a mix of pre-NIL and post-NIL transfer portal roster management to create a team that can compete with just about anyone. His model looks similar to the one that Napier used at Louisiana, so that gives me hope that Napier’s Florida version of that model will show positive results within 3-4 years.

 

Still amazed the two sunbelt players were so good. Kinda gives me hope that coach at least has a good eye for talent.

 

In the last 10 years Gators have had 4 loosing seasons. In that same period of time Alabama, Georgia, LSU, Ohio State and Clemson in total have one loosing season. Currently we are not in the same hemisphere as these teams and maybe we never will be. I don't have a clue if CBN is the right guy for the job or not. However he is the guy and deserves our support until proven he can't do the job.

 

With 3 straight bowl losses, our all-time bowl record fell to 24-24. Hopefully, we can start again to take these bowl games more seriously in the future to get back over .500.

 

I don't disagree, but ignoring the portal this cycle for key positions will result in a 2023 season that Gator fans will beg to forget. We desperately need some experienced stopgap players so the HS talent has time to learn and mature. By and large, true freshmen can't be expected to be able to immediately compete at the SEC level.

 

Exactly. Here we are impatiently comparing Napier (and before that, Mullen) to coaches on teams that have not had losing seasons in decades, if ever. We do not need to lower our expectations, but we certainly need to acknowledge that Napier's situation is not a one-year turnaround job like Brian Kelly's. As long as Napier does not repeat the mistakes of Muschamp, McElwain, and Mullen in the first 4 years we should give him some slack. Each of those coaches made easy wins up front that extended our good faith in them as they hid the underlying problems from us. Napier is showing us just how bad it is and how much the damage the previous coaches caused over 12 years.

 

Curry went 26-10 at Bama, 14-6 in the SEC. It wasn't the losses to AU that did him in.

 

Excuses excuses

 

40 4 and 5 star players. We had zero 5 stars and a handful of 4 stars with mostly 3 stars and walkons. In fact, LSU before Kelly had 10 times the 5 stars than we had over the 10 year period before Kelly arrived. Worse, LSU recruited better than Mullen and McElwain. Many of our 4 stars ended up hitting the portal doing nothing while they were here. Just go back 5 years and highlight the guys they recruited that ended up being game changers.

So here is my proof:

2022

LSU - 12th
UF - 18th

2021

LSU - 3rd
UF - 12th

2020

LSU - 4th
UF - 9th

2019

LSU - 5th
UF - 9th

2018

LSU - 15th
UF - 14th

2019 - 2021 LSU had 3 consecutive Top 5 classes. That's a big deal because no program outside of the Top 5 has won a national title this Millennium. LSU recruited better last year than we did. Whether Kelly had a bigger name than Napier remains to be seen but let me remind you Kelly would have never come to Florida. Kelly sees LSU having a better foundation to build his program around. UF is just a poser to him. Considering what we have done since Meyer left, he might be right.

So taking a look at 2023:

LSU - 5th
UF - 11th

Again LSU ranks in the Top 5. It is what it is. LSU's program is better right now than ours and it's going to take a couple of years for Napier to rebuild much like what Norvell has done at FSU. Yeah, we were laughing at them last year weren't we. Now they are the ones laughing at us. Do I think Napier is the man? Have no idea, but we have to give him time, not just fire him after one season. If we do that or stack the deck against him for Year 2, he'll fail and we'll end up looking for a new coach again and this time we won't recover. End of a program, wait another 5 decades before we get back to the top. All these programs firing their coach after a year or 2 will never return to greatness. They may have some success, but the days of old will never return.

And I again, my point is LSU just won the CFP in 2019. We haven't even sniffed the CFP yet. LSU's recruiting classes after that season were all Top 5. Mullen couldn't even build on the success we had in 2020.

 

Miami was a disaster.

Our season was a disappointment.

 

The notion that we're on the same plane as LSU is silly.

Lots of folks still think that this is 2010 and all we need is a tweak here and there.

Over the last 12 years, I have watched the steady decline in this program until it has finally hit rock bottom (as far as our standards are concerned).

 

I agree that his is a long-term project. I am concerned that despite being given an army of recruiting personnel, he has a “good” class but Miami sits at #5 ?

Miami had a disappointing year on the field, but coach Mario Cristobal is giving Hurricanes fans reason to be excited about the future with a top-five class. They powered up the rankings after several additions, including two impact commitments in the trenches. Close to home, they landed explosive and disruptive ESPN 300 DL Rueben Bain out of Miami Central, and they went into the Northeast to get No. 3 OT Samson Okunlola, a flexible and powerful blocker from Massachusetts. Miami now is one of only two classes with three five-star commits (joining USC), and the Hurricanes now have two of the top three offensive tackles in the nation

 

Miami's success on the trail is mainly due to their booster Ruiz. He has ponied up millions for Okunlola, McClain and others. He has claimed that he'll spend countless millions to keep recruits away from UF, among others who he disdains. How long this continues is unknown.

Our administration refuses to get into these kind of bidding wars. This will definitely lengthen the time it takes Napier to rebuild as I'm sure several of those recruits may have signed with us, if not for Ruiz's money. I'm torn in a way. I'd like to see us open the wallet to a point, but I think chasing this guy is a fool's errand. I can't see what he's doing at scUM becoming a sustainable model for success.

 

Doesn’t matter the reasons, we seem to be losing the battle of perception. Need some serious mojo good news. Media portraying you as a train wreck is never good, no matter the validity.

BDE!