Article: No, Florida won’t fire Billy Napier in 2023. Yes, the pressure is mounting quickly.

I think Meyer might be the last?

 

His first year is not the same, due to the impact of Covid. Yes, everyone experienced it, but not everyone was in their first year at a school trying to rebuild the program. So, yes, I count his second year as more like his first because of that. You’re more or less conceding we won’t go 10-3 next season, so I don’t see why you think somehow Napier needs patience, but Norvell didn’t.

I’d counsel patience when it comes to competing for championships, sure. That’s likely to take a few years for any coach inheriting what he did. But I think it’s rather lame to expect patience in the hope we field a team that maybe next year can stay within three touchdowns of Georgia or beat a hapless program like Arkansas at home when they were winless in conference play.

There are zero national championship programs where the coach has a team perform this way in his second full season. As stated, Norvell doesn’t count, because he didn’t have a full first season. All of college football was dealing with a bizarre situation, as was the entire country.

The schools with coaches that build programs over time while sucking for years aren’t upper echelon. They’re mediocre also-rans like Kentucky.

I want Napier to succeed. I don’t want to piss away five seasons waiting to see if he can when there are no examples of any coach doing that in a way that should count as success at a program like UF.

 

Firing is not an option, even if the cost of the buy out goes to $0.00.

You are right about the cycle comment. Lets take a looks at UGA. For almost 60 years, UGA has had an unreal run of keeping Head Football coaches.
Vince Dooley was hired in 1964 and left in 1988. 24 year run
Ray Goff was hired in 1989 and left in 1995. 7 year run
Jim Donnan was hired in 1996 and left in 2000. 5 year run
Mark Richt was hired in 2001 and left in 2015. 15 year run
Kirby Smart was hired in 2016 and still is there. 8 year run

Continuity has not been an issue at UGA. There may of been some bumps with in
some of the listed transitions. However, in most cases the effects did not linger.

We need to keep Napier and not air too much dirty laundry in public. That dirty laundry could have an adverse impact on the current recruiting class (which is blockbuster) and the recruiting class for years to come.

Hopefully Billy makes the required changes on himself, his staff, and the players. Eventually we will have a real roster in another year or two.

 

If this kind of recruiting continues...it's only a matter of time.

Hey, everyone wants to go all mental when we lose. But now, instead of the mandatory three days of mourning I used to suffer through, I am almost fully recovered after 24 to 48 hours. It shows progress, it also shows the record as being pretty awful and I'm hedging against total breakdown.

I'm not sure players have been in a space as supportive as with Napier. We still need to win one we aren't supposed to - this would shake off some of the stank and allow the kids to take that with them. A gazillion years ago, back in the 70's, we had teams that didn't have winning records. But we always had a gaggle of premier players. This team is a better version of the same thing. In this instance, the ground up rebuild is the culprit behind the struggles. We can always argue there's a confluence of components that contribute to the current state of affairs. Check the recent threads for details.

I don't see any shoe throwers, any drunken stop-light before playing Bama guys. I don't see guys beating the crap out of their gals. There is a collective respect and accountability amongst this team. They are doing it right. And, eventually, this team will win doing it right and it will feel all the better.

I'd love for them to steal one from the jaws of defeat and convert that puppy to glory.

Go Gators

 

The last coach to have winning records in his 3rd and 4th season. It’s not complicated, losing records get you fired at UF.

Is it fair to assert that you are suggesting these coaches would have been successful with a team entirely composed of their players? If so, why did all of them perform worse with teams made up of increasingly larger percentages of their own players?

 

This is all nice and good, yes let's give him more time, but to me the big red flag about Napier is that both this year and last, the team has gotten worse as the season progressed. If you supposedly have a good, solid system, the more you practice and the more games you play, the better you get. If you're in over your head, then the result is what we're currently seeing: players progressively forgetting how to play and coaches progressively forgetting how to coach.

 

Who did?

 

C'mon, you know who I'm referring to, the 3 M's after Meyer.

I don't expect an answer because seemingly everyone who throws out the "we didn't give them enough time" can never specify the who and why of that comment.

 

You can’t compare how Richt left a program to Mullen. Ymmv

 

I realize that he won’t be fired this year or probably next and I don’t expect it, I agree that if we fire him things get worse for the program for a while (if that’s even possible) and his contract is structured to prevent it, so that’s a no-go.

At the same time I also think that he has shown that he isn’t the on the field guy that will win championships either. As another post stated Napier is failing at Football 101, the BASICS. In spite of that it seems like a number of people believe (or desperately WANT to believe) that suddenly somehow get better. Napier is 44 years old, he has been a coach in some capacity for twenty plus years and played the game even longer, but if we just give him a couple more years…….

For reference at 44 years of age Steve Spurrier was ACC Champion and coach of the year. At 44 Urban Meyer was at UF winning championships after finding success at Utah.

 

Because those new players they brought in were all underclassmen?

 

If Billy hires an OC who he allows to call the plays and a ST coach, I'm still on board. If he fails to make those two hires and just keeps things status quo for next year, I don't see the results changing much.

 

He shouldn’t be fired this year. But I’d say he needs to win eight games next season to not be let go. I don’t care how tough the schedule is, if you can’t climb to eight at Florida in your third year with three recruiting classes (two full ones) under your belt, you’re not good enough for the job.

 

And the fans have been using it since the 2024 opponents were announced.

 

There are NFL teams that would struggle with our 2024 schedule? Is this a joke?

 

agreed - I can certainly live with a couple of losing seasons and people preaching that there's an orange and blue promised land just over the horizon if we can only be good, patient little Gator fans for a while longer. But in order to remain patient and trust the process throughout our sojourn in the wilderness, I also need to see some form of consistent growth from our team on the field and smart, steady leadership from our coaching staff.

22 games into the Billy Napier Experience, there's unfortunately not much that we can point towards as a logical reason to whole-heartedly continue believing we're on the right track. Still, despite my better judgment I keep hoping that we start to see some better play and a change in momentum next year and that Napier can show enough to remain the head ball coach in Gainesville for a long time (or at least until we can get a couple more classes worth of talent in here). I agree with the many others who've pointed out that things were not good with Florida football when he took over, and firing yet another coach and starting over yet again is just going to push us further into a self-perpetuating cycle that's going to continue to put this program deeper in the hole.

but at the same time, if we continue to look like the Keystone Kops on Saturdays next season and continue to show little to no improvement overall, it's not going to be possible to expect rational Gator fans to just keep blindly supporting Napier for the long term and hoping he turns things around someday. At some point he's got to deliver a little bit of that rosy future that he's selling us, and that point is rapidly approaching with the 2024 season. I don't have to see a championship-level effort, but I do expect Florida to look like a competent, steadily improving SEC football team and not the disjointed mess of the past couple years in order to continue believing that we're headed in the right direction.

 

It doesn't matter HOW hard the schedule is?

 

Well, we've fired 2 coaches with less than 3 full year's tenure and 2 with less than 4 in the last 20 years alone. Maybe those are the coaches he is referring to.

 

Alli is getting feisty.

 

They were 11-3 last year, which probably bought the new coach some goodwill. We will eventually see if Riley is a Mullen-esque flame-out and Napier is a long term success.