I can see his being safe with 6 wins. Is 6 enough, no, but the timing for finding the next great Gator HC may not be right. We do not need Stricklin conducting another experiment.
With no firm UF president at the moment I think Billy is safe for 2025 unless he goes 4-8 or worse. If your record regresses with each season nothing can save you.
I agree, only I think that 5-7 would be fatal as well; 6-7 will likely get a fourth season, like it or not. Let’s just beat Miami, soundly, and we can defer this kind of talk for a while.
5-2 gives us a legit shot at a 7. I can see us winning 2 of our final 5 for 7 win season, but much harder to imagine a 4-3 start then winning 3 of the back 5.
I don’t think the admin would want to fire him, but the public/media pressure would be huge. Plus recruiting will suffer. 6-7 is basically a coin flip if he stays if I was betting, which is not the same as what I’d prefer. Order matters here. If we start 6-0 and then finish 0-7 vs consistency throughout and a couple upsets wins at the end? Totally different feel I think he can still turn things around if this happens but it’ll be tough 5-6 we’d be a laughingstock with awful media perception. Recruiting would be rough and I’m not sure he could turn it around. If he stays here it’s because our admin is in disarray 4-7, we’d be the national joke. Every lost and commentary on failures would lead with us. To me this is the ultimate clean house. Virtually 0.00% chance SS or Billy can turn this around. It would be deafening. The inverse is true. 7 wins gets us good vibes, good recruiting, and a strong arrow up. 8 wins and a playoff spot gets us a top tier class and on prospective national title lists for next year. We are on the edge and we can tilt either way. It’s hard to STAY on the edge. So is Miami important? Yes. But every game is important. For Billy’s sake I’d rather him win early so he’s not coaching for his job later in the year. Imagine going into the LSU game with 4 wins? Sure we can go 2-1, but we’ve seen bad seasons cascade. That would be tough
Failure to prepare? They had a new play caller for that game on offense. How do you prepare for that on defense with key starters missing in our defense? Their defense was far superior to ours last year and kept them in games. They lost by a total of 13 points to 3 ranked teams in the previous 6 contests, despite having a poor offense. They were locked into every game until the end of the season when their coach's term looked like it was over. Nevertheless we scored more points against them than LSU, Bama, and Ole Miss. Our offense was on point, and predictably our defense failed us again as was the case in almost every game.
I gotta hand it to you. I’ve never heard as good of a defense for that indefensible loss. But you may want to at least mention how Special Teams (as usual) also failed spectacularly in that game. And as long as we’re citing all of our excuses, don’t forget to mention that deceptively powerful Arkansas (4-8, 1-7) had a bye week before playing in Gainesville.
If we are 6-6, we need to look good doing it. We have eight possibly nine raked teams on our schedule. At 6-6 we have beaten 2-3 ranked teams and haven’t lost to any unranked teams more than likely. In that scenario, we probably look considerably better on the field next year but there will still be noise in the system. Let’s just hope Miami is the first ranked team we beat in three weeks.
We are winning six or more games though so we don’t even need to concern ourselves with that other crap.
Might just be a roller coaster like many year 2s (0,1,2) we'll likely win one or two we're not supposed to and lose one or two we're not supposed to. But yeah hopefully we'll look like a serious team and fight every game without too many brain farts.
I just hope we win the few that we should and put up a good fight for a half dozen more and win some of those. It could be six or nine wins but I hope we look like a respectable well coached team doing so. We are going to win some games that aren’t ucf, Sanford or whatever that other team we are picked to beat is.
Redefining what a “Year 2” is doesn’t mean it isn’t Napier’s third season, and whatever we want to call it, Year 3 expectations are in effect.
Is that a question? If it is, then, no. It’s not a different Year 3 than anyone else’s Year 3, no matter who was paying attention to what.
So you were definitely not paying attention. This is not your Three of Irwin Meyer taking over Ron Zook talent. This is year three of a freaking dumpster fire being taken over.
So it’s more akin to the third year of Zook, McElwain, or Mullen than it is to Spurrier, Meyer, or Muschamp. Sure, I get that.
