I was in wait and see mode for Napier but it’s an obvious failure at this point. I think any coach we hire is going have a rough year or two but year three being worse says it all.
Taggart dint exactly walk into a rose garden at FSU but Napier inherited a toxic locker room, imbalanced, roster, broken recruiting relationships with HS coaches, losing record and all at a time when the portal and NIL was starting to change college football forever. Add this year’s schedule to that and I’d say CBN was dealt a pretty crappy hand.
I'm not trying to minimize the sea change of NIL and the portal to the sport, but nearly every coach who takes over any program after the predecessor's firing (and that's probably most job openings) have big problems to deal with in rosters, locker rooms, recruiting, losing records, etc. Which is generally why their predecessor was fired in the first place.
We definitely had talent but remember that Urban came into a program where a lot of that talent was underdeveloped and almost completely demoralized. Guys who would become key components of those 2005/6 transition years like Dallas Baker and Ray MacDonald have been very open about how they had considered quitting football altogether before Urban came and turned things around.
I would guess that an average, if there is such a thing, situation for a coach taking over a program from a fired predecessor is far better than what Mullen left Napier. Also think that, Miullen, McElwain and even Muschamp inherited better situations than Napier did. Of course, that’s subjective and just my opinion. I’m not defending Napier at this point, but I do support our team and he is still the head coach.
One week at a time at this point. All we really need is to come together a bit on defense. He wins this weekend and we play respectable against Tennessee and maybe we’re turning a corner a bit. But if we lose at home against UCF he should be gone immediately. Winning cures everything
It's a judgment call, for sure. In our case I think it's skewed by our relatively high expectations. We expect and assume to recruit near the top, compete for titles, and look good doing it all. I'd suggest that on average most D1 coaches walk into very similar circumstances, if not worse, than Napier. But those programs have substantially lower expectations relative to ours, and the different fanbases likely judge their own situations accordingly. Because even at our "low" points, we have far more talent and resources than the clear majority of all D1 schools. And there are a lot. Many programs strive to make a crappy bowl. We UF fans have talked openly about turning down bowls that don't seem worth it. The vast majority of D1 programs will never crack the top 15 in recruiting. Recruiting rankings of #10-15 for us feel like underperforming. We are likewise directly compared to the very top of the college football world and have to stack up against the Georgias and Alabamas, as well as our own more successful past. I doubt I have any more insight that you do and my opinion just another take on things like yours. But I'd say Mullen didn't leave us off anywhere near as badly as it was popular to say. Was it a mess? Definitely. But describing it in apocalyptic terms as many did always seemed unrealistically negative to me and set up ready made excuses for problems and deficiencies in Napier's process. To me, at least, it's like the oft repeated epithet that even Meyer acknowledged UF was "broken" when he left. Man oh man what we wouldn't give right now for a program as "broken" as 2010. Heck, we're looking up at 2011 as an unrealistic goal for the rest of this season.
And were wildly inconsistent, losing to some bad teams and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory time after time.
Exactly and that’s not lack of talent, That’s coaching and having your guys prepared to play every week
Really like your posts Sewanee, but got to strongly disagree with your take on the mess Napier walked into. It was a perfect storm of everything that could go wrong.
I get it and don't disagree. But I think it minimizes what Meyer was able to do when people forget how ineffective our talent had been. He saw a diamond in the rough and had the coaching talent to bring it out. Without him, maybe that talent never lives up anywhere near to its potential or, as some of those stars have said, they flat out quit. This wasn't a turn key operation. The wrong guy doesn't make of that talent what Urban did.
He definitely can run a program but had he took over this mess Napier took over which he’s never tried to do, it might be year three before we see eight or 10 wins. Teams and record is light years ahead of anything that’s been going on here lately. He didn’t have any losing records and recruited quite well.
Fair enough. Again, I think it's relative to our expectations. Abject failure for us is an average or disappointing season for many others. For me, at least, the end of Mullen's tenure felt worse because of how many good things had happened and how close we felt like we were in 2020. It's the special pain of failure relating to the needless squandering and wasting of what should have happened rather than the sort of "this just isn't working failure" I think we're experiencing now.
Maybe so. We can speculate about how one of the best in the business would have fared here, and since it never happened, I think there's plenty of room for interpretation and opinion. Unfortunately, I don't think Napier is one of the best in the business and we are seeing first hand how he fared here.
