**Buzz Buzz Buzz** - Nappier's (ahem) Golden Ticket

I’m not gonna answer your question. It’s off the topic. Have a nice day. Go gators.

 

FSU fans are openly talking about dumping Norvell a year after an undefeated regular season. They fired their last coach in less than two years on the job. Auburn fans are openly talking about dumping Freeze midway through year two. And that's how long it took them to hire and fire Harsin, their previous coach. But people here will still assert Florida fans are uniquely entitled and unreasonably impatient with coaches.

Because fans are demanding everywhere. Every big program has "unreasonable" expectations. And though I may not like the portal/NIL era, I think Cignetti is right. Coaches need to win early or else. The time of the methodical rebuild seems to be in the past. Not just because of impatient fans, but the negative cycle that losing causes in recruiting and attracting/sustaining NIL money for those recruits and transfers, which in turn negatively feed into each other. And every quick turn around garners more attention, more NIL investment, and more recruits and causes fans of slow burn schools to ask "if they can do it, why can't we? What's wrong with us?" And the complaints rise, the NIL money tightens, and on the negative cycle goes.

 

Yeah, well so have I. But what I also did was to cut my pay here by 60 percent. Did you???

 

This year. Overall Norvell has been far more successful. We have a contingent of fans that would riot if we wanted to fire a coach after an undefeated season. Either way I wouldn’t want Novell or Napier. Hopefully they are stuck with him

 

Well this is what separates people who look at stats and people who watch the games.

 

I gave myself a raise with your money.

 

Far more? one good season of cupcakes that ended 63-0

 

Ill write you a check too

 

They were 10-3 the previous year too. And though the schedule was light last year, they thumped a good LSU in the opener. And considering we were one of last year's cupcakes in your calculus, that also says something about distinguishing the two coaches' relative successfulness.

I'm not arguing he's a great coach. He hit the portal jackpot with the qb he needed. But he's had more than just last season of success.

 

The game was much closer than that....It was 63-3. Give those guys a couple more minutes and they probably win.

 

How many games did lsu lose last year with a great qb? We were terrible also. 10-3 with our schedule is decent and matbe even good. 10-3 in the acc isnt all that. They got beat badly in their bowl because their 85 man roster was very thin and had a handful of portal players propping up an otherwise weak roster. Their over program is in the crapper.

 

We're still looking up at "good." So again, regardless of their schedule over ours, Norvell with two winning seasons over Napier's none has been far more successful. I've got no complaint at calling it fool's gold that's been exposed since Travis was hurt and now gone. And if Napier can finish strong somehow and Norvell continues to collapse, then that gap starts to dissipate. But so far, it is what it is and the records are what they are.

 

Who cares what the fry cooks are doing?

 

I guess a few people do because I was responding to a point other people were already talking about. I, for one, am enjoying the schadenfreude.

 

63-3. Don't diss them like that.

 

It is hard to counter a 10 and 13 win season despite the fact that he had losing seasons his first two. What i can say is that i don't think he'd have been much better than Napier had he faced an SEC schedule.

But honestly, what i look at is where are they now. I don't think we'd be 1-7 with their schedule. They'd still have at least 7 losses with ours.

Now what that means in the grand scheme of things i have no clue. We are likely to have another losing season and next year will be more of the same. Right now, we play 5 of the top 10 teams plus 2 more ranked teams.

I find being 1-7 against a marginal schedule when ranked top 10 to be more egregious than anything napier has done.

 

Agree with all and quoted to add that IMO if we had Jordan Travis as our QB in 22 and 23 IMO we win 3 more games each year.
He was that good and he made a huge difference.

As far as who is better between Norvell and Napier- hard to know. Both are clearly below average in the SEC. (If FSU were in the SEC.)

 

We’re seeing this first hand. Napier with his long term rebuild plan, even if he gets a few more wins, will stagnate because the losses and fan uproar have crippled recruiting. Our future looks dismal unless he is able to conquer the portal, which so far he has been unable to do.

 

I'm with you that their catastrophic collapse is worse than our disappointing seasons. And I'm pretty sure we're the better team this season and would probably have no worse record than we do right now with their schedule and every likelihood of a better record than they've managed. It's truly and delightfully awful.

Comparing schedules across teams let alone conferences is always tricky. There's no real way to know what what each coach would have done with the other's schedule. But we can know what they did with what they had, and I think it's clear that Norvell has been more successful--substantially more successful--than Napier to date. To date is definitely operative, because Norvell is slipping amazingly fast and Napier still has the chance to improve our record--potentially substantially--with the games to come. I would like the small push back on the schedule differences, though, with the reminder that our meager win totals the last two and a half years have been against the weakest part of our schedule, almost exclusively. So while we could guess that FSU from last year or the year before would have had trouble with our tough games, there's not much reason to assume they couldn't have beaten the same few teams we did, if not more.

Norvell's first two losing seasons look a lot like Napier's. But I think it's more than reasonable to recognize that his next two were way better than what Napier's been able to produce so far. The jury is out whether or not Napier can catch up or even surpass the fleeting but real success Norvell had in his seasons 3 and 4.