**The end is not near, for Billy Napier at Florida**

The article detailing the missed tackles is like a RICO indictment against Napier. Three years and the tackling stat has worsened. It plagued the program during Napier's first year and has become one of the main reasons why we struggle to be competitive.

There is a collective unwillingness to make contact which sadly is an indication of lack of toughness. I never thought I would say that about a Florida defense. But the assessment is inescapable so far.

 

I 100% agree! Leadership starts at the top and we have had poorly aligned leadership when it comes to athletics over the last decade. We need to get a President that cares about athletics and he needs to hire an AD that aligns with his vision. It is only then that we will see a competitive product. It is all about core values and buy in from all involved. That is when you will have success.

 

Having our players leave and see them perform better means that were poorly coaches here. Why can't he just understand that? Sure, we didn't get some of the best and the coach's evals took forever, and we lost out of the top talent in the portal. But several players that Napier recruited or coached are doing much better at their new schools, which means that the players might not have been as bad talent wise as Andy says they were.

It's much more about the development of the player we have or lack of development than talent. Even still... we have a few very talented players, especially at the skill positions, that I think should stay no matter who we get to be the next head football coach. I don't agree with that part of Andy's description of the situation at all. It's mostly coaching, for sure, and we are missing top talent on both lines of scrimmage, but our team is not devoid of talent like he makes it sound like we are.

One more thing, Wilson is a keeper no matter who the next coach is, and red-shirting this year does NOT automatically mean he's transferring out.

 

This has been going on much longer than Napier. He’s just one bad piece of a bad puzzle. It seems we are catching up but it’s still a mess.

 

Getting football right should be priority one for athletics. It supports everything. It hasn’t been shown enough effort. That falls to leadership at the top.

 

The defense is bad, and the tackling hasn't improved.
Tackling hasn’t improved in year three under Billy Napier | GatorCountry.com

Three alarming stats about Florida Football's defense in 2024

 

One of the safeties shouldn’t have been playing

 

I think that's the better way to put it rather than leadership--UAA or UF--not having sufficient commitment to athletics. I think they're hugely committed to athletics and our overall athletic program's sustained success and resource allocation absolutely demonstrates that. But football as the single biggest component allowing that overall success has been proportionately neglected. Not completely neglected, as witnessed by our overly large contracts to less than deserving coaching staffs, but well behind the curve wherever the rest of the industry has gone, from facilities, to staffing, to NIL.

It's as though the assumption from that leadership was that football had hit critical mass and was self-sustaining. Small bumps or nudges were all that was needed for that ball to keep rolling and funding so many other athletic programs and projects. But here we are, having consistently lost momentum until now where you can't help but notice and feel the consequences. Several of those previous issues have been addressed, but the football program, unlike almost every other UF program, is now playing catch up rather than near the front or leading the way. Now the concern shifts to when football's failing fortunes start to impact the funding for all those other successful programs.

And the irony is that the creation of the UAA itself, spinning off from the formal university structure to offer independent (though interrelated) fundraising and leadership of athletics, was one considered a game changing innovation, leading the forward for university athletic departments--and for football in particular.

 

It just seems to have slipped from being the priority. Football should be by far the top priority of a sports program. The contracts we are writing are not huge. Our coaches have been given average contracts, not huge contracts.7 mil was big money years ago but only top 20 now. They were avearage coaches and hadn’t earned a top contract yet . Bama didn’t hire a guy like tgat. They went to a playoff team and bought their coach. That shows they really are serious about winning.im not sure a coach like Run twenty years ago would take the job here at this point. Top coaches want to win . They want to know they will have every advantage that the other top coaches have. If they can’t recruit the players that the top schools can, they aren’t coming. They will go to a school that will give them 100%..

 

There's a causation/correlation open question, but I'd argue that each of the four failed coaches were paid at the upper level of compensation at the time of their hiring, and for each it was a significant bump--for most a huge leap, because none of them were proven coaches at the absolute top level. My comment about less deserving coaches definitely has a little hindsight about how worthwhile they wound up being, but 3 of the four were also offered significant extensions extremely early on, further skewing their actual cost to return.

For example, Billy's initial contract put him at #4 in the SEC at the time. No, that's not number 1, but when 3 of the 4 ahead of you have already won national titles and the 4th was hired away from Notre Dame at the same time, I think you can easily make the point it was an extremely competitive salary. Considering it tripled his salary at ULL, you could also argue it was over market for his resume, which supports the idea of the UAA trying to stay competitive financially, even if it was too late and the ex post facto more competitive move would have been slightly more money from a far more experienced top coach.

McElwain and Muschamp were hired more modestly in comparison, coming in around the midpoint of SEC salaries when hired, but both were given bumps early on to put them higher in the league. Mullen, more of a proven commodity, was given a bigger contract, both comparatively and in real dollars. He was maybe top third initially, but his first extension put him back in the upper SEC echelon as well.

I'd say that shows a growing commitment to the salary end of football support, but that wasn't the only issue, and again, you can definitely argue that we were going after "solid" or "sensible" choices at competitive prices rather than paying premiums for homerun swings.

 

My thinking is that you do like Bama and go pay top dollar for a top coach instead of hoping that some jackass from the Sunbelt is going to turn your program around that’s been wallowing in the mud for a decade. Quit bargain shopping and go take the highest percentage chance of winning you can get at this point

 

You're point is well taken.

But, being reactive is one hell of a lot better than taking no action. Saban said that Florida should have taken advantage of building better facilities when urban was there. I agree that's true yet the guy in charge back then was arguably one of the most visionary and well respected athletic directors in the country. His fiscal responsibility led to some failures in our facilities. However, we do have a practice facility, we do have a state of art athletic facility. If we had had them then would that have suddenly made muschamp hire an offensive coordinator that was worth a crap? Would it have changed anything about the shark jumper? Would Mullen suddenly have become a better recruiter or fired Grantham when he should have and hired a decent DC? Would Mullen not have quit after he didn't get a NFL job?

Those are rhetorical because we know the answer.

Yes the administration has been slow, plodding and made poor decisions.

But that doesn't mean that you can take the errors of the past which have been remedied and bootstrap that into the reason that the coaches that have been hired at Florida failed. More often than not it has been intransigence. Sometimes that's a really good quality and sometimes it's the fatal flaw. It's been a fatal flaw here.

I still would like Stricklin gone But imo that's just not going to happen with the current situation at President. And if you think my ire at Saban And what he's trying to do is a bit over the top, You don't want to hear my thoughts on the BOT, Sasse and I'll stop there.

Edit. David Whitley put some flesh on my points lol. Saban's take on Florida football is outdated

 

Penny wise pound foolish? Or in for a penny, in for a pound? Something about pennies and pounds I'm sure. I don't like spending chunks of money, but I've learned to never spend 800 when I should have spent 1000. So 7 million to the unproven guy at the same time LSU paid 8 for Notre Dame's coach who had taken them to the championship game suddenly looks like a slightly bigger stretch would have allowed us to aim much, much higher.

 

I'm going to add the BOT to the list. They should all be removed from their positions for hiring Sasse. Political hit job.

 

Brian Kelly sucks. That aside, this spending narrative is nonsense. Look at the top coaches and their contracts at the time of hire. It simply does not follow that spending more on a coach initially means you'll get a better one.

 

I'm one who thinks good coaches can come from all sorts of sources. I bring up the Napier/Kelly comparison only in relation to the idea that the administration wasn't committing sufficient finances to coaching hires.

Hindsight says we overpaid, but of all the administrative failings, I don't think paying enough for top coaches was one of them. Kelly in particular was seen as a coup--conventioal wisdom was that you just can't hire someone away from another top program. Except the package we gave to hire a top Sunbelt coach was within 15% of what it took to hire Notre Dame's successful coach.

And say what you want about Kelly, but he and his staff would be a noticeable upgrade here. A low bar, but easily cleared.

 

M first problem with Napier was no hiring of a special teams coordinator. It’s like he didn’t realize it was a third of the game. I didn’t panic because Meyer didn’t have one either. He was the special teams coordinator. The difference was Napier thought it was a Napier and Meyer made it an honor to be on the special teams.

 

That worked out extremely well for TAMU. How many trophies have LSU and USC piled up with their insane deals? Simply spending the most guarantees nothing.

 

And pegs the price a university is willing to pay.