Billy Napier announces a band-aid fix to Gator football staff. Will that be good enough?

Barring some pretty drastic turns in the NCAA’s ongoing investigation regarding Florida’s recruitment of Jaden Rashada, Billy Napier will be coaching the Gator football team in 2024. His plan, his vision, and his executive decision-making are going to be given the 2024 season to be seen through. So let’s start right away with the disclaimer that there’s no point getting emotionally revved up about what he does or doesn’t do this offseason, because it’s an exercise in futility.

At the same time, though, past results and logic tend to be the two best predictors of the future. And having just doled out that above disclaimer about Napier coaching in 2024, it’s becoming harder and harder to ignore the warning signs that he likely won’t last much longer than that.

After Florida lost to Arkansas on the first weekend of November in the Swamp, most fans started to agree that changes were needed. Eugene Wilson’s mysterious disappearance for most of that game and a pair of cataclysmic special teams meltdowns removed the final shreds of logic to the issues of the offensive coordinator duties and special teams coaching. Now, nobody would say the Gator defense has been a bright spot under Napier, but with a 29 year old first-year coordinator missing his best player for a third of the season does at least provide some reason to argue against the need for a change there. It’s on offense and special teams that changes are beyond desperately needed.

The problem of Billy Napier as a play-caller is only one of a laundry list of issues, though, and it’s best served to go into in more detail on another day. Because there were other glaring issues that were illuminated on Wednesday’s press conference. And they all stemmed from the same parent issue: the Gator football team is coming off of a historically bad two-year stretch, and Billy Napier is of the mindset that all he needs to do to turn the Gator program from a perennial loser into a winner is a small series of micro tweaks.

To be fair, Napier did more than nothing. He made a series of small tweaks, such as promoting Jacob LaFrance to the role of “General Manager” and Joe Hamilton to the Director of Scouting and Recruiting Operations. He also hired Gerald Chatman to replace Sean Spencer on the defensive line and Will Harris to replace Corey Raymond in the secondary. And then there were a few moves he made that seem to not serve much of a purpose other than to check the box of, “I made a change,” which defeats the entire purpose of making a change.

Most alarming of all, though, was the one position he didn’t address: the offensive line. There’s clearly nothing wrong with the fact that he’s paying two coaches to each do 50% of a job, and that under co-offensive line coaches Darnell Stapleton and Rob Sale, Florida’s offensive line surrendered a mortifying 3.25 sacks per game last year, which by the way is 114th out of 130 FBS teams. Nothing to see here, please disperse.

But more on that later. Let’s go back to Wednesday, and rehash Napier’s post-Signing Day press conference. (Yes, there still is a February Signing Day, even if Florida was dormant on that day beyond the inking of Washington transfer Asa Turner.)

There was a lot wrong with that press conference from hell. Let’s start small and work our way up to the biggest issue.

The very first question was: “How much money is it gonna take to compete at this level, is that going to be a problem at Florida?” Napier’s response:

First reaction: well, you’re sure doing a great job building a sustainable program. Trevor Etienne and Princely Umanmielen will confirm that, after they both transferred to other SEC schools. Second reaction: taking 18 months to figure out how to operate in the new NIL world is a little hard to stomach when rival coaches Mike Norvell and Kirby Smart didn’t seem to need anywhere near that long to figure those same things out. But to be fair, it’s a little more complex than that.

Napier has to walk a pretty thin line here between promoting Florida Victorious, the Gators’ NIL entity, and breaking the NCAA’s new NIL laws. His program is already under investigation for that with its recruitment of Jaden Rashada, and for all we know, he’s already committed a bevy of violations. We’ll have to wait and see.

What we do already know, though, is that Florida AD Scott Stricklin and the UAA simply aren’t interested in driving people toward Florida Victorious, and bolstering the Gators’ NIL operation. We know this, as opposed to suspect this, because they’ve been aggressively encouraging top donors to donate funds for the Ben Hill Griffin Stadium renovation– a project that, by the way, probably 90% of Gator fans vehemently oppose– and those dollars that get sent for that project are dollars that take away from Florida’s NIL operation. Whether Stricklin and the UAA are just too stupid to realize this or they do realize it and don’t care (and it’s probably the latter) doesn’t make a difference, as by taking these actions to prioritize a stadium reboot over fielding top talent, they’ve left Napier to sink or swim on his own.

That’s probably what led to the follow-up question: “Is there an amount of money that Florida needs to compete with Alabama or Georgia?”

Poor Billy Napier. There are plenty of things to criticize him for, such as his play-calling, but what an absolutely truculent thing for Stricklin to do, feeding him to the wolves like that. Because it’s a perfectly legitimate question for a reporter to ask, and yet it’s one that Napier has to answer very carefully– both in terms of not breaking NCAA rules or antagonizing his preppy bosses.