College Football Morning: Florida's Mess Goes Deeper Than the Swamp

Institutional chaos might keep Billy Napier around.

It’s sometimes difficult, in college football, to separate good coaching jobs from good coaches. Is Alabama the best job in the country, or was Nick Saban the best coach? Was USC’s early-2000’s excellence more about Pete Carroll, or about Southern Cal?

When we at The Barking Crow think about the best jobs in the country, we tend to focus on three factors: Resources, branding, and location.

With resources, we’re curious how much money a coach could get for recruits, staff, and facilities if he maxed out his institution’s donor potential. We’re not worried about the present NIL budget. We’re not worried about the present state of the facilities. Those things do point towards the size of the resource pool, but the size of that pool is what ultimately counts. If you were to drop the greatest college football coach in the world into Job X, how much money could they get from the school’s fans and alumni, and with what ease?

With branding, we’re interested in the program’s cultural cachet. We’re interested in what a school means to people outside the school. Drop Steve Sarkisian, his staff, and his roster into West Lafayette, Indiana, and I’m not sure Arch Manning ends up at Purdue. Texas being Texas is helpful for Texas.

Location? It doesn’t matter like it used to, but it’s still a driving factor in recruiting. It’s easier to recruit a player to Los Angeles than South Bend. It’s easier to recruit players in Louisiana if you’re already in Louisiana.

All three of these, of course, primarily impact recruiting. They’re also very focused on the long term. When we ask what the best job is in the country, we aren’t really asking what the best job in the country is right now, today, in 2024. We’re asking which school would enjoy the most success if every college football coach was the same.

Resources. Branding. Location.

Florida should be a very good job.

Florida is obviously very similar to Florida State. They are the two big state schools in one of the best recruiting states in the country. Florida is probably more similar, however, to Georgia.

Tallahassee isn’t remote, but it’s more remote than Gainesville or Athens. Florida State isn’t a poor school, but its alums don’t make as much money as those from UF or UGA. Crucially, Florida and Georgia are both in the SEC, the sport’s best proving ground for NFL hopefuls, whereas Florida State has little chance of earning itself an SEC invitation anytime soon. Florida State’s donor base is more chaotic than Florida’s or Georgia’s, further out on the cultural fringe, harder to corral. Florida is in close proximity to Florida State, but Tennessee is FSU’s closer cultural comparison. Florida’s best comp is Georgia.

Georgia is, of course, a more desirable place than Florida for recruits to play right now. This, though, is a reflection of recent success. Again, we’re not focusing on what a job is for the coach who presently inhabits it. We’re focusing on what a job can be.

Florida is not as good a job as Texas. It might not be as good a job as LSU, where the resources are the most chaotic but surprisingly effective, and potentially the closest to infinite. Florida is probably about as good a job as Georgia. And Georgia is a very good job.

Why, then, is Florida averaging a 7–5 record since Urban Meyer stepped down?

This is a guess, and it’s only a guess. But I wonder if most of this has to do with Florida hiring coaches who struggled to stop a spiral.

Will Muschamp went 11–2 in his second season in Gainesville. He lost to a 12-win Georgia and he lost to Louisville in the Sugar Bowl. In 2012, Muschamp did rather well. In 2013, when Jeff Driskel broke his leg, the season fell apart. Florida lost its last seven games that year, most ignobly a defeat to then-FCS Georgia Southern, who went 7–4 and missed the FCS Playoffs. One year later, Florida was off to the Birmingham Bowl and Muschamp was off to the defensive coordinator position at Auburn.

Jim McElwain won ten games at Florida in his first season. He went 7–1 in the SEC and kept Alabama from a total blowout in the SEC Championship. By his third year, an inability to respond to a goofy scandal* and two close losses** conspired with Dan Mullen’s obvious interest in the job to set the table for McElwain’s midseason dismissal. McElwain’s spiral happened differently from Muschamp’s. But it was still a spiral.

Dan Mullen? Again, things started well. Florida won 21 games in his first two seasons, including two New Year’s Six bowls. In 2020, they were in contention for a playoff berth. Then, Marco Wilson ripped off Kole Taylor’s shoe, threw it down the field, and kept alive what would become a game-winning LSU drive. A week later, the Gators lost the SEC Championship by six points. They finished the season 8–4, and after a 2–6 SEC mark the next year, Mullen too was gone.

*In the offseason preceding that third year, a photo went viral of a Jim McElwain doppelgänger naked on a boat, hugging a shark. It was not McElwain, but he and Florida handled it in such a way—letting the story linger, taking it personally instead of laughing it off—that a lot of people thought it really was.

**After a pair of losses by three combined points, McElwain claimed, unprompted, that he’d received death threats. Quickly, it came to appear he had not, in fact, received death threats, and after a blowout loss to Georgia, McElwain and Florida mutually parted ways.

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Billy Napier didn’t start as hot as his three predecessors, or even as well as Ron Zook did back in 2002. Florida went 6–6 in Napier’s first year and 5–7 in his second. Now, in Year Three, the Gators are 1–2 and Napier’s seat is the hottest in the country. It feels like a lot is riding on this weekend’s visit to Mississippi State.

Napier is unlikely to be fired in the next few weeks. As (Florida grad) Andy Staples and Ari Wasserman pointed out for On3 on Saturday night, the four-game redshirt rule creates a huge risk of players quitting the team before they play their fifth game if they’re expecting to enter the transfer portal anyway. This is a dangerously early time to make a move.

Even beyond the next few weeks, though, Napier’s seat might not be as hot as Florida fans would like. Florida’s employing an interim president. Kent Fuchs is back in Gainesville to steer the boat through Ben Sasse’s departure’s wake. Scott Stricklin, Florida’s AD who came over from Mississippi State a year before Mullen, is potentially on the hot seat himself, or would be if Florida had a full-time president. the university doesn’t know who its president or its athletic director will be in a year. That makes it tricky to hire a football coach.

Sasse stepped down at the end of July, citing his wife’s very legitimate, well-documented health issues. Following his exit, though, reports emerged alleging Sasse—a Nebraskan and recent U.S. Senator—had spent exorbitantly while in office, pouring other people’s money into everything from consulting contracts to overpaid remote jobs for his former political staffers. The latest report states Sasse spent $38,610 in university money on a sushi bar at a holiday party, and that he roughly doubled Fuchs’s spending on catering.

In the long term, Florida is a good job.

Right now, Florida’s looking fairly dysfunctional.

Billy Napier is just one of this university’s problems.

It’s fair to criticize the Mullen firing with the benefit of hindsight, just as it was briefly fair to criticize the Muschamp firing (until Muschamp also flamed out at South Carolina). At the time, though, Mullen’s firing was not entirely about going 2–6 in the SEC. It was about a downturn in recruiting and an appearance of a deteriorating culture. Mullen might have been able to survive 2–6 if he did 2–6 another way. The way he did it got him canned.

Similarly, it’s fair to criticize the Napier hiring with the benefit of hindsight. It turns out that what worked in Lafayette, Louisiana isn’t working in Gainesville, Florida. The concept behind that hire, though—find a mid-major coach who’s dominating—had worked pretty well for Florida in 2005. Plenty of people thought highly of Napier, even if in-state power LSU hardly gave him a glance. With Muschamp’s memory still looming large, it’s likely some powerbrokers at UF wanted a coach who’d been a head coach before. Even Steve Spurrier, a Gator legend on the field before the sideline, was the head guy at Duke before Florida went and brought him home. Florida was not unreasonable when it hired Billy Napier. It just isn’t working.

Napier isn’t disliked personally on a national level, and he’s not melting down in the press the way McElwain did. His football team is just not very good, it’s talented enough that it should be in the middle of the SEC, and the resources at Florida are big enough that its talent should probably be better than what it is. Put simply: Napier’s done a mediocre job.

Can Napier turn it around? It doesn’t look good. Even with all the speculation about his employment status, he’s favored by close to a touchdown against Mississippi State, and our model currently only has the Gators a 3-point underdog in their next game, a home tilt with UCF. So far, so good. But after the Knights, the schedule gets murderous. That model has Florida a better team than Arkansas. It also has the Gators going 3–9.

You can find five more wins on the calendar if you really, really squint. Maybe the Gators beat Mississippi State, get past UCF, survive Kentucky and Florida State, and upset one LSU–or–better team along the way. Even that, though, only gets Florida to 6–6, and again, 3–9 is more likely. 3–9 would be the program’s worst record in 45 years.

Napier has to do more than stop the spiral.

He needs to simultaneously turn it around on the football field and prove to his effective bosses—Florida’s booster community—that he’s worth another year.

Napier might be able to survive 2–6 in the SEC if he does it another way. But the way he’s currently doing it, it appears Florida’s boosters are ready to move on. The program’s 2025 recruiting class is hardly in the top 25. That doesn’t signal an abundant NIL budget at Napier’s back.

As for Florida:

What do you do? Your university leadership is in a state of flux. Boosters are ready to buy the coach out and maybe fire the athletic director as well. You need to hire a president. The boosters who decide on the president only partly overlap with the ones who pick the football coach. Do you keep Stricklin and trust him to make another hire? Do you let the new president pick their athletic director and let that athletic director pick their coach? How much does it limit your coaching search if that coach can’t be confident his athletic director will be there when he starts his second year? Football coaching searches are generally fast. Searches for university presidents are generally not. There’s an argument to be made that even if Florida is fully convinced Napier is not the long-term answer, they should keep him for this year and the 2025 season, accepting whatever suffering it entails in order to enter the post-Sasse era with aligned leadership at arguably the school’s three most important positions.

Napier probably won’t spring enough upsets to get the Florida ecosystem back on his side.

But it’d sure be helpful for the university if he did.

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Movelor’s Week 4 picks are up, and I don’t like what it’s saying about Michigan and USC. Bettors have the Trojans favored on the road by nearly a touchdown. Movelor has the Wolverines favored at home by two touchdowns. It is late in the season for a 20-point gap between our model and the markets.

Sherrone Moore confirmed today that he’ll turn to Alex Orji full-time under center, the Davis Warren experiment having proved untenable. This would be hilarious gamesmanship if it was gamesmanship—if Michigan knew it couldn’t beat Texas and wanted to bait USC into preparing for a Warren offense that wasn’t. But even a headless group of Jim Harbaugh acolytes probably isn’t that bold. Most likely, Moore either dramatically miscalculated coming out of summer practice or Orji is a terrible quarterback. We’ll find out soon enough.

As for that model/market gap:

Michigan was great last year. Michigan was so, so good. It’s very unusual for a team to get this much worse this quickly, and it’s especially unusual when that team was formerly the best team in the country. Florida State got a lot worse, but once they’re out of Movelor’s top 25, that miss of ours will escape notice. Michigan’s degradation was more predictable, and Movelor should be built to predict it. We’ll work on it this offseason, with the goal being to cross-section the 247Sports talent composite by class and measure the impact of physical talent at different ranges of age, if not experience. We know Michigan succeeded the last few years because it had very old, very experienced talent. We should be able to find a way to mathematically capture that.

With all of that said, I’m personally bullish on Michigan this weekend. I don’t know if I’ll bet it myself, but I’m highly skeptical that USC is 5.5 points better than Michigan on Michigan’s field. ESPN’s FPI, a good and proven model, does have the Trojans favored, but ESPN’s SP+, another good and proven model, does not. The disagreement likely comes down to how much better USC’s defense really is and really can be. USC has a great defensive efficiency so far this year, but one of its games came against Utah State.

We’ll talk plenty more about that matchup over the next few days. It’s pivotal for both teams’ seasons. One closing thought, though:

It’s often rightly said that over Jim Harbaugh’s last few years, Michigan was built to beat Ohio State. That meant strength in the trenches, enough strength to outweigh Ohio State’s speed outside. It’s often similarly said that Ohio State was built to hang with the SEC. That’s how Ohio State got all that speed outside. USC was built like Ohio State, or like the pre-2023 Ohio State editions (Ohio State swung back towards trying to beat Michigan in recent years). USC is not as good, of course, as those Ohio State teams.

What we have then, is a game where Michigan is a lesser imitation of 2021–23 Michigan and USC is a lesser imitation of pre-2023 Ohio State. What that really seems to make this game is not Big Ten vs. Big Ten or Big Ten vs. Pac-12, but Big Ten vs. SEC Lite. That’s what we’re preparing to watch on Saturday.

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This post was also published at www.thebarkingcrow.com, where you can always find all of Joe Stunardi, Stuart McGrath, and NIT Stu’s work.