Adjustments were necessary but Napier stayed the course

Bryce Thornton celebrates his game-winning interception against Ole Miss (Gator Bait Photo by Chris Spears)

Stay the course. If Billy Napier has said that or words to the same effect over the last three years, he’s said it 100 times. Maybe more.  

Win or lose, and there have been more losses (19) than wins (17), Napier has insisted that the Gators are not only progressing toward a resurrection of Florida’s championship past, but doing it the right way. It took until Saturday to convert the Gator Nation from skeptics to believers.

Saturday past sins were, in large part, forgiven by the Florida masses when the Gators (6-5, 4-4 SEC) beat a ranked opponent for the second week in a row, this one 9th-ranked Ole Miss (8-3, 4-3 SEC) which came to Gainesville 13.5-point favorites and left 24-17 losers.

Winning tends to cure all ills in football where the most successful coaches tend to surround a few carefully picked Boy Scouts with a roster of borderline psychopaths. The nice guys -- and Billy Napier will never be confused for anything but a nice guy -- have this habit of taking the Leo Durocher route. Durocher, a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame, once said, “Nice guys finish last.”

While we loved and adored Steve Spurrier during his 12 years as Florida’s head ball coach, to the rest of the Southeastern Conference he was Darth Visor. Urban Meyer had the rest of the SEC convinced that he had made a pact with the devil the way he kept bringing in players who were on a first name basis with the folks that process wrongdoers into the Alachua County Jail.

But, Spurrier and Meyer won championships. Eight SEC and three national championships, to be exact, with a combined record of 187-42-1. Since Meyer retired iafter the 2010 season, there has been a succession of nice guys -- Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain and Dan Mullen prior to Napier. All three were fired prior to the completion of a fourth year and in McElwain’s case, the third.

Napier will get a fourth year, whch pissed off quite a few Gators when Scott Stricklin made the announcement that he’s sticking by his coach. Stricklin explained that Napier had the Gators on the right track for success.

There we go again. Stay the course.

Now, if pressed for more substance, Stricklin might be forced to admit that if he doesn’t stick with his guy, then he’ll lose DJ Lagway, Jadan Baugh and a whole bunch of others to the transfer portal for lucrative NIL deals. That used to be cheating but now it’s legal.

Let’s be honest with ourselves here. We saw the Florida-LSU and Florida-Ole Miss games. Are any of us willing to risk losing this kid to the portal? Ole Miss, probably LSU, Miami, Ohio State, Georgia, Oregon, Indiana and Auburn will all be shopping in the portal to fill the quarterback void and all of them are more than willing to pay  through the nose to get their new guy. Twice that or three times that if it’s Lagway.

So let’s not be fooled here. As much as Scott Stricklin was willing to stand by his man, he also knew what would happen with Lagway if Napier were fired. Bringing back Billy meant keeping DJ Lagway a Gator. That was a gamble Stricklin was willing to take.

Another reason why that seemed like a safe gamble was what Stricklin saw on the field starting with the Gators’ response on the field after the Mississippi State win. At that point, consensus was that Napier had one foot out the door and it was simply a matter of which loss in the games ahead would be all she wrote.

Starting with the Wednesday practice after the Mississippi State win, things began to change in a positive direction for Napier and the Gators. At that point in time, the Gators were 2-2 and only the UCF and season ended with Florida State seemed winnable.

Napier admitted that there was at least a tad of self-doubt that day, but what he saw in his team convinced him that he had to find a way to navigate through an upcoming schedule that would include Tennessee, Georgia, Texas, LSU and Ole Miss among others.

“I walked off of that field on that Wednesday, and man, it's like abuse out there,” Napier said after the Gators stunned No. 9 Ole Miss. “I can ignore it. I can kind of control my environment and live life, but for these young people, in the digital world they live in, they can't do that. They live a life where they cannot do that. 

“So just to see them -- sometimes you get to an open date, and I've been on teams where an open date is a disaster, and you're trying to work, you're trying to come up with plans for improvement. But just to see this group, man, they were like, ‘Coach, what do we do; what do we need to do?’”

Players weren’t pointing fingers at each other. They weren’t blaming the head coach or his assistants, either. They blamed themselves for losing and they trusted Napier enough to lead them out of the dark place they were in.

How often does something happen like that in collegiate athletics these days. Nearly every coach in every sport at the big time level will tell you the portal and NIL have changed things into “what’s in it for me.” It’s why Nick Saban retired at Alabama. It’s why Tony Bennett resigned as Virginia’s basketball coach.

This group of Florida players is different.

“Yeah, I mean, just passion and energy and the way they worked that week and that Wednesday practice, I'll never forget that,” Napier said. “I walked off that field and said, ‘That's the best practice I've been associated with in 20 years of college football. So at that point, I'm like, we've got to figure this out.’”

What an admission, a coach saying he has to make some changes because he thinks his players deserve better. Couple that with players who tell their coach we’re with you all the way and the ingredients are there for good things to happen.

Now you know why the Gators had Tennessee on the ropes, knees wobbly and ready to fall face first on the mat until Graham Mertz tore his ACL. The Vols won that game but it took overtime to do it.

“I think Tennessee was a turning point,” Napier said. “I think in that locker room after the game, that was when it was like okay, we can do this, and I think obviously Kentucky, another open date, what we experienced in Jacksonville.”

Since the Tennessee game, the Gators are 3-2 and obviously not the same team that got its doors blown off by Miami and the Aggies. You can’t turn the clock back, but you can rest assured that neither Canes nor Aggies would be willing to play the Gators right now.

Leaving the field after beating Ole Miss, Napier told the ABC reporter that the Gators could play with anyone in the country right now. How right he is.

The corner has been turned. By staying the course, with some corrections in the staff (Ron Roberts to the booth, Austin Armstrong to the field for defense) and the way he calls the offense to take advantage of Lagway’s skill set, Napier has finally connected the dots.

It’s three years since he was hired, but finally, the head ball coach has a team he knows he can go to war with and win. The Gators are 6-5 with FSU looming next Saturday night at the world’s largest erector set, Doak Campbell Stadium. Win that one, win the bowl game and the Gators finish 8-5 against what every expert said was the toughest schedule in the country.

It should be noted that if the Gators get their eight wins it will be with a roster that has had to deal with a rash of injuries the likes of which we haven’t seen since 2013. In 2013, there were so many injuries that Will Muschamp was down to this fourth quarterback at the end of the season.

Against Ole Miss Saturday, 16 of 22 starters will be back next year. Another 16 underclassmen played significant roles in the win. The nucleus of a team that should be looked at as a contender next year is in place already and thanks to the portal and solid recruiting by Napier, the Gators should be in a place of real strength for 2025.

This journey Napier has been on since taking the Florida job in December of 2021 has been anything but smooth, but credit the coach with believing that championship level teams can be built with high character guys who believe in each other enough to block out the noise. Napier has a roster of guys who go to class and who steer clear of trouble. They aren’t like that rogue bunch in Athens which seems intent on setting arrest records that won’t ever be broken.You don’t seen players opting out to get a head start on the transfer portal and NIL deals.

What you see is a team that knows Billy Napier has their backs. Billy knows they have his.

Standing at the podium Saturday, Napier said, “I just think hope is powerful, man. Just proud of these guys, man.”

Hope is indeed powerful, but so is a coach who loads his roster up with high character guys. We live in weird times in which college athletics are changing on an almost daily basis and for the most part the changes are anything but good.

In the face of all this change and so many negatives, we have Billy Napier who seems to have proven that not every nice guy finishes last. Some nice guys simply need a little bit of time to assemble the tools they need to make their plans work.