After Kentucky, Napier Knows A Re-set Is Necessary

Photo by Chris Spears

By FRANZ BEARD

GatorBaitMedia.com Senior Columnist

“I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden; Along with the sunshine, there has to be a little rain sometime” – Lynn Anderson

The rose garden that Florida fans were seeing when they celebrated a 29-26 win over then 7th-ranked Utah turned into a rainstorm last week when the Gators lost to now 9th-ranked Kentucky, 26-16. Kentucky celebrated by dousing Mark Stoops with Gatorade on the sideline. Up in Lexington, UK students took to the streets. You would think the Wildcats won the SEC championship.

Billy Napier never saw the Utah game as what would define Florida’s football season. He saw that game through his coach’s lenses. There were way too many mistakes that fans at the game or watching on TV were never aware of.

“Sometimes you get a great outcome and you didn’t do what you were supposed to do,” Napier said at his Monday press conference. “Sometimes we sack the quarterback and we busted the coverage over here and we could have given up a touchdown. So, sometimes I think in this game you can get too consumed with the result. What you’ve got to do is control the things that you can control, get consumed with preparing and go execute and do your job for the team.”

The mistakes the Gators made in the Kentucky game were way too obvious and on full display for the whole world to see. Most of the mistakes were the kind of things that are gone over time and time again in practice, but it’s different practicing against teammates during the week and then executing in front of 90,000 and a national television audience on Saturday. In the days since Kentucky, Napier has kept a very even keel, sounding much the way he sounded prior to and after the Utah game. Whether his demeanor is practiced or simply a natural cool, calm and collected exterior, Napier comes across as a coach with a sculptor’s mentality.

We may see a block of granite. From that same block of granite the sculptor envisions a masterpiece. He chips, he chisels, he smooths away the rough edges with sandpaper. Then the process begins all over again. The work in progress begins to take shape until one day there is a finished product ready for the whole world to admire.

Think of the Gators that Billy Napier is coaching as you would a block of granite. There is an abundance of rough edges that have to be smoothed out, never so obvious as they were when Kentucky came to town. Napier and his staff have spent the days since smoothing over the flaws as they prepare for Saturday’s close encounter with the South Florida Bulls at The Swamp. No matter how well the Gators play – they’re favored to blow the doors off USF by 24 points – they will still be a work in progress.

While many in Florida’s fan base saw the loss to Kentucky as a disaster of category five proportions, Napier chooses to see it as an opportunity to smooth out some of the rough spots before sending the Gators out to do battle again. In re-evaluating the Kentucky loss and then turning the lessons learned into positives on the practice field, Napier was quick to make this a top-to-bottom experience for the entire football organization.

“We’ve got a punch-list of things that we have to do as individuals and our responsibility to the team, staff and players,” Napier said when he met with the media on Monday. “And, having the self-discipline to follow through, right, I think can be a challenge. And I think our group is learning what’s expected of them, the level of detail. I’m not just talking about players when I say that, right, I’m talking about position coaches. I’m talking about graduate assistants. I’m talking about off the field people. All parts of the organization are improving each week, right, where, I don’t care who we play, we are consumed with improving, to be more efficient at how we do things, and I think that’s where we’re at, independent of who we play.”

Staying focused on whatever is next is straight out of the famous Nick Saban “process” that Napier learned during two stints at Alabama. There is a little bit of Dabo thrown in there from days on the Clemson staff as well plus more than a few lessons learned from a father who became legendary as a high school coach for the way he treated his players.

If you’ve followed Napier from the time he was introduced as Florida’s head coach by Scott Stricklin way back in December, then you are familiar with this Napierism: “Better people make better football players.” He could probably add to that by including better people make better coaches, staffers, equipment managers and so on.

It’s all part of a cultural shift that’s going on with the Florida football program. No one is more keenly aware than Billy Napier that the last time the Gators won the Southeastern Conference championship was 2008, the same year the Gators won their third and most recent national title. Thirteen years have passed since then, time enough for Nick Saban to win six national titles and Dabo Swinney to win two. With one SEC loss already in the books plus a road game to Tennessee and Georgia still on the schedule, it may take a miracle of Samson slaying a thousand Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey proportions for the Gators to get back to a championship level in 2022.

A 2022 championship has a ring of impossibility to it because it takes time for blocks of granite to take shape. There are, however, visual signs that things are changing.

Wide receiver Justin Shorter, standing in front of the media Monday in a blue Gator polo streaked with sweat, was the perfect example. The sweat was from his daily routine of 250 catches. He caught footballs. He caught tennis balls. All thrown at different speeds and angles by his human jugs machine, mom Paula Shorter.

Paula Shorter doesn’t lack for ability. “She can really zip it,” Justin says. “She can dial it up. I ain’t gonna lie.”

Florida’s other wide receivers may not have a mom who can fire a tight spiral at them, but they’ve noticed Justin’s work ethic and that of Ricky Pearsall, whose every morning routine is making 100 consecutive catches from a non-human JUGS machine. One drop and Pearsall re-sets to zero. The workout isn’t complete until he has made 100 consecutive catches.

Shorter and Pearsall are part of a change in culture that is necessary to take the Gators from the roller coaster existence they’ve been on since Urban Meyer’s final season in 2010. Players have embraced hard work just as they have embraced Napier’s people first approach.

“I would say definitely the culture here has changed drastically,” Shorter said. He spent the first two seasons of his collegiate career at Penn State before transferring to Florida in 2020. He has seen how his teammates are putting in the hard work on their own and in groups to do their part for the team.

While doing his own workout, Shorter paid attention to teammates getting in the extra work.

“I think I saw eight guys down there – linemen, running backs running, doing drills, linemen snapping balls, kids over there catching JUGS,” Shorter said.

Shorter says there is a hunger for greatness, something that was surely missing last year when the Gators limped home with a 6-7 record, finishing up with a losing record when they suffered a grind-it-out 29-17 loss to UCF in the Gasparilla Bowl. The Gators know they could have done better and should have done better. There is no question the Gators should have and could have won at least 10 games in 2021, but you don’t win a lot of football games when the team lacks discipline, when there is a lack of respect for the entire coaching staff and the support people.

You also don’t win a lot of football games when there are off-the-field issues with bad food and parking tickets because players have no place to park their vehicles. Even before the Heavener Football Center opened with adequate parking and three good meals a day, Napier took the time to rectify the problems. Whether or not this is something the previous head coach could have controlled, it didn’t get done.

With Napier, things got done and they continue to get done, which is why Florida football seems to be on a stable, consistent incline even with a loss to Kentucky. This was a winnable game, lost because Florida mistakes giftwrapped 23 points to the Wildcats. You don’t beat many teams when you have a wholesale giveaway of points, particularly when it’s a quality team from the Southeastern Conference. That made correcting mistakes the first rule of order when the practice week began.

Rather than browbeat his team with all the times the Gators shot themselves in the feet against Kentucky, Napier viewed this as a teaching moment not just for the players but the entire Florida football organization.

“So many people contribute to a football team, so a loss gives you a chance to hit the re-set button, to re-center,” Napier said. “Everybody kind of gets hit in the gut and I think sometimes it’s healthy. The key is that you don’t waste it, right? That’s when I say operate in truth. I say, hey, let’s call it exactly like it is. What caused us to get the result we had here and what can we do to position our team?”

Operating in truth. Another Napierism that will be repeated over and over again. It means taking responsibility and owning your mistakes. It means giving maximum effort all the time, not just when it suits your mood. As Napier explained at his Wednesday press conference, it means you don’t cut corners when nobody’s looking.

Good teams make the transformation to great teams when everyone in the organization operates in truth. Sometimes it takes a loss to kick start the climb from average to good and from good to great.

“I think everybody’s awareness is heightened a little bit relative to what’s required to win and I think we’re learning what winning football looks like, right?” Napier said. “I mean, you know we did some things in that game that go against everything that we teach from a formula standpoint and what we do to win, so sometimes it’s got to happen to you for you to understand the importance of conversion downs, right, the importance of red-area touchdowns, the importance of turnover margin, right?

“All these things, it’s technical but it’s simple and I think losing sometimes, ‘Oh, man that really does matter,’ right? As simple as that sounds, I think that it’s been healthy for our players and I think there is a little bit different level of awareness and, you know, in this game you’ve got to handle success and you’ve got to handle failure, right? And, the ability to stay consistent, not only as a leader of an organization, but also as a player, I think is very important.”

No rose garden was promised for the 2022 season. The first rain has fallen and there could be more in the future. It’s football and it’s a process, just like sculpting. Chip away, chisel, smooth over the rough edges and then start all over again.