BuddyMartinBlog: How Steve Spurrier Field Could Become *Billy Napier Field. (*According To The HBC)

So the HBC, chuckling as he made a little sport, told his guest Napier: “Coach, if you can do that today, they’ll rip my name off of that stadium in a heartbeat and make it ‘Billy Napier Field.’”

So here’s how the new coach can get his name on Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, or perhaps convert Steve Spurrier Field to “Billy Napier Field”: All Coach Napier has to do is dominate the two best teams in America, Georgia and Alabama, for 12 seasons. Says the man whose name is already plastered across the front, preceding Florida Field.

The other night when Napier was visiting Steve Spurrier’s Gridiron Grille, the HBC was asked by his partner Freddie Wehbe to query the group with his usual trivia question. So Spurrier grabbed the mic and asked: “When I was at Florida, we played Georgia and Alabama 21 times. What was our record against them?”

It took a while before a patron replied: “Seventeen and four!” Bingo! A woman in the audience correctly identified it -- perhaps somebody doing the math of 11-1 vs. Georgia and 6-3 vs. Alabama from 1990 to 2001 and passing it along. Looking back, such a superb accomplishment from today’s perspective was one of the most remarkable in college football history. Especially considering today’s landscape which the Bulldogs and Crimson Tide currently rule.

So the HBC, chuckling as he made a little sport, told his guest Napier: “Coach, if you can do that today, they’ll rip my name off of that stadium in a heartbeat and make it ‘Billy Napier Field.’”

It’s fair to say Napier is off to an excellent start, changing the culture of the UF football program, and maybe even being perceived as slowly building up a head of steam. If the strong vibe continues to be first-class and yields some big-name recruits after this weekend’s much-ballyhooed official visits, progress would be well on the way. However such a thought as replacing Spurrier’s name on Florida Field, even as a joke, is far-fetched. As we often say, let Napier win a game before we start drawing up specs for his statue.

Having said that, in the progress report on Napier’s first 50 days on the job, he would likely score very high in problem-solving, player evaluations, salvaging recruits, rescuing a few players from the transfer portal, the speed-dating hiring of accomplices, clear communication with media and outlining a manifesto not unlike the schematic used by Nick Saban and Kirby Smart.

The jury is still out on all the money being spent for recruiting and the assistant coach/support staff said to be about $7.5 million. We don’t know the total number of hires Napier has made yet – said to be in the range of 80 total – but of the 10 assistant coaches he went after, Napier landed seven. None with any better resume than Assistant Head Coach/Cornerbacks Corey Raymond, the so-called Godfather of LSU’s self-acclaimed “DBU” and Offensive Line Coach Rob Sale of the New Giants.

Just the 10-person coaching staff alone has averaged roughly $750,000 per person. And that doesn’t even include the $200,000 salary of Assistant AD Of Recruiting Strategy Katie Turner from Georgia, which would bring it down.

It certainly looks fantastic on paper, even though we don’t know yet if any of it will work on grass. So it’s difficult to evaluate at the present.

“Either it could be the greatest coaching staff in history,” a leading recruiting expert told me, “or they could all be fired in five years.” He went on to say that while Napier’s choices have stirred up a buzz among top recruits and appeared “fantastic” so far, critics might suggest there were “too many coaches hired from his old program at UL-L” and that he wasn’t sure hiring Turner over Lee Davis was nothing more than “a wash.”

Asked about all the great flood of Louisianans to Gainesville, Spurrier laughed when he denied that he was thinking of opening a second restaurant specializing in Cajun food. “Maybe that’ll be Billy’s thing,” he said, but at the same time acknowledging of a preponderance of “Rajin’ Cajun tags” in the parking lot. So the “Rajun’ Cajun Invasion” is underway.

Is it too much hot sauce to handle? As another critic of Scott Stricklin’s choices recently said, “If you hire the AD, the head coach and several coaches from Mississippi State, aren’t you in danger of one day turning into Mississippi State?” So will UF become UL-L East?

In 1990, Spurrier spent only 400Gs on his staff

Another guy who heard some rumblings about hiring too many coaches from his past employer may have been Spurrier, who brought in his fair share of “Dookies.” But criticism didn’t last long. On his first staff, Spurrier reached out to Jimmy Collins, Carl Franks, Bob Sanders and Rick McGeorge at Duke, later adding Ron Broadway as another.

Also on that first 1990 staff were Jim Bates, Bob Sanders, Tim Marcum, Jerry Anderson, Dwayne Dixon and John Reaves. The latter two had never coached before, although Dixon played for Spurrier.

“Dwayne was making $18,000 working in the office of Student Life. I said, ‘I know I can get you all the way up to $28,000.’ And he said, ‘Coach, that would be great.’ John Reaves was making about $30,000 coaching the tight ends. Bates and Marcum were our more experienced, higher paid guys – Bates, made about $50,000 and Marcum made about $40,000.”

He kept Strength & Conditioning Coach Rich Tuten as a holdover from the Galen Hall staff.

“That was our first coaching staff, not exactly a ‘Who’s Who List of Coaches In America.’”

He got them all for about $400,000 total. Coupled with his 400G salary, Spurrier’s budget for everybody was about the average salary of one Napier coach. Plus Steve secured a $50,000 loan to be paid back unless he won the SEC in four years. He won right away and wiped it out.

There was no agent. Spurrier retained the services of “Uncle” Willie O’Neal, a friend and Gainesville attorney and told him what he wanted, which amounted to about $450,000 counting the loan. To which O’Neal countered: “They’ll never give you all THAT!” Which they did.

They all shook and when they walked out, Uncle Willie said, “Orr, we should have asked for more.” And Spurrier said: “Uncle Willie, everybody’s happy. We don’t need any more.”