First Things First: Eliminating The Stupid Mistakes

“The team that makes the fewest mistakes wins.” – From The Seven Maxims of Football by General Robert Neyland

The game has certainly changed since Bob Neyland coached the Tennessee Vols, but that abiding principle has remained the same. Oh, there are exceptions such as Florida beating Kentucky 24-20 in Lexington in 1993 despite throwing six interceptions, but probably 95-99 percent of the time the team that makes the fewest mistakes wins the game.

Doug Dickey, a branch on the Neyland coaching tree since he played for and coached for Bob Woodruff, drove Florida fans crazy after the Gators lost to Georgia 10-7 at the Gator Bowl on a wet, miserable day. Dickey defended sending David Posey out to try for a game-tying field goal instead of going for the win, stating “To win, you must first avoid losing.” Dickey was simply paraphrasing Bob Neyland, but the way Florida fans viewed it, Dickey was avoiding winning. The reality that day was Florida made the most mistakes and not only lost the game, but lost a chance to tie Alabama for the Southeastern Conference championship.

Here we are 47 years later and Billy Napier, who has yet to coach his first Florida football game, is sounding a lot like Bob Neyland and Doug Dickey.

“You know, more games are lost than won and I think we … I think one of the things you’ve got to do as a staff is teach your players what winning football looks like,” Napier five practices into fall camp on Tuesday.

This Florida team knows all about more games lost than won. The Gators were 6-7 last year, capable of going toe-to-toe with Alabama and yet at the same time a team that South Carolina blew out by 23 points starting a former D1AA quarterback who had thrown all of 20 Division I passes before earning his first start ever against UF in November. Eliminate the silly errors, penalties and blown assignments and the Gators might have made a fourth straight New Year’s Six bowl game. Instead, they suffered the humiliation of playing in the low-tier Gasparilla Bowl and losing to a UCF team that treated this game as its Super Bowl.

Of course, if you go back a few weeks, the Gators would have been a top five team heading into the Georgia game if they had beaten Alabama, Kentucky and LSU. Those were three winnable games, all three lost because there was an abundance of silly mistakes.

The Gators lost to Alabama, 31-29, because of a blown assignment by the O-line on a second-and-2 at the Bama four that resulted in a 4-yard loss and UF settling for a field goal; an interception that gave Alabama a short field to work with for a third TD of the first half; a missed extra point; and a two-point conversion that would have tied the game was missed because of an offensive lineman taking out the wrong guy.

Two weeks later, the Gators lost to Kentucky, 20-13, in Lexington, a game the Gators literally gave away. Of Florida’s 15 penalties there were nine false starts and a critical holding penalty that nullified what would have been a first down run to the UK 14 by Dameon Pierce. The Gators wound up trying a field goal that was blocked and returned for a touchdown. There was a fourth quarter interception that gave UK a short field to work with for a 29-yard drive that produced the winning touchdown.

Against LSU, the Gators threw four interceptions, three of which were converted into touchdowns. LSU came into the game one of the worst rushing teams in the country. Florida’s run defense was a no-show, allowing the Tigers to gain 328 yards, nearly all of them on the same play. Surely, the Gators knew what was coming, but there was either a lack of discipline or a lack of focus because UF couldn’t get stops.

The Gators could have and should have won those three games. There is no guarantee they could have beaten Georgia in week eight, but if UF had come into that game 7-0, it’s a totally different dynamic and maybe Dan Mullen is still Florida’s head coach instead of Billy Napier.

But Napier is the coach because things continued to unravel for Mullen after the Georgia game. Since arriving at UF, the key word in Napier’s plan to rebuild the Florida program and restore it to a championship level is discipline that permeates through the entire organization. From the single most important task to the lowest and least important, Napier believes there is a right way of doing things and a wrong way. With him there is no gray area because if there is a gray area it means short cuts and details overlooked.

“The gray area is the enemy,” he says. Either do it the right way or else find a new place to work.

In his four years at Louisiana where he compiled a sparkling 40-12 record, the Rajin Cajuns had only one season (2018) in which they turned the ball over more than they took it away. In year two, the Cajuns were +5 in turnover margin. It was +10 in 2020 and +15 last year when they went 13-1 while winning the Sun Belt Conference championship.

In addition to eliminating turnovers, the Rajin Cajuns minimized stupid, costly penalties and there was no tolerance for blown assignments. Don’t give the game away. Make the other team beat you.

“We’ve always taken tremendous pride in not giving the other team anything, and I think undisciplined penalties are things you can eliminate,” Napier said. “You start there. You start with undisciplined penalties, you start with turnovers, you start with mental errors, lack of effort plays, fundamental and technique flaws. We want to eliminate the chinks in the armor, make the other team beat you and we’ve always taken great pride in that.”

When he assembled his Florida coaching staff, one of the first tasks was to go through each game to assess why the Gators lost while at the same time evaluating each player’s performance. Everything and everyone went under the microscope.

One thing that stuck out like a sore thumb was the number of penalties the Gators committed in 2021. There were 104 of them and 69 percent could be categorized as silly and undisciplined. There were 29 false starts,19 holding penalties, 13 offsides, six delays of game and five unsportsmanlike conduct calls. That’s way too many.

When he broke it down for the entire team, it was a sobering moment.

“Coach Napier came in and [preached] discipline,” tight end Dante Zanders said. “He showed us the other day before we went out to practice all of the penalties that we had last season. He was just showing us that it wasn’t big penalties that hurt us: It was just all the undisciplined penalties – offsides, holding things like that we can learn not to do. He handed out a piece of paper and it had all the highlights of all the penalties we had and the lost yardage that we had, which ones were undisciplined and which ones were holding, offsides, stuff like that. It was shocking and embarrassing.”

The Gators should have been embarrassed, not only because a lack of discipline cost football games, but it cost a lot of people their jobs when the head coach and his staff were fired. There is a new staff in town now, and the new CEO of the organization won’t tolerate giving football games away.

So, how do you go about injecting discipline into a team where discipline was in short supply not all that long ago? Napier believes that it starts with building up people.

“I was reading the other day, a guy was talking about, hey, businesses do not get better, people get better,” Napier said. “Teams don’t get better, people get better. So, it’s each individual.”

In other words, better people make better football players so it all starts with transforming each player into a better person. The Napier philosophy is you win with players who are (1) committed to being good students who don’t take a day off from class; (2) committed to earning a college degree; (3) committed to being better teammates; and (4) committed to being better friends to each of their teammates.

It all starts with the people at the top. If the coaches expect players to be better people, then they have to make the concerted effort to be better people themselves.

“Players are going to model leadership,” offensive line coach and offensive coordinator Rob Sale said. “We have a great example in Coach Napier, and then he hired the right people to model that for their individual position rooms. Once players see that, you see how coaches interact with each other, then coaches to players, players to players, you want 'em to speak the right things, choose your words wisely. So they're going to model the example that we give them.”

There are a lot of high character teams out there that don’t win football games, however, so there is the matter of taking these better people and turning them into better football players.

Napier, who like most coaches has stolen the bulk of what he teaches from some other coach, has a development plan that has been a work in progress since he first took over the reins of the Louisiana program back in 2018. This was ground zero for a coach accustomed to the kind of athletes he worked with at Clemson when he worked for Tommy Bowden and Dabo Swinney and at Alabama where he worked for Nick Saban. At Clemson and Alabama, Napier coaches players with one eye already on the NFL. At Louisiana sometimes it was players long on potential but short on actual experience.

“I’ve said this many times, at Louisiana we took all these things we learned from a lot of different people and we started that journey in year one,” Napier said. “I felt like we improved our year-round plan for development for players. At Louisiana we didn’t get the 5-star. We started from scratch with a lot of players. We projected. We took height, length and speed. We had to teach football at a much different level and I think it made us better as coaches.”

The process of learning each player’s capabilities and doing a better job of teaching it is ongoing. When recruiting players to Louisiana, Napier had to find those diamonds in the rough that were overlooked by LSU and the other SEC schools that routinely swoop into the state to snap up top tier talent. One step down were the players Louisiana typically landed.

So, how do you take what could be deemed as second tier talent and post three straight seasons with at least 10 wins?

“This is what are we trying to do with the players: we’re No. 1 trying to improve character; No. 2 we’re trying to increase knowledge; and No. 3 we’re trying to develop skill,” Napier said. “Notice, I didn’t say talent, we said skill level. So I think we projected, we took height, length and speed – and we worked hard on improving character. We were able to do that independent of the talent level, the physical traits. But okay, what about the football intelligence? How do we implement and teach football from a year-round standpoint and then, okay, guy doesn’t have maybe his skill level, his set of fundamentals and techniques. Maybe he’s never played the position he’s playing.”

In so many ways, the situation Napier has inherited at Florida is so much like year one at Louisiana. Overall, there is more talent already proven and fewer kids who can only be called projects, but the process remains the same.

Improve character. Increase knowledge. Develop skill.

“I think at Florida maybe you get a little bit more of a finished product relative to their football intelligence, their skill level, the things they’ve been exposed to the in past,” Napier said. “I think our roster always is going to be made up of different level in all those categories, and then you adjust accordingly. Two areas that I think really led to our success was our evaluation process in recruiting, and I think our development – the level of detail that we discovered we were going to need to have success. I’m excited about applying those things here in this setting.”

This new setting requires a new level of detail. It requires discipline that has been absent for some time. Napier has a core group of some 50 players who were part of the last year’s meltdown. There are 35 new faces. This isn’t necessarily ground zero like it was in Lafayette, Louisiana four years ago, but it is a situation that has to be rebuilt if the program is to get back to the championship level it was during the Tim Tebow years.

“Thirteen years, right?” Napier asks. He knows fully well, perhaps down to the exact number of days since the last time the Gators were SEC and national champions (2008). “Okay, what is it going to require to get Florida back in position to where they can be a consistent contender, to be in a position to be very competitive?”

He already knows the answer to that question. A team with players committed to all the right values, players who will push and help each other. A team that knows there are no gray areas. A team that is willing to embrace the kind of discipline that eliminates the stupid penalties and reduces the turnovers substantially. The Gators were 119th nationally in penalties last year, 115th in turnover margin and dead last in interceptions thrown.

General Bob Neyland would roll over in his grave at the thought of a team that made that many mistakes.