By Franz Beard
A few thoughts to jump start your Monday morning:
THE NEXT FEW DAYS ARE GOING TO BE VERY INTERESTING
Andrew Carnegie once suggested that his tombstone should be engraved with this epitaph: “Here lies a man who was able to surround himself with men far cleverer than himself.” Carnegie even suggested that you could take away all his money but as long as he could surround himself with good people, he could rebuild everything.
Watching Billy Napier go about the business of filling in the blanks of his plan to succeed as Florida’s head football coach is like watching a football version of Andrew Carnegie. Napier is brilliantly efficient and it’s obvious that he believes it takes an entire staff of excellent people to bring a sustainable championship football culture to the University of Florida.
Rob Sale, by all accounts, is a done deal to leave the New York Giants to coach the UF offensive line. There are plenty of reports that Karl Scott will leave the Minnesota Vikings to become Florida’s co-defensive coordinator. Scott, it must be noted, is a devotee of Ron Roberts’ creeper defense (he worked for Roberts in 2012-13) as is Patrick Toney, who came with Napier from Louisiana back on December 5. Chris Rumph (Chicago Bears) and Eric Henderson (Los Angeles Rams) seem to be likely additions. Rumph has worked at Florida before while Henderson has drawn rave reviews for his work with Aaron Donald the last three years. He played his high school football at Edna Karr in New Orleans. If that sounds familiar it’s because UF running backs coach Jabbar Juluke was the head coach at Edna Karr for nine years.
When complete, this will be an extraordinary coaching staff and personnel department. Napier has been given a large budget to transform the Florida staff and he’s committed to bringing in the best possible people who understand that surrounding yourself with good people means upgrading the roster whether with new recruits or transfers.
It’s going to be interesting to see how many players from the 2021 roster hit the transfer portal in the next 10 days. Based on what we saw in the Gasparilla Bowl in Tampa last week, there are several players who gave half-hearted efforts and probably would be better served to look elsewhere. If they think Napier is the type to beg them to stay, they are going to be unpleasantly surprised. He wants kids who want to be Gators and that means kids who give 100 percent 100 percent of the time, pure and simple. Attrition normally claims 5-7 players every year. I’m of the opinion that the demands of a new coaching staff will equate to somewhere between 10-15 players transferring out. I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. If unmotivated players who aren’t willing to do what the new coaching staff wants, then they shouldn’t let the screen door hit them on the way out.
The transfer portal is just heating up. There are expectations that somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 players will opt out of their current situation to find new digs. It’s obvious from the way Mel Tucker (Michigan State) and Josh Heupel (Tennessee) used the transfer portal to upgrade their rosters and exceed 2021 expectations that there is no shortage of talent out there. It just takes careful evaluation to find the right fits. If we’ve learned anything about Napier in less than one month on the job, he’s got a systematic approach to everything and that should allow him to bring in highly motivated transfers.
Napier got news to build on the transfer to Florida of Ohio State quarterback Jack Miller III over the weekend when linebacker Ventrell Miller III and wide receiver Justin Shorter committed to come back. Miller’s injury in game two proved devastating as Florida didn’t have an adequate replacement in the middle. Shorter finished the year with 41 catches for 550 yards and three touchdowns. If UF quarterbacks had paid attention, they would have noticed he ran free in the secondary all year and would have come close to doubling his production if they had looked his way more frequently.
At his initial press conference, Napier preached patience but we’re getting mixed signals on that end. In one respect, he is patiently going about filling out his coaching staff, but he’s going gangbusters when it comes to his personnel department. The next few days are going to be very, very interesting.
WHAT WENT SIDEWAYS FOR MULLEN
This will be the last I’ll post for quite some time about the old regime. It’s time to put the past behind us, but there is one thing I think that needs to be posted. I’m going to use two very good examples to set the stage for one of the biggest reasons Dan Mullen is looking for gainful employment somewhere else (Yes, I know he’s got $12 million to ease the pain and we should all be that lucky but indulge me). The first one is Florida 2010 and the second is Alabama ongoing.
The Gators went 13-1 in both 2008 and 2009. They won the national championship in 2008, then lost in the SEC Championship Game to eventual national champion Alabama in 2009. In 2010, Tim Tebow, Maurkice Pouncey, Joe Haden and Brandon Spikes had moved on to the NFL. There should have been and was a dropoff, but from 13-1 to 8-5? I have been convinced for years that the biggest reason the Gators failed to reload had everything to do with losing six coaches from that 2008 staff and the choices Urban Meyer made for replacements.
Dan Mullen and John Hevesey departed for Mississippi State after the 2008 season. Urban turned the offensive coordinator/play calling job over to Steve Addazio and the Gators went from wide open explosive to highly predictable. Following the 2009 season, Charlie Strong became the head coach at Louisville, taking with him Vance Bedford and Kenny Carter. Billy Gonzales left to become the wide receivers coach at LSU. Meyer hired Teryl Austin from the NFL to replace Strong. Players considered him aloof and hard to approach, unlike Strong, who was like a second father. Zach Azzanni was hired to coach the wide receivers. When a few of the freshmen from the No. 1 recruiting class skipped out of practice in August of 2010 because they thought some of the upperclassmen like Mike Pouncey lectured them about their sense of entitlement. Azzanni was sent to fetch them and that didn’t go over well. Meyer should have punished the freshmen for disrespecting his coach, but he didn’t do that, perhaps realizing that he had a weakling on his hands and perhaps a revolt brewing.
Meyer twice made bad choices when he had to name replacements and it showed, first in the predictability of the 2009 team that Alabama so easily defended in the SEC Championship Game, but then with the slide all the way back to a 7-5 regular season that included blowout losses at the hands of Alabama, South Carolina and Florida State. It took an Outback Bowl win over Penn State to get to eight wins in Meyer’s last game as the UF head coach.
Alabama. Nobody has more coaching staff turnover than Nick Saban. It is a revolving door but Alabama continues to win and recruit at a high level. Saban has won national championships with five different offensive coordinators and three different defensive coordinators. Lane Kiffin was the OC for a 2015 national championship team that had Jacob Coker at QB and only four returning starters … and to think Meyer couldn’t win a 2009 national championship with Tebow at QB.
So, back to Mullen. He didn’t exactly bring a great staff with him when he was hired in 2018 and when he had chances to upgrade, he didn’t do it. He needed better recruiters. He needed better on the field coaches. Realistically speaking, he had four top grade assistants TOTAL – Billy Gonzales (WR all four years), Brian Johnson (QB first three years), Larry Scott (TE first two years) and Tim Brewster (TE last two years).
What happened at the end of 2020 should have told Mullen (a) he needed to upgrade his staff and (b) if he brought in better assistants and recruiters, he might start winning those one- possession games instead of losing them.
He should have replaced defensive coordinator Todd Grantham after the 2020 debacle but didn’t, which was the shock heard all around the college football coaching world. The 2021 Gators still missed a ton of tackles, lost three games when they gave up at least 280 rushing yards and gave up 19 TDPs. When Brian Johnson left for the NFL, Mullen replaced his QB coach with Garrick McGee. Johnson is doing a miracle worker job in Philadelphia where he is transforming Jalen Hurts into very good NFL QB, something experts said couldn’t be done. McGee’s work with Emory Jones is forgettable. We’ll always wonder what Johnson could have done with Jones. Mullen replaced bad coaches in the secondary with Wesley McGriff and Jules Montinar. The secondary was only minimally improved. They still missed tackles and blew assignments. Hevesy? How can your line dominate Alabama like Georgia couldn’t and then two weeks later set a world record for false starts and blown assignments at Kentucky?
Dan Mullen is out of a job today in large part because he didn’t hire good assistant coaches. Lots of head coaches aren’t great recruiters, but they’re smart enough to hire assistants who understand the key to getting that coordinator or head coaching job is to make a name as a recruiter. Not every assistant Nick Saban hires is a great recruiter but all of them are outstanding position coaches.
The moral of the story: If you have a job like Florida and you intend to keep it, HIRE OUTSTANDING ASSISTANT COACHES. Not good, mind you. OUTSTANDING. Urban Meyer’s last year at Florida and even his abbreviated year as the head coach of the Jacksonville Jaguars is marred by poor choices for assistant coaches. Nick Saban on the other hand keeps making one good hire after another because he won’t settle for mediocre. Dan Mullen settled for mediocre when he should have taken what happened to Meyer to heart and paid attention to why Nick Saban keeps the train rolling in Tuscaloosa.
A FEW COLLEGE FOOTBALL NOTES
Alabama offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien and O-line coach Doug Marrone are in isolation after testing positive for COVID although they’re expected to join the team in Dallas before Friday. Meanwhile Joe Pendry is coaching the O-line. He has been retired since the 2010 season but he’s the best O-line coach of the last 40 years in the SEC.
The Sun Bowl is on hold because of a COVID outbreak with Miami and the Fenway Bowl is on hold because of COVID with Virginia. Why not just have SMU go to the Sun Bowl to play Washington State? SMU is from Texas (Sun Bowl is in El Paso) and has been practicing. Doesn’t seem like that’s a tough call.
Alabama is a 13.5-point favorite to beat Cincinnati Friday in the first College Football Playoff semifinal while Georgia is a 7.5-point favorite to beat Michigan. I’ve got Alabama and Michigan winning.
ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT: Ross Dellenger of Sports Illustrated, one of the truly outstanding reporters about college football spoke to Jeff Dugas, an orthopedic surgeon who is Troy’s team doctor and the Sun Belt Conference’s COVID -19 advisory panel chairman. Speaking to Dellenger about the omicron variant of COVID, Dugas said, “The question that needs to be asked is, if the risk of severe illness – hospitalization, death, dying – is not there, if we’re not seeing that, how is this different than the common cold? Do we need to be freaking out just because it is a variant of COVID-19? Do we need to apply the same rules or changes the rules?” Dellenger went on to report that multiple physicians and college administrators are questioning the long quarantines and cancelling athletic contests because, “Vaccinated young people are showing either no symptoms or very mild symptoms, and their symptoms are subsiding within two to three days.” I’m no doctor and certainly no medical expert, but if we’re not seeing death and long term hospitalization with people on ventilators, I, like Dr. Dugas, have to ask if the sports world is overreacting?
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