My column from Gator Bait from this morning:
This was the football version of “you had me at hello” when Billy Napier said he will be coaching Florida’s quarterbacks and calling the plays since it frees him up to have two coaches working the offensive line.
“I’ll be calling the plays here,” Napier said at his introductory press conference Sunday afternoon, just five hours after arriving from the University of Louisiana and a Sun Belt Conference championship. “I think it give us an advantage in my opinion. We’re one of the only teams in the entire country to have two offensive line coaches. We’ll have an offensive line coach and an assistant offensive line coach.”
What a concept.
It worked for Urban Meyer who won two national championships at the University of Florida with Steve Addazio and John Hevesy coaching the offensive line. That 2008 O-line that featured future NFL Pro Bowlers Mike and Maurkice Pouncey along with Carl Johnson, Jason Watkins and Phil Trautwein did the heavy lifting for a national championship team that averaged 43.6 points, 231.1 rushing yards (5.9 per carry), 213.9 passing yards (9.1 per attempt) and gave up only 16 sacks in 14 games.
Throughout his time at Louisiana, Napier has gone with two O-line coaches. It has worked well enough in four years for the Cajuns to go 40-12 with 10, 11 and 12 wins in the last three seasons. The 2021 SBC championship team (12-1 record) has been working with Jeff Norrid as the O-line coach assisted by Darnell Stapleton, who at one time started on the Pittsburgh Steelers O-line with Maurkice Pouncey.
“We will construct our staff on both sides of the ball and put a premium on the line of scrimmage – the offensive line, the defensive line,” Napier said. “The edge players will be very important.
“And certainly when you’re coaching the offensive line, you’ve got to coach five players. Nobody’s got one coach coaching five DBs. I don’t know why you wouldn’t have two guys coaching the offensive line. I’ll coach the quarterbacks with the help from an offensive analyst and call the plays and we’ll have the advantage of having two offensive line coaches.”
Imagine that. Something that makes sense.
What we learned from Napier’s first press conference is that he makes an awful lot of sense. It’s what you would expect from someone that UF athletic director Scott Stricklin says is described by people who know him as “genuine, authentic, organized, detailed, disciplined, methodical, caring, competitive, hardworking, thoughtful.”
Before we go further, let’s start with the “genuine” description.
Billy Napier has a Southern accent, acquired while growing up in north Georgia and refined after years of coaching in South Carolina, Alabama and Louisiana. He doesn’t have to fake a Southern accent, unlike that recently hired coach at LSU, whose attempt to speak Southernese went over about as well as an attempt to speak Swahili to the locals in Tanzania after a single lesson from one of those “Speak in Ten Minutes” books.
Who else but someone who is genuine would admit to the world that he learned just how much he didn’t know in 2011, when he landed a job as an analyst for Nick Saban after being fired as Clemson’s offensive coordinator by Dabo Swinney?
“First of all, it was a unique time in my career,” Napier said. “Certainly I was in a very humbled place, I think any time that happens to you, but I’m thankful for Coach Saban giving me that opportunity. There’s no question.
“I’d been in college football for 10 years at that point and in that one year I think I learned more than I learned in the previous 10, if that makes sense.”
It makes perfect sense. There is a reason why Nick Saban has won more national championships (seven) than any coach in college football history. There is a reason why no coach in college football has more staff turnover than Nick Saban and yet Alabama keeps churning out championship teams. Napier left Alabama in 2012 for Colorado State, where he spent a year as an assistant with former Alabama offensive coordinator and Florida head coach Jim McElwain. He returned in 2013 to coach Saban’s wide receivers and during the next four years worked with future head coaches Kirby Smart, Lane Kiffin, Mario Cristobal and Jeremy Pruitt. The 2016 Alabama team had Steve Sarkisian (now HBC at Texas) and Mike Locksley (now HBC at Maryland) working as analysts.
During that one year working as an analyst and the four he spent coaching wide receivers at Alabama, Napier got fully indoctrinated to “the process.” We’ve all heard about Saban and “the process” but most people act as if it’s computer code for the next rocket launch at Cape Canaveral.
Napier says it really is fairly simple.
“I think really what it is it’s a very specific detailed plan for the players and the staff relative to who they are as people, who they are as students and who they are as football players,” he said while answering a few more questions after the formal press conference ended. “It’s that simple. The key is executing the process. It’s one thing to talk about it. It’s another thing to have the discipline to follow through and do those things each day. That will be the challenge is to get everybody in the building to do just that. That’s my job to create consistency, be fair and hold people accountable and create an environment where people want to do their job. They want to look forward to coming to work every day.”
When he first arrived at Alabama back in 2011, he was exposed to “the process” the first time and it completely changed how he thought about coaching football.
“Maybe you have these thoughts and these beliefs and convictions about how things should be done and then all of a sudden you walk into the building and you’re looking around and observing things and there it is,” Napier said. “I was 30 years old at the time. I remember telling Ali (his wife) if this was our first job in college football we would be ecstatic. So it’s almost like you had to take a step backwards so you could take a step forward and man, an incredible year. We won the national championship that year. We beat LSU in New Orleans in the Sugar Bowl. I would say this. Everybody wants to talk about these head coaches. You don’t realize the quality, the unbelievable, best in the entire profession in the building that you’re getting to interact with and work with each day, to have conversations with, to go back and forth with about ideas.”
It was like getting a master’s degree in coaching and the four years he spent coaching wide receivers at Alabama, further ingraining “the process” into the core of his foundation were like a PhD.
And now that he’s the head coach at the University of Florida, where coaches who don’t win championships find themselves seeking gainful employment elsewhere, an adapted version of “the process,” refined and fine-tuned at Louisiana, will be implemented, starting with the way he divides every football season into eight phases.
“I’ll give you the quick version here – foundation, identity, spring practice, discretionary period, summer regimen, training camp, in-season and postseason,” Napier said. “Really what we try to do is to create some intensity and urgency for small periods of time. We have specific goals and objectives for each one of those and everybody in the building’s got things that they’re in charge of and what we’re trying to accomplish.”
Recruiting is also broken down into workable phases.
“So, we also break our recruiting calendar into six phases and that’s all well-defined for everybody in the building,” he said. “And, I do think we’ve gotten better at each one of those things, each one over the last four years.”
It is recruiting that will require his immediate attention with the December signing date 10 days away. He’s not going to go at it with a fire all your guns at once approach that may or may not get results. For one thing, he doesn’t have a full staff yet and hasn’t done personal interviews with the current coaches on staff to determine who will have the option to stay on and who will need to find a new place to coach in 2022.
Napier knows what the fans expect, but he threw out a bit of caution while explaining how he will go about it.
“I think I know everybody wants to go pedal to the metal here and go a hundred miles an hour,” he said while preaching patience, adding, “So, we’re going to evaluate the situation a little bit this week, over the next 10 days or so, but you can expect us to be very conservative, very patient, trying to position ourselves for post-signing day to evaluate all the players that are left over, all the players in the transfer portal.
“And then when we do have our entire staff and organization put together, position ourselves for some really strong weekends in January, and then try to close strong in February.”
While this might not satisfy some who believe there is no time to lose on the recruiting trail, do understand the one part of “the process” that also reminds him of his late father, a long-time high school football coach who taught him that relationships are what matters most. Recruiting is all about building relationships not only with the athlete but with the parents and family of the athlete as well as his high school coach. This is not a fly by night approach which is why Napier is preaching patience at this point.
He knows that if trust and respect are earned that the relationships will be built the proper way and the foundations for long term success will be put in place. It works for Saban and it worked for Napier at Louisiana, where after the Ragin Cajuns beat Appalachian State for the Sun Belt Conference title Saturday, he had to do one of the toughest things he’s ever had to do – say good-bye to kids who trusted him back in 2018 when he took the job.
“It was a tough week in a lot of ways but I think there’s so many individual stories in that locker room,” Napier said. “That’s the thing. You pour your heart and soul into each one of those guys and the best thing about the job is to see them make progress as people. To have to leave right in the middle of some of those guys’ careers is tough.”
He leaves his former team with a good conscience and in the good hands of Michael Desmoreaux, a former standout Louisiana quarterback who inherits a program where winning is expected. Now, Billy Napier arrives in Gainesville knowing fully well what the expectations are at the University of Florida – “These jobs will chew you up and spit you out if you let them,” he says – but prepared to deal with it methodically, systematically and with the goal of building something that won’t break.
The three previous coaches came to Gainesville thinking they had the answers for sustaining excellence. All three of them – Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain and Dan Mullen – left with winning records but none of them won a Southeastern Conference championship or won enough games to last four full years. This is a tough job and it’s a tough place to coach, but we know from the 12 years of Steve Spurrier (122-27-1, six SEC championships, one national title) and the six of Urban Meyer (65-15, two SEC championships, two national titles) that it can be done here.
There were other SEC jobs that Napier could have had – Mississippi State, Auburn, South Carolina and Tennessee all wanted him – but he chose Florida. A lot of prayer went into the decision to take the Florida job. During the 2021 season at Louisiana, the theme of the team chapel was the Book of Joshua. Sunday he pointed out the Joshua 1:9 where it says, “Be strong and courageous.”
He arrives in Gainesville feeling strong enough to handle the job and courageous enough to lead the Gators.
“You know, so it’s the right place at the right time, with the right people and the right leadership,” he said.
And a plan in place that involves common sense and the Billy Napier version of “the process.”
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