Ad Disclosure
Billy Napier on Florida struggles in 2022: ‘We didn’t have the team dynamic’
Published:
Billy Napier met with reporters on Wednesday while in Florida for the SEC’s spring meetings, and offered a bit more insight into the issues that plagued the Gators in his first season.
In spite of a top-5 NFL Draft pick running the operation at quarterback, Florida sputtered to a 6-7 record. The on-field product was a mess; Napier’s first Florida team looked like a far cry from the Louisiana teams he coached to a combined 33-5 record over his last 3 seasons with the program.
Napier, like any other first-year head coach in today’s game, inherited a difficult task in Year 1 at a major program. The roster gets a makeover before the new coach arrives, the Early Signing Period in December means that new coach sometimes has just a week or 2 to build relationships with the recruits who are going to be the backbone of the signing class, and the ground for building a foundation is shaky at best.
“But all those things combined, I think your time is divided,” Napier said, per The Tampa Bay Times’ Matt Baker. “We got some things established, but we didn’t do it with detail, we didn’t do it with discipline, we didn’t have the team dynamic.
“I’d just left a place that was a well-oiled machine to some degree. But it didn’t get there overnight.”
In the time of the ever-burgeoning transfer portal, 1-year turnarounds are certainly more realistic than they once were. Lincoln Riley took USC from 4-8 to 11-3 in 12 months. But unless you’re willing to undergo a Deion Sanders-like teardown of the roster, it still takes time to build back the right way.
Napier signed 6 transfers in the 2022 class, 3 of whom followed him from Louisiana.
“Reality is, first year — I’d say even 2 years — you’re giving away 2 years of your life to some degree,” Napier said, per Baker. “It takes a while to get it going.”
The 2023 class is a bit more robust — 12 transfers, most of them from other Power 5 programs, along with another 20 high school recruits. The key question for Napier in 2023 is how long will this take?
Dan Mullen won 29 of his first 38 games and that wasn’t good enough to outweigh some of the issues that cropped up in Year 4. Expectations are high at Florida. Napier told reporters Wednesday that was part of the allure of the job, per Baker.
And he also told those same reporters, per Baker, that there was a “significant difference” in the team’s first summer workout Tuesday compared to where things were a year ago.
We’ll see what that’s worth when the ball is kicked off in Salt Lake City on Thursday, Aug. 31.
Derek Peterson does a bit of everything, not unlike Taysom Hill. He has covered Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Pac-12, and now delivers CFB-wide content.
