Is this the week?
If the Florida Gators lose to UCF in six days, is this the week when they once again start from ground zero?
When they fire their old coach — Billy Napier— and hire a new one?
When they tear it all down?
When they totally rebuild their roster?
When they likely spend more than $100 million buying out the old coaching contracts and paying even more for the new ones?
You know the drill, Florida Gators.
In fact, you are the master of it.
The master of disaster.
You do it every three or four years.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
It feels like every week, every game, is an endless referendum on whether Napier will survive another round. Win, and he’s granted a brief reprieve — a week’s worth of job security. Lose and the vultures circle, with fans and boosters ready to hand him a pink slip. It’s a relentless cycle of high-stakes pressure where every snap feels like a vote of confidence or a nail in the coffin.
As you would expect, Napier has handled this impossible scenario with grace and class even though he has been booed off of his own field and poisonously and profanely berated and condemned on social media.
We heard all of the rumors and rumblings a week ago: If Napier loses to Mississippi State, he’s definitely gone just as Ron Zook was 20 years ago when he lost in Starkville and was fired a day later.
Except Urban Meyer was waiting in the wings back then.
Ever since, there have been no wings; only an empty sky, a featherless free fall and a crash landing below.
As fate would have it, Napier and his team beat Mississippi State, had a week off and now prepare to host UCF in the Swamp. And, once again, it’s the exact same narrative: If Napier loses to UCF, he’s definitely gone.
And maybe he will be, and maybe he should be. The Gators, quite frankly, seem to be regressing instead of improving. Napier has hired the wrong assistant coaches, hasn’t fixed the defense and has been slow to adjust to the rapidly changing landscape of college football. I just don’t understand why everybody is in such a hurry to fire the coach and pull the plug on this season.
Do you fire your coach after five games and have dozens of players immediately put their name in the transfer portal just to throw some fresh meat to the angry mob? Do you fire the coach and sabotage the rest of the season just for the sugar rush it will give fans and boosters who can then immediately and excitedly start speculating on who the new coach might be?
Ah, yes, fire Napier and there will be hope once again — as there always is. Just like there was with Will Muschamp and Jim McElwain and Dan Mullen. Gator Nation always believes that changing coaches will suddenly and miraculously mean that they’re going to start winning championships immediately.
Has anybody ever thought that maybe it’s not just a coaching problem, but also a Gator problem?
Nick Saban, the greatest college football coach of all time, certainly thinks so.
“I think maybe the problem isn’t the coaches,” Saban said last Saturday on ESPN GameDay. “They [UF] have been through four coaches since [ Steve] Spurrier and Urban Meyer, who both created a tremendous culture of winning there, and sometimes the fan base thinks that we can just show up and expect to win without making the commitment to the program and the investment that you need to make to keep up with changing times.
“They should have taken advantage of building better facilities when Urban Meyer was there. What’s their collective been like? How have they adapted to the new model of college football? It’s not just the coaches. When you’ve been through four coaches and haven’t had success, there’s something else people need to be looking at.”
If I’ve written it once, I’ve written it a million times. The Gators have been living off Spurrier and Meyer for decades now. As somebody who grew up following Florida football and graduated from UF, I speak from experience. For most of their history, the Gators have been perennial underachievers.
Historically, Florida’s championship history is a flash in the pan; like a comet streaking across the southern skies. They had 18 aggregate seasons with two of the greatest coaches of all time — Spurrier and Meyer. The duo combined for three national championships and eight SEC championships. In the 72 other seasons of SEC competition under 14 different coaches, the Gators have combined for 0 national and conference championships.
As Saban suggested, the Gators fell behind in facilities and didn’t open their indoor practice facility and palatial standalone football facility until years after other programs had built theirs. UCF, for crying out loud, had an indoor practice facility a decade before UF.
Saban also mentioned UF’s NIL collective, which, by all accounts, has been a disorganized mess since it became legal to pay players. UF’s own in-house NIL leadership and the booster-funded collectives have been chaotic from the get-go. The Jaden Rashada fiasco and resulting lawsuit have highlighted the dysfunction, but, until the last few months, there also have been issues raising enough money to pay for top talent.
I’ve been saying for weeks that instead of boosters raising $30 million to buy out Napier and his staff, wouldn’t it be more prudent to put that $30 million into buying him some better players?
Then again, that’s not the way they do things in Gator Nation.
Napier has seemingly been on the hot seat since midway through his first season.
It’s like Zook told me once about his tempestuous 2 1/2-year tenure as UF’s coach: “From the day I walked into the introductory press conference, I was fired.”
Is this the week?
Is this the week UF begins the latest cycle of hope … and then heartbreak?
In the end, you can’t help but wonder:
Are the Gators going to be chasing a new coach or desperately grasping at the same old ghosts?
