Billy Napier enters Year 3 with Florida hopeful while facing ominous vibes, daunting schedule

DALLAS (AP) — Billy Napier enters his third season as Florida coach in maybe the toughest position in college football: Head coach at an Southeastern Conference powerhouse whose program is struggling to gain traction and facing one of the most daunting schedules in the country.

Napier arrived at SEC Media Days on the hottest seat in a conference where they say “it just means more” — so that makes it the hottest seat in the country.

The vibes around the Gators seem ominous. Napier sounds hopeful.

“I love our team, and I really like what I’ve observed,” he said Wednesday. “I just think we’ve got for the first time, we’ve got some stability. The roster’s kind of stabilized. I think we’ve got competitive depth. There’s credible leadership at the players level.”

Napier was hired away from Louisiana-Lafayette after the 2021 season, taking over after Dan Mullen was fired. He stepped into a program that had fallen behind in recruiting, facilities and staffing.

Napier hired an army of analysts and staffers with a plan to try to stack the type of high school recruiting classes that would give the Gators a team that looked more like Georgia’s and Alabama’s.

It’s not that Napier ignored the transfer portal, but a methodical rebuild can be a tough sell at a program that has won three national titles.

The Gators went 6-7 with future first-round NFL draft pick Anthony Richardson at quarterback in Napier’s first season. In need of signs of progress in 2023 to ease the worries of fans and lock in blue-chip recruits, the Gators regressed to 5-7.

Now, Year 3 seems as if it’s a make-or-break season for Napier, who rattles off stats that support optimism.

Florida returns 17 starters and players who have made 463 career starts and 41,000 career snaps. The Gators rank fourth in the SEC in returning production.

Still, all the talk about Florida this offseason has focused on a daunting schedule and Napier’s job status.

“It was just chatter,” quarterback Graham Mertz said. “That’s exactly what it is. I mean for us, and I always tell my guys every day, I’m like, look we can focus on what people are saying or we can focus on what we are doing.”

Napier sees a team ready to win the close games that have gotten away from the Gators the past two years (six losses by a single possession).

“Change doesn’t happen overnight,” Napier said. “Timing is everything, right? When we took the job, what we inherited, the work that needed to be done. I think we’re on schedule to some degree.”

Year 3 is often when things click for a new coach. See, Texas under Steve Sarkisian.

“I think part of it was our culture. We had to keep building our culture, the things that were important to us, and that takes time. It takes time to learn the schemes,” Sarkisian said. “You bring in coaches and you have an idea of what you want to run, and that’s nothing against a previous staff, but maybe they didn’t recruit the types of players that fit what we wanted to be and how we wanted to play. So that takes time, too.”

The Longhorns had a losing record in his first season, then made a jump to 8-5 in 2022 that left many Texas fans still not quite convinced Sark was the guy.

“But as you continue to stay committed to who you are and you stay committed to your course of action, you stay committed to what you believe in, over time you start to reap the benefits of that,” Sarkisian said.

Last season removed the doubt. The Longhorns made the College Football Playoff for the first time, Sarkisian received a four-year contract extension and Texas will enter this season — its first in the SEC — with national title hopes.

Nobody is expecting the Gators to take that big of a leap, especially against that schedule. The Gators’ schedule looks as if it was made by someone who is holding a grudge against Napier.

Florida faces Georgia, Texas and Mississippi, all top-10 teams in last season’s final AP Top 25. Add Tennessee, LSU and Texas A&M in conference. And then there’s the nonconference schedule of Miami, UCF and Florida State.

“Look, the great thing about our schedule, we don’t have to take this on as individuals. We get to do this as a team,” Napier said.

Napier talks about how the rapidly changing landscape of college football (NIL and loosened transfer rules) made rebuilding Florida more challenging.

“So we already knew that we had a ton of work to do at Florida,” he said. “You know, from a facility standpoint, infrastructure, modernizing the approach, best practices, improving personnel. But then here we go. The evolution of the game starts while we’re doing that.”

Napier said he thinks a lot about how he would have done some things differently and is trying to adapt on the fly.

Napier is Florida’s fourth coach since Urban Meyer left after the 2010 season, having won two national titles.

The instability hasn’t helped Florida get back to championship level. Whether Napier can show enough progress in Year 3 to earn patience will define the Gators’ season.

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Follow Ralph D. Russo at https://twitter.com/ralphDrussoAP

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AP college football: https://apnews.com/hub/college-football