Assessing how hot Billy Napier’s seat is following loss to Miami
Following a season-opening loss to Miami, the heat has been turned up considerably on Florida coach Billy Napier. In three years with the program, he sports just an 11-15 record.
Worse, Saturday’s loss to Miami could easily be interpreted as two programs moving in opposite directions. Or, at the very least, one program making tangible progress while the other is stuck in the mud.
And it shouldn’t be hard to figure out which one is which.
“There’s a million ways to lose a football game and the only one worse than what Florida did Saturday would have been to get shut out,” said GatorsOnline reporter Nick de la Torre. “It couldn’t have gone worse for Billy Napier.”
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Florida simply didn’t look competitive for much of the afternoon. The Gators were bullied in the trenches. Receivers couldn’t get separation. Costly penalties extended and killed drives.
It was how it looked, as much as the result, that was hugely problematic for Billy Napier.
“The fact that both coaches were hired within eight days of each other and one looks like a playoff team while the other looks like an FCS team who plays that opening game to get a check does not bode well for Billy Napier,” de la Torre said. “If Florida would have looked better, if Florida would have looked improved from the last two years when they were 11-14 I think we’d be having a different conversation. But at no point was Florida competitive against Miami on Saturday.”
There are still plenty of games left on the schedule for Billy Napier to turn things around. But that schedule ranked as the nation’s toughest to begin the season.
Just about every win will be a tough one at this point.
So what can Napier do to stabilize the program and perhaps quiet the calls for his job?
“I would have said earlier in the year that I thought Billy Napier can go 6-6, 7-5 and he would be the coach in 2025,” de la Torre said. “Things have rapidly started changing in Gainesville. And the only way Billy Napier can save his job now is to win games convincingly and quickly.”
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