It was a wild coaching carousel season in college football this year. In most cycles, you may see one or two blue-blood jobs pop open, but this year, Florida, Oklahoma, LSU, USC, Notre Dame, Miami and Oregon all had coaching vacancies to fill, along with 21 other programs. The college football landscape has seen a lot of shakeups, and things will look considerably different next year at many of the top programs in the country.
With that in mind, where does Florida’s hire of Louisiana coach Billy Napier rank among them? USA TODAY Sports’ Paul Myerburg ranked all 28 of the new head coaches in college football, and Napier stands near the top of those rankings at No. 6.
Napier patiently waited his turn after several strong seasons at Louisiana and reeled in one of the premier jobs in the country at Florida. The former Alabama assistant knows how to run a program but will have to steer through an SEC East dominated by Georgia. There is also a question of what would constitute success for a program that has jettisoned its past two coaches not long after playing for the conference championship.
There are certainly questions surrounding the Napier hire, as there always are with coaches that don’t come in with Power Five experience. Napier tried to build his Louisiana program as similar to that of an SEC school as he could within the available resources, but being at a school like Florida with sky-high expectations is a different animal. As Myerberg noted, UF has fired its last two coaches less than a year removed from a division title.
Only time will tell how Napier is able to handle the pressure or if he can achieve the success that has been lacking in Gainesville over the last decade, but in hiring him, Florida gets a coach who has a clear vision for how he wants to build the program into a national contender, and based on some of the moves he’s already made in both recruiting and building his staff, there’s been some proof of concept already.
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