Florida Gators fire Billy Napier midway through fourth season
College Football Enquirer co-hosts Andy Staples and Steven Godfrey discuss the firing of Florida head coach Billy Napier. Hear the full conversation on the “College Football Enquirer” podcast - and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you listen.
Video Transcript
Florida has fired head coach Billy Napier.
Godfrey, I was at the game last night.
I thought it was Billy Napier's last game.
It certainly felt like Billy Napier's last game, even though they won.
It felt like everything had run its course.
Florida has an open date before they play Georgia next week.
Billy Gonzalez, the wide receivers coach who has served under three different head coaches at Florida.
He's been under Urban Meyer, Dan Mullen, and Billy Napier.
He will be the interim coach.
This is what we thought was gonna happen, but it's one of those.
For the Florida fans, they've been waiting for this day for quite some time.
This was probably a decision that was made, uh, let's say not in the last 24 hours, right?
This is something that's been long in the works.
Let's put it this way, they decided to fire him after he lost to Texas A&M in 2024.
And then went back on that, decided to keep him, said, hey, here's some conditions to us keeping you, one of those being you hire a play-calling offensive coordinator, which after he beat Ole Miss and LSU, he decided, I don't need to do that.
And so that kind of sowed the seeds, but then losing to USF in game two this year, I think that's where most people were pretty much out.
And then they followed that quickly with losses to LSU and Miami.
And you kind of knew where it was headed.
Even when they beat Texas a couple weeks ago, it just, it never seemed like it was gonna last.
Recruiting was good.
There was a lot of potential, there was reason to be excited in between the seasons, and then it never really fully clicked, but in a really maddening way that was really unique to Napier.
This wasn't, couldn't win in a big game like James Franklin.
This was just kind of shooting your toes off on a consistent basis.
There were some big picture things that he did really well, like restocking the roster.
And then there were some big picture things that he didn't do well and, and a lot of small detailed things that he didn't do well.
And usually when you have big picture things you do well and some small stuff you need to clean up.
You clean the stuff up, and it never did get cleaned up.
Now, the other thing, Godfrey, with this particular situation that I think was very maddening to Florida people is Steve Spurrier, Ron Zook, Urban Meyer, Will Muschamp, Jim McIlwain, Dan Mullen, none of them got the toys, the bells and whistles, the massive staff.
They didn't have the dedicated football building.
Billy Napier got all of this.