In a recent interview with On3 Sports, former Florida Gators football coach Billy Napier made some surprising personal revelations as to why he failed in four seasons at the school.
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Napier admits to being stubborn when it came to holding on to the play-calling duties and said he also should have handled the delegation of responsibilities of roster building via the NCAA transfer portal and NIL decisions much better than what he did at UF. He revealed these opinions of his shortcomings as he approaches his first season as the head coach at James Madison University.
Napier even told On3 Sports he was “stubborn” in continuing with the play-calling duties even after responsibilities overwhelmed him, a realization he did not understand until after he was fired on Oct. 19, following a 22-23 record in four seasons. The Gators were 4-8 last season and tied for 11th in the 16-team SEC at 2-6.
“I think that I probably was a little stubborn,” Napier said.
It’s official: UF fires Billy Napier after four seasons with Gators
He also admitted to On3 his “failure of leadership and my responsibility to our players, our team, our entire organization and staff.”
Napier arrived at Florida a highly respected offensive mind, which was one of the reasons Florida hired him away from Louisiana in 2021, after going 37-12 in four seasons with the Ragin’ Cajuns.
Under Napier, however, Florida never finished higher than 57th nationally in scoring. The Gators ranked 104th offensively among the 136 NCAA Football Bowl Subdivision teams last season, averaging just with 341.3 yards per game, a number that dropped significantly in each of Napier’s four seasons.
Ultimately, Napier told On3, it was his inability to relinquish duties and delegate to other staff members, and the lack of efficiency led to the program’s failures and his firing.
“I think that that took away from the level of detail that I had provided in a lot of those areas in the past,” Napier told On3. “And then once my back was against the wall, I wasn’t confident or comfortable enough to hand that over to somebody else.”
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Napier said juggling the responsibilities of building a roster through the transfer portal, making recruiting decisions and weighing options in regards to managing the program’s NIL budget, eventually became too much of a burden for one person.
“I think that we really struggled to manage the workload that came with NIL, that came with the portal,” Napier told On3.
“ I think in general there, the work continued to be loaded up in terms of my responsibility to our team and to our entire organization. So, for me, in general, if I can sum it up, I would say the ability to delegate and hire exceptional people in certain areas and hand over more responsibility to those guys and empower them to do their job at a high level.
“I think that you have to continue to adapt and evolve, and certainly college football the last few years, that part has been really important. We didn’t do that as well as I would like us to do it. And ultimately, that was my responsibility.”
At James Madison, Napier is already applying what he learned at Florida. He has hired Cam Aiken, who was at East Tennessee State, as his new offensive coordinator.
Napier also told On3 that his time at Florida was not a complete failure, and he said building infrastructure through staff hirings, many of which new coach Jon Sumrall retained on his current staff, was a positive imprint he left on the program.
“I’m delegating a lot more and empowering other people throughout,” Napier said, “and I think, ultimately, that’s been healthy for me.”
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Chris Hays can be found on X.com @OS_ChrisHays.