1 week Ago
Florida coach Billy Napier, left, and LSU coach Brian Kelly speak on the field before kickoff between the Tigers and the Gators, Saturday, Oct. 15, 2022, at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, Fla. LSU won 45-35.
Facebook Twitter WhatsApp SMS Email Print Copy article link Save This past week hasn’t been a great time to be an LSU Tiger. A promising weekend to showcase the school and LSU football devolved into one giant missed opportunity filled with vulgar chants Saturday morning on “College GameDay” (don’t fans know that ESPN's unbearable Pat McAfee was just playing them?) to a $250,000 Southeastern Conference fine for debris thrown on the field (money that could have gone, I don’t know, into LSU’s NIL fund?) to Omar the rent-a-tiger to the 42-13 loss to Alabama on the field. As bad as you’ve got it, it’s important to remember someone has it worse.
Florida fans might say, “Hold my beer while I tell you our story.” There has been rampant speculation all year that Florida and former UL football coach Billy Napier was on the hot seat, speculation that was cooled at the oddest of times last Thursday with a statement from Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin saying that Napier would return as coach in 2025. Speaking of laying an egg, the Gators — albeit with a third-string quarterback running the show — went out and got crushed 42-17 on Saturday at Texas.
That dropped Florida’s record to 4-5 this season, 2-4 in the Southeastern Conference and 15-19 in three seasons under Napier. The timing of Stricklin’s statement on Napier didn't seem coincidental one day later when news broke that Florida men’s basketball coach Todd Golden was facing serious Title IX accusations regarding stalking and sexual harassment. The news, which was broken by Florida’s student newspaper, stems from allegations that were brought against Golden in late September but had somehow not gone public to that point.
Both Napier and Golden were hired by Stricklin. His first hire was former women’s basketball coach Cam Newbauer, who resigned in July 2021 amid allegations of verbal abuse toward players and staff members, and that he threw basketballs at players as well. How is Stricklin still Florida’s AD, you might ask? Well, Florida doesn’t have a full-time school president.
Not since Ben Sasse, a former U.S. senator from Nebraska, abruptly resigned in July after just two years on that job.
He cited concerns about his wife’s health, but there were reports he was forced out because of problems dealing with a top member of the school’s board of trustees. Looping back to Napier, it certainly appears that deciding how to deal with him and Stricklin will land in the lap of Florida’s next school president. It’s worth noting that since Steve Spurrier left after the 2001 season to coach the then-Washington Redskins, Florida had five football coaches before Napier.
Except for the highly successful Urban Meyer, all of them were fired — Ron Zook, Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain and Dan Mullen. It’s a puzzling string of struggles for a program that appears to have everything you need to win in terms of talent and financial support. Napier’s Gators, it must be said, have not given up the fight in the face of a big wave of injuries, starting with the quarterback position.
Former starter Graham Mertz is out for the season with a torn ACL, and backup DJ Lagway is trying to work back from a bad hamstring injury two weeks ago. His availability is key for the Gators against LSU on Saturday in Gainesville (2:30 p.m.
, ABC) because he’s a dual-threat quarterback. And dual-threat quarterbacks have been Kryptonite to LSU the past two games against Texas A&M’s Marcel Reed and Alabama’s Jalen Milroe. Still, the Gators need to go 2-1 in their final three games against LSU, Ole Miss and at Florida State to avoid a fourth straight losing season.
That hasn’t happened at Florida since 1935-38. As much grumbling as LSU fans have done over the past couple of weeks — and perhaps throughout Kelly’s tenure — I’d imagine Gators fans would take a 26-10 record over the same period of time Napier has been their coach. Maybe he can turn things around at Florida.
But the support for Napier to move over from UL to LSU when athletic director Scott Woodward hired Kelly instead (Napier never really had a chance at the LSU job) has not aged well. For that matter, you can say Kelly has done better than two other big-name hires that were made at the same time LSU picked him. Lincoln Riley looked like a serious candidate for LSU but shockingly left Oklahoma for USC instead.
His first team went 11-3 (with a Cotton Bowl loss to Tulane), then the Trojans went 8-5 and are now 4-5, even with that 27-20 win over LSU in Las Vegas. Riley’s replacement at Oklahoma, Brent Venables, is 21-15 and has struggled mightily with a 1-5 SEC mark. I don’t really want to urge LSU fans to count their blessings, but things in Tigertown could be a whole lot worse.
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