Billy Napier opens up about his failures at Florida and fans are left shaking their heads

I don't even know where to start with Billy Napier. 

The former Florida Gators coach found a fallback at James Madison, where he's surely going to struggle to maintain everything that Curt Cignetti and Bob Chesney built up, and now he's ready to tell all about his time in Gainesville. Napier's comments are guaranteed to frustrate Gators fans and leave them scratching their heads wondering what he actually did other than drive the program in the ground.

READ MORE: The "process" problem and why the Billy Napier Era failed in Gainesville

There is a lot to unpack from Napier's interview with Wilson Alexander from On3, so I'm going to start with one of the biggest criticisms of the former coach while he was at Florida — his absolutely awful offense. An offense that made very talented players look extremely mediocre. It's an offense that ruined any potential DJ Lagway might've had to the point of where we openly wonder if he can salvage anything with the time left in his career. 

READ MORE: Former Florida QB DJ Lagway is clearly ready for a fresh start at Baylor

Billy Napier is ready to give up play calling three years too late

After last year's embarrassing loss to USF, Napier was asked if he would consider letting someone....anyone else call the plays, and he quickly answered, "No." Then, during the SEC teleconference that week, he went into deeper detail, blabbing on about various concepts and playing with precision and a bunch of other loser talk that losers talk about when they can't explain why they keep losing. There was also a bunch of talk about what everyone else needed to do better instead of simply saying, "I need to call better plays or let someone else do it."

But now Napier has seen the error of his way, so Hallelujah. He claims he should have given up the play calling a long time ago. Some would argue he should have never done it in the first place. 

READ MORE: Billy Napier’s house of cards collapses in deflating loss

Alexander points out that Florida's offense was failing while Napier was also taking on all the responsibilities of roster management and NIL issues. And not only was Napier taking on too much, but he didn't want to give any of it up. 

“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 said. “And then once my back was against the wall, I wasn’t confident or comfortable enough to hand that over to somebody else.”

This would be a good time to point out that Napier had a full staff of assistants and over 60 additional coaches on the support staff. It was a running joke about how many random assistants to the assistant coaches Napier had running around. And he didn't trust any of them to do anything! 

"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," Napier added. 

It's no secret that Napier was far over his head as the Gators coach, but this quote proves exactly how inept he was at nearly everything. He hired a million people, he didn't trust any of them to do their jobs and took on all the responsibilities himself and was terrible at it. The more you read and the more you should wonder why Scott Stricklin didn't nip this thing in the bud two years earlier. Even if Stricklin didn't want to fire him, he had the power to force him to make changes. 

It's good that Florida football has put the Napier era behind them. If nothing else, Jon Sumrall appears to be competent and comfortable enough to hire good people that he believes are capable of doing the jobs they are tasked with. The days in Gainesville will be brighter if for no other reason than the last guy is gone. 

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