Billy Napier’s latest excuse makes his massive Florida staff look even stranger

Oh Billy. Billy, Billy, Billy.

As our Corey Long wrote about yesterday, Billy Napier reflected on his time at Florida and once again threw a bunch of word salad at the wall in an attempt to deflect just how much of a failure his reign was with the Gators.

At the core of this week’s defense, Napier tried to make the claim that NIL was the catalyst for why he struggled with the workload he had in Gainesville.

And so while we have blasted Napier time and time and time again, in the words of battle rapper Charlie Clips, let’s bring Napier back and do a whole ‘nother scheme with it.

Billy Napier still can’t figure out why he failed at Florida

One might make the case, “Hey guys, Napier is gone. Move on.”

In time, we will. But the problem is that, little by little, Napier is coming out and admitting all the things that Florida fans were forced to argue over during his four-year reign in Gainesville. And the lasting legacy is that Florida’s rivals piled up wins over the Gators that they get to claim for a long, long time.

But the other reason it is so hard to take these Napier reflection pieces seriously is that his reflections keep changing. In both April and May, Napier, in separate interviews, tried to claim that the culture he inherited at Florida wasn’t great and was a major reason he struggled to succeed.

Now in July, he is making the claim that:

“I think that we really struggled to manage the workload that came with NIL, that came with the portal. 
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.”

Napier acts like Florida and Florida alone had to deal with NIL and the transfer portal, as if it were this mysterious thing that no one else in the country had to grapple with. The comical part of his statement, when he talks about wanting to delegate more at James Madison than at Florida, is that he had 60+ staffers in Gainesville whom he convinced Scott Stricklin to allow him to hire.

But then, when it came time to let those staffers help, Napier was too stubborn to let them do anything.

And so, even if we ignore all the game-day failures that had nothing to do with NIL and take Napier's statement at face value, there is now another question to be raised.

Did Scott Stricklin have any clue what was going on with Billy Napier?

Stricklin gave Napier free rein to hire anyone he wanted, and a staff budget to create and fill any role he could have conjured.

So if Napier is admitting that he needed to delegate better, did Stricklin at any point go to those staff members and go, “Hey, what exactly do you do around here?”

Stricklin has alluded to telling Napier that he thought a dedicated offensive coordinator should be hired, but he didn’t want to directly interfere with operations. But if Napier is making the case that he tried to carry the burden by himself, was there no point that Stricklin bothered to check what any of those members of “Billy’s Army” were doing on Florida’s payroll?

It’s also possible that Napier is throwing anything he can against the wall to mitigate his own failures. 

But the reason why we here at Hail Florida Hail are not interested in letting Napier or Stricklin off the hook for the 2025 season in particular is that Gator fans were gaslit into having to support Napier at the risk of being called a “bad fan.”

As we have said time and again, how are the “bad fans” supposed to feel when, in the end, they were right?

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