Florida Football lags behind despite Gator Athletics finishing 4th in Directors' Cup

One of the monikers that help Gator fans out when Florida Football isn't doing so great is this idea that Florida is an everything school. Outside of 2020, Florida has won at least one national title in something every year since 2010.

The 2023/24 academic year was no different, and the Gators have finished fourth in the nation in the Directors' Cup, which ranks the best all-around athletic program in the country.

With all the success found elsewhere around campus, why has the football team struggled to keep up?

Florida Football: Everything School

Women's cross country, gymnastics, men's swimming, women's swimming, lacrosse, softball, baseball, men's indoor and outdoor track, and women's indoor and outdoor track all finished in the top five of the respective sports during the 2023/24 academic year, highlighted by men's outdoor track bringing home another national title.

There are a myriad of reasons why all of these programs have been able to find repeated success, some of which are advantages that football will never have. Gymnastics and lacrosse do benefit from having fewer schools to compete against, baseball and softball benefit from being a sport northern schools seem to have zero interest in being good at, and swimming has the benefit of being able to train outdoors year round if desired.

But built in advantages alone don't explain the sustained success of these programs and almost all of them have a similar link that ties them together.

The following are when the head coach for each sport was anointed to their position in Gainesville:

• Baseball - Kevin O'Sullivan - 2008
• Cross Country - Will Palmer - 2023 (Technically, it's Mike Holloway, but that's a weird semantics thing that's standard with cross country)
• Gymnastics - Jenny Rowland - 2015
• Lacrosse - Amanda O’Leary -2010
• Softball - Tim Walton - 2006
• Swimming - Anthony Nesty - 2018 (Though he has been Associate Head Coach since 2006 and an assistant with the program since 1999)
• Track and Field - Mike Holloway -2003

Notice a pattern here?

Scott Stricklin took over as Florida's Athletic Director in 2016, so only two of these seven coaches have been hired on his watch. And even with those two, Nesty was a lifelong Gator who was the heir to the throne, and Palmer was hand-picked by Holloway with minimal input from Stricklin.

The other component at play for these sports is that once it was established they were an elite coach, Florida has made sure to keep them. Football, meanwhile, has had those coaches twice with Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer, and both times they walked out the door.

Spurrier was lured by the NFL while Meyer had health complications, spurred on in part due to the high demands of coaching college football. If we are being fair to football, none of the other sports mentioned have the stress and scrutiny that football has and outside of baseball, none of them have a professional scene lucrative enough that would tempt a coach to leave their college position.

The moral of all of this is that Florida has shown across the board that they are capable of being an elite program if they can get the right coach in place.

It's up to Billy Napier to keep up with his colleagues and prove he is the right coach for Florida in 2024 and beyond.