Former Florida Gators coach and current James Madison Dukes coach, Billy Napier, has had quite the eventful press tour this offseason.
After his unceremonious exit in Gainesville, Napier has had plenty of opportunities to offer a look under the hood at just what went wrong during his time as the head coach of the Gators.
That hasn’t exactly happened, though, as Napier went on a local ESPN Radio show, “Fitz The Bill” in Richmond, to try and dump blame on his former employer while discussing the virtues of his new landing spot.
Then there was the USA Today fluff piece that tried to cast aspersions on the culture at Florida when Napier was there all while absolving him of having any hand in that, alluding to it being a systemic problem.
The point is, there’s been a lack of accountability from Napier, but the new Dukes head coach may have finally come clean about what went wrong while he was at Florida.
In an interview with On3’s Wilson Alexander, Napier took plenty of the blame for his shortcomings, identifying a lack of delegation on his part as well as some stubbornness with regard to his offensive philosophies.
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“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.
“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.”
When it comes to his inability to give up play calling duties, Napier was forthcoming, saying “I think that I probably was a little stubborn.”
“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.”
Reading this as a Gator fan is absolutely infuriating, because these are all things that most Florida supporters identified very early on as blindspots or weak points that would sink Napier’s tenure at UF.
Some fans were even pressing the panic button during his opening presser when Napier revealed that he wasn’t going to hire an offensive coordinator, but I would say the majority of them started to jump ship sometime around his second year following a five-game collapse to end the season.
As far as his comments about NIL and not being able to give up those duties as well, those words are equally as damning.
Fans and rivals alike all remember the bungling of the Jadan Rashada NIL deal.
One can only wonder if Napier had delegated more responsibility or established a front office model (much like the one they now have in place at Florida), perhaps the Gators wouldn’t have been mired in a very public legal battle for the majority of Napier’s tenure regarding Rashada’s reported missed paychecks.
Napier famously hired one of the largest support staffs in SEC history, so the fact that he is now saying that he refused to delegate responsibilities to them is eye-opening, to say the least.
There is a good chance Napier has recognized the error of his ways and will correct course in time to be successful at JMU.
He’s already hired an offensive coordinator, East Tennessee’s Cam Aiken, so maybe he really has turned over a new leaf.
That’s nice for James Madison fans, but what about the Florida fans who endured the entirety of Napier’s tenure?
The former Gators head coach never even issued an official goodbye statement after being fired by his old athletic director Scott Stricklin, something even the most embittered coaches have done after being shown the door in northern Florida.
Perhaps all Napier needed was a change of scenery and an ego check. As you’ll recall, he did pretty well the last time he was coaching a Sun Belt program.
Time will tell, but admitting you had a problem is only the first step in a very long journey of self-improvement, and Billy Napier has a hell of a road in front of him.
