Current James Madison football coach Billy Napier has been on quite a speaking tour hyping up his new job, as most new hires are wont to do.
It’s still the honeymoon phase, after all, so everything is new and fresh and feels right for both coach and college program alike.
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If you have been paying close enough attention, however, you’ll notice that Napier has been very calculated with his words on these speaking tours, and it’s driving fans of his former program insane.
His latest comments are perhaps the most subtle, as Napier took the time to single out how impressed he was with the culture and infrastructure already established at James Madison.
“I think typically, when you get one of these types of jobs, it’s broken. There’s lots of things to fix. You’ve got a long list of problems you have to solve,” Napier said. “I think here we are starting on second base a little bit.”
Napier mentioned he was a head coach at two other programs prior to this one, one of those being a Group of 5 also-ran in Louisiana.
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But, Billy, come on! Your previous stop was at the University of Florida.
Crying poor when you are the head coach of the flagship university of one of the most talent-rich states in the Union is going to earn you no sympathy points from anyone.
As someone fairly close to the program, I can tell you that, yes, there were some things that needed to be fixed from an infrastructure standpoint when Napier arrived in Gainesville in late 2021.
But to say the program was “broken” is so laughably inaccurate I have to wonder if he was even paying attention while he was at Florida.
Some of Napier’s biggest problems had nothing to do with culture or resources.
The Gators having one of the worst offenses in the SEC can’t be blamed on culture, and the fact that his teams rarely had 11 men on the field during special teams plays isn’t the fault of the administration.
Napier’s teams routinely made boneheaded mistakes that cost them the outcomes of quite a few games, and to blame that on past coaching staffs or “program alignment” is passing the buck, plain and simple.
Florida fans aren’t dumb, and have once again called their former coach out on the latest stop of his self-pity tour.
This might seem like an overreaction, but Gator fans have had to endure these subtle shots all offseason, culminating in the brutal USA Today fluff piece defending Napier’s follies in Gainesville.
It’s almost as if Napier is gaslighting fans of his former program to make them think these things aren’t his fault at all.
The fact of the matter is, this is the same program where the previous three coaches before him all finished with records well above .500 and won at least a share of the SEC East at some point during their time in The Swamp, something that can’t be said for Napier.
He can dodge accountability all he wants, but it won’t change the fact that he was, by most tangible metrics, the least successful coach in modern Florida history.
