Commentary:Mind Your Ds and Qs
Gator fans will have a lot to cheer about under first-year coach Billy Napier, sportswriter Pat Dooley predicts. However, his team’s brightest days might still be a season or two away.
What can fans expect in Year One under new football coach Billy Napier? A team that plays like a team.
The “D” word comes up often these days in conversations with the old Head Ball Coach, Steve Spurrier.
Discipline.
Like most Florida football fans, the greatest Gator of them all was frustrated last year with the lack of it. It’s more than penalties (I’ll get to that dump truck of nonsense later). Discipline is who you block and how you block. It’s where you run and how hard you run. It’s getting your hips turned in the secondary. It’s doing your job instead of playing hero ball and ending up out of position.
New coach Billy Napier’s goal? Make Florida Disciplined Again.
There are people who’ll tell you the Gators’ downfall is because I “retired.” Since then, Florida is 6-10. That’s just coincidence. The Gators are 6-10 as much from lack of discipline as anything else. There was a shoe thrown in one of those losses, 15 penalties in another and not bothering to show up mentally in a couple others. Florida went from College Football Playoff contender to Gasparilla Bowl loser so quickly it made our heads spin.
Let’s focus on how that will change under Napier. First, let’s get this straight: it won’t happen overnight.
Oh, sometimes we think it has. Spurrier had the SEC’s best record his first season coaching the Gators. Will Muschamp won 11 games his second season. Jim McElwain won back-to-back SEC East titles his first two years at UF. Dan Mullen started his reign with a New Year’s Six Bowl win over Michigan.
But other than the Head Ball Coach’s, those seasons were fool’s gold — holes filled with spackle that would eventually come loose and crumble.
Florida has to solve its penalty problem. A year ago, the penalty differential was more than three football fields worth of real estate, 307 yards, in favor of the other teams. To correct that, Napier gave each player a video highlighting bad penalties from last season. More than one Gator called the footage “embarrassing.”
It was.
Billy Napier’s team-first philosophy is all about discipline and players being committed to doing their best for the men beside them.
We’ll see how the long 2022 season plays out. My guess is there won’t be more than 100 penalties called on the Gators.
Napier’s first season could be rough considering UF’s schedule. More than anything, 2022 is about reestablishing a right way to do things and expecting it in Year 2 and beyond. A lot of us were raised on Spurrier. We expect teams like we had in the 1996, 2006 and 2008 national championship seasons.
For Napier, the return to that level is all about the details — from the driving route to bring recruits to Spurrier’s Gridiron Grille to the color of socks worn at practice. There has to be structure within the program to go along with the team’s five-star football training center structure that opened in August. There has to be accountability. Not just in the way players and coaches prepare for games, but in the way they handle themselves in everyday life.
One popular coaching expression is “Players want to be coached.” I like the way NBA coach Doc Rivers puts it: “Average players want to be left alone; good players want to be coached; great players want to be told the truth.”
The truth is Florida wasn’t very good last season. The highlight of 2021 was a two-point loss to Alabama. The roster left behind is full of players who have yet to reach their potential.
What Napier hopes you see this fall is a team that plays for the guy next to him. “There’s something to be said about developing loyalty and galvanizing the team,” he said.
This won’t be Spurrier’s Fun ‘n’ Gun. Napier will be going for balance on offense. His last team at Louisiana-Lafayette averaged 214 yards on the ground and 192 in the air. His way is for his team to execute better than the guys on the other side, not to run a bunch of trick plays. To do that, Napier and his coaches have to bring out the best in a lot of players.
The test of this year’s team will be how it handles adversity. Because it’s coming. Along with the “D” word missing, we’ve seen the “Q” word too much in the last two years. The team has 12 games a year to get up for. Quitting on teammates should never be an option.
With Napier, it won’t be. 
Sportswriter Pat Dooley (BSJ ’76) covered the Gators for The Gainesville Sun for 33 years until his retirement in 2020. He still shares his love for Gator sports through his podcast, “Another Dooley Noted,” and WRUF radio program, “Dooley’s Back 9.” His Gator Nation News column does not necessarily reflect the views of the University of Florida.
