GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Even though Florida has retained a search firm to help land the school’s next football coach, athletic director Scott Stricklin said Monday he will have final say in the hiring process.
And he won’t be in a rush to get it done.
Thanks to new NCAA legislation, teams that fire head coaches during the season no longer trigger an open window for players to enter the transfer portal. So, the Gators have weeks, maybe even months,
to find Billy Napier’s replacement.
“Time is an asset,” Stricklin said Monday, a day after firing Napier. “You would certainly I think it’s going to be beneficial. The more time you have, the easier it is.”
The main dates that are important in the process: national signing day, Dec. 3, and the opening of the transfer portal, Jan. 2. If Stricklin hires a coach before January, a portal window would open for Florida players five days later.
But the tweaked rules would allow Stricklin to wait for other coaches to finish their regular seasons or even potentially exit the College Football Playoff.
“We have a chance to be very thorough,” Stricklin said.
Stricklin declined to delve much into a “postmortem” on Napier’s tenure at Florida, but he did acknowledge that Napier repeatedly declining to hire an offensive coordinator and maintaining a firm grip on play-calling were “probably part of the reason we’re here today.”
“I thought that his strength may be in leading the program and overseeing the bigger picture,” Stricklin said. “But, at the end of the day, my philosophy is, as athletic directors, you hire head coaches (and) you give them authority to make decisions on how they want to run their program, and you hold them accountable to that.”
Napier went 22-23 in four seasons in Gainesville, including 12-16 in Southeastern Conference play. He was 5-17 against ranked opponents, including 0-14 away from home, and 3-12 against rivals Florida State, Georgia, LSU, Miami and Tennessee.
His tenure featured undisciplined penalties, game organization issues, clock mismanagement and an offensive scheme that was as predictable as it was pedestrian. He was fired following a 23-21 win against Mississippi State that included some of those same issues.
Receivers coach Billy Gonzales was named the interim. He first landed at Florida under former coach Urban Meyer, returned under Dan Mullen and stayed to work with Napier. Gonzales made no staff changes other than putting quarterbacks coach Ryan O’Hara in charge of play-calling.
“Obviously, we want to be more productive,” Gonzales said. “We want to be more explosive. That’s going to be something that we’ll talk about as a staff, offensively, to see what we can do.”
The Gators (3-4, 2-2 SEC) are off this week before playing No. 5 Georgia on Nov. 1 in Jacksonville.
Players said Napier’s goodbye team meeting was emotional and his message was simple: finish.
“My whole thing is to keep the guys together,” quarterback DJ Lagway said. “We got to finish strong these five games. I’m going to play my heart out. I’m going to continue to get better each and every day, and my guys are going to do the same thing. That’s our goal.”
Stricklin made it clear he believes Napier left the program in better shape than when he took over, pointing to the roster talent, the support structure and a relatively new standalone facility.
“He’s got a lot of good days ahead of him,” Stricklin said. “I’m convinced of that.”
Stricklin also is confident he will find a replacement who can “compete for championships and not just compete but we want to win championships.” He thought he had done the same with Dan Mullen in 2018 and Napier in 2022.
Stricklin noted that Florida is the only program in the country with three national championships in football and men’s basketball. The Gators won a men’s basketball title in April, and Stricklin hired coach Todd Golden.
Now he needs to find someone similar to lead the football program back to national prominence, although he called hiring coaches an “inexact science.”
“It is tricky,” said Stricklin, who is using TurnkeyZRG out of Atlanta to help. “There are three current coaches in college football who have won national championships. So unless one of those three decided that they want to come, and we think they’re the right fit, we’re going to have to be making a projection somewhere along the line.”
He added that most of the championship-winning coaches hired at Florida won their first titles after getting to Florida.
“We need somebody to come join that list,” he said.
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