Florida fans hold Lane Kiffin ‘fever dream’ with Billy Napier on hot seat
For the first time since 1948, the Florida Gators are entering the year having endured three straight losing seasons. Two of those seasons have come under the regime of Billy Napier, who after a 40-12 four-year stint as the head coach at Louisiana, signed a seven-year, $51.8 million contract to come to head to the SEC and coach the Gators.
It goes without saying, but an 11-14 record — Billy Napier’s tally since taking over the Florida football program — is not acceptable in Gainesville. We’re talking about a program that didn’t have a single losing season from 1980 to 2012. But now suddenly, the Gators have almost become an afterthought in the continuously-growing SEC.
“It has not been easy here the last couple of years now,” Napier said at SEC media days earlier this month, per Pete Thamel of ESPN.com. “This is not for the faint of heart. And then the game has evolved and changed every six months.”
The evolution that Billy Napier is referring to is the proliferation of the transfer portal, and the introduction of NIL. Some schools and coaches have seemingly been able to adapt to these changes on the fly, including the Ole Miss Rebels, who under head coach Lane Kiffin, are thriving as they enter the 2024 season with both SEC and National Championship hopes.
Ask any Gators fans out there if they’d be eager to swap out Napier for Kiffin, and they’d like enthusiastically say yes. The good news for the folks in Gainesville is that Pete Thamel believes that there is a pathway for this to happen.
“The Florida fan fever dream is for Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin to end up as the head coach at Florida if Napier can’t find winning ways. For that to happen, the Gators need to simultaneously root for Ole Miss to lose,” Thamel says. “Florida’s regular season ends Nov. 30. The first college football playoff date is Dec. 20, and Ole Miss is a solid contender to get there. Same goes for whoever the Group of 5 champion is, as its coach would have a hard time taking a job in the traditional timeline.”
Kiffin is entering his fifth season as the head coach of the Ole Miss Rebels, the longest stint of his coaching career. But there seems to be a sense of peace and comfort that he has in Oxford that he hasn’t had in any of his previous stops. Although it’s certainly not an impossibility, this seems to suggest that Kiffin would truly need to be wowed in order to leave.
Strengthening Ole Miss’ case to hang on to Lane Kiffin would be their willingness to spend on NIL funding. Thus far, few programs across the country have proven to be as aggressive as the Rebels. After all, there’s a reason why Lane Kiffin has been referred to as “The Portal King.” Meanwhile, the Florida Gators have had their share of NIL issues, with a lawsuit against the school and head coach Billy Napier still pending.
Whether it’s Lane Kiffin or another big name coaching candidate, it feels like the Florida Gators need to do something to get the program back to where it once was.
The post Florida fans hold Lane Kiffin ‘fever dream’ with Billy Napier on hot seat appeared first on ClutchPoints.
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