Nick Saban exposes Florida’s one true problem, and it's not Billy Napier, folks

It stinks how it is going, but it was probably always going to end up this way at Florida. Outside of Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer's dynastic runs at the helm of the operation, Florida's football program has otherwise been varying shades of chaotic. Even good coaches like Billy Napier get eaten alive by this job. It is going to consume Napier, but firing him won't solve everything.

While on the set of ESPN's College GameDay, former Alabama head coach Nick Saban (one of Napier's former mentors in Tuscaloosa) put it incredibly bluntly. In trying to identify a cure to what is ailing the Gators' football program, he said the problem isn't coaching, but a lack of facilities. They have hurt Florida in terms of negative recruitment and player development.

Napier may have been Saban's first Alabamian rehabilitation project, but this dig is all about Florida.

“Well, I think maybe the problem isn’t the coaches. You know, they’ve been through four coaches since Spurrier and Urban Meyer, who both created a tremendous culture of winning there. And sometimes the fanbase can just think ‘Well we can show up and expect to win.’ And not make the commitment to the program that you need to make to be able to continue to make the changes and investments you need to make to keep up with changing times.”

Florida failed to use the momentum from the Meyer era to bring Florida's facilities up to SEC average.

“Things change. … They should’ve taken advantage of building better facilities when Urban Meyer was there. What’s there collective been like? How have they adapted to this new model of college football? So it’s not just the coaches. When you’ve been through four coaches that haven’t had success, there’s something else that people should be looking at.”

The fact that Florida was so far behind on facilities astonished Saban's ESPN colleague Kirk Herbstreit.

“It’s amazing, I didn’t realize—I just assumed Florida has great facilities. I didn’t realize they just finished their facilities a couple of years ago. I go back and I think about the Dan Mullen era, it’s like what was so bad about the Dan Mullen era? I mean they were winning a lot of games. … I’m sure they would love to have that era back.”

Now that Herbstreit connected the dots, it seems to have made a lot of sense for Florida's downtick.

“It just looks like a team that right now, the last couple of years, they don’t have the athletic ability you would expect to see in the SEC, especially at the line of scrimmage. They don’t have the defense. And I think they just lost their confidence overall. This program in the last 10 years, they average 7-5, the Florida Gators, 10 years, 7-5. It just doesn’t make sense to my brain.”

Until Florida can get a head coach who gets everyone pulling in the same direction, this will continue.

Florida's biggest problem is not even Billy Napier, and it shows up daily

Even though this is my alma mater's arch rival, I hate to see how irrelevant Florida has become in the decade-plus since Meyer last coached in Gainesville. Yes, there are always high moments for his first three predecessors in Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain and Dan Mullen, but three straight abrupt firings have culminated in Napier having virtually no runway to take off. I do feel so bad for their head coach.

The good news is we have seen formerly downtrodden programs get it right in due time because alignment is prioritized. Alabama was down bad for most of my teenage years in the 2000s. They won their first national championship since since the early 90s in 2009—and have never looked back. Tennessee was a behemoth in the 90s and early 2000s, but devolved into a joke throughout the 2010s. That changed recently.

What happened is Saban, and now apparently Josh Heupel, commanded alignment once taking over. Admittedly, having great athletic directors the caliber of Greg Byrne and Danny White helped play a part in this as well. Should Florida lose to Mississippi State, UCF and/or Kentucky in the coming weeks, Florida may need to think about moving on from more than Napier. Goodbye, Scott Stricklin!

Florida needs to upgrade its facilities, but it must first get everyone on the same page to save them.