Florida officially hired Billy Napier on November 28. Today is December 21.
During the 23 days since the hire, Florida has announced 17 hirings to the football program on top of the retaining of some existing staff like Vernell Brown. The newest came today with staffer Kyle Kazakevicius. If it at times has felt like there is a new staff member announced every day, it’s because there almost has been.
That feeling appears to be something UF is creating on purpose. Some of the announcements have come days after the staffers have reportedly started work.
Napier promised to build an army with the resources Florida agreed to grant him. He is making sure everyone knows he’s building that army with this announcement-a-day strategy. He could announce them in batches, but that’d make them easier to forget. Oh, he hired a couple assistant athletic somethings and directors of player whatever? That’s nice. Here comes a new news cycle about literally anything else.
Instead, there is a message getting out there on a near-daily basis: Florida hired. Florida hired who? I don’t know. It’s hard to keep up with everyone. But that’s the point: Florida is hiring so many people, it’s hard to keep up.
Florida hired. Florida hired. Florida hired.
It’s a marked change in the communications strategy for Gator football. The program is taking control of its own narrative and not merely reacting to things as they happen.
Dan Mullen has never been a good communicator. There are sections in Buddy Martin’s book Urban’s Way, published after the 2007 season, that talk about how awkward and off putting he could be back then. Nearly every account of someone meeting him tells of that person not liking him. Plenty came to like him over time, but it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that he’s something of an acquired taste.
And that was Mullen on a personal level, which is more forgiving than the level of a public persona. He got better over the years in Starkville, but he never got to be good at public relations.
On top of lacking the ability to read the room, he has an uncanny ability to say things in just the wrong way to allow them to get spun into something they don’t mean. The latest example of that was his “recruiting season” statement, which, when taken out of context, could allow someone to erroneously believe that he didn’t recruit during the football season.
There’s a famous quote from The Reagan Diaries by former President Ronald Reagan that gets repeated as gospel across both sides of the political aisle: if you’re explaining, you’re losing. Mullen had to do too much explaining as a result of his misstatements and general lack of effort on messaging.
Again, recruiting season. He had to go clean up that mess a couple of days later. Pulling the camera back, when the pandemic closed off most of the normal avenues of access to the program, Mullen walled off those avenues instead of trying to find alternate routes. He did little to craft a narrative for his team and project it to the world, instead receding into secrecy. With no alternate messaging coming forth from his program one way or the other, Mullen had no ability to try to get on top of the narrative once it started to turn against him this fall.
Napier hasn’t spoken publicly too many times as Florida’s head coach yet, but he’s been measured and precise with his language. Look up clips of him at Louisiana, and aside from his famous “scared money don’t make money” quote said off the cuff in a halftime interview, he comes off that way there too. If there’s one thing that anyone ever said about Napier, it’s that he’s a person who believes in preparation and attention to detail. His messaging has followed that to a T.
It’s for those reasons that the near-daily hiring announcements appear to be a real strategy and not, say, a consequence of the public relations department being short staffed from the coaching transition and the holidays. There hasn’t yet been time to put together attention-grabbing video content or glossy photo-laden profiles of coaches and players, but they’re doing what they can with what they’ve got to put forth a message.
Napier is still in the honeymoon period, especially after a strong finish to early National Signing Day. Gator fans won’t always celebrate hiring people they’ve never heard of to perform a role that’s ill-defined by their job titles. But for now they will, especially since the early hires started coming before that good NSD performance.
Even if you can’t name most anyone hired two days after the press release went out, you still can understand the narrative arc here:
- Napier said he’d hire an army to improve the program on the field and in recruiting.
- He began hiring that army.
- Members of the army helped him deliver an early NSD signing group that was well above expectations.
The through line is clear. No one has to explain anything, and therefore Napier is winning.
There will come a time when Napier puts his foot in his mouth or otherwise has some kind of mess to clean up. He’s human after all, and we all make mistakes.
The early returns suggest, however, that he’ll have a lot fewer messes to clean up than the past several coaching staffs had to. Message discipline and winning communications appear to have returned to Gainesville.
