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S&C Coach Hocke

Gator Sports
Mark Hocke
Mark Hocke to Lead Gators Football Strength and Conditioning
Hocke will serve as the Gators Football Director of Strength and Conditioning.
Matthew Hutchison
Football
Posted: Monday, December 6, 2021
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Florida head football coach Billy Napier has announced Mark Hocke as the Gators next Associate Head Coach/Director of Football Strength and Conditioning on Monday.
 
He spent all four seasons (2018-21) at Louisiana with Napier, which included four straight Sun Belt West Division titles, a share of the Sun Belt title in 2020 and 2021 Sun Belt Conference Champions.
 
Hocke began his collegiate coaching career at the University of Alabama in 2009 spending six seasons on head coach Nick Saban’s staff and was with Napier in Tuscaloosa during the 2011 and 2014-15 seasons. He helped coach three teams that won BCS National Championships (2009, 2012, 2013) and trained over 35 players that signed NFL contracts, including 10 first-round NFL Draft picks. The New Orleans native also headed the offseason Player Leadership Council.
 
He served as the head strength and conditioning coach at the University of Georgia in 2015, where he directed a 15-person staff that trained a pair of All-SEC honorees in offensive lineman as the Bulldogs finished the year with a 10-3 record, which included a win over Penn State in the Gator Bowl.
 
Hocke was on the strength and conditioning staff at Texas A&M (2017) and Florida State (2016). His certifications include CSCCC Certified, FMS Screen Certified as well as USA Weightlifting Level 1 Sports Performance Coach Certified.

Coach Napier’s Comments

Gator Sports
Matt Baker, Tampa Bay Times
·3 min read
 
 

Florida coach Billy Napier wore a camouflage Louisiana hoodie Monday as he straddled his dual responsibilities as the incoming leader of the Gators and the outgoing architect of a Ragin’ Cajuns team that hosts Saturday’s Sun Belt Conference championship game.

Here are five takeaways from Napier’s Zoom media conference — his first public remarks since taking the UF job.

1. He’s focused on Louisiana…

By announcing his decision to go to UF on Sunday, Napier hoped to get that business out of the way so he could lock in on his final game at Louisiana. Coaching against Appalachian State this weekend was “non-negotiable.”

Napier said his game preparation schedule will not change this week so he can try to win his first outright conference title.

“I think from a loyalty standpoint, anything less than that would be — that’s not who we are and not what we’re about,” Napier said.

Napier said it has not yet been determined whether he’ll coach the Ragin’ Cajuns in their bowl game.

2. …but he isn’t neglecting the Gators.

Napier said he’ll devote early-morning and late-night hours “to work on some of the future challenges that we have.” Translation: recruiting and assembling a staff at UF.

He is expected to arrive in Gainesville on Sunday.

3. He sounds like Nick Saban.

Napier spent five seasons under Saban (one as an analyst, four as receivers coach) and modeled Louisiana after Saban’s Alabama dynasty.The similarities were unmistakable.

“I think the big thing here is that we don’t get too consumed with Saturday, and we focus on what we need to do each day,” Napier said. That’s coach-speak, yes, but it’s also a quick summary of Saban’s famed Process, the all-encompassing approach that stresses, well, the process, not the result.

Napier also said “you need complementary talent, but you have to have a shared vision, if that makes sense.”

It does if you understand Saban, who uses an army of analysts and support staffers to follow his top-down directives.

4. Napier explained his approach concisely.

“It’s one thing to collect talent,” he said. “I think it’s another thing to build a team. I think that’s what we’ve focused on here, is building a team.”

Both pieces are important, of course. The UF job was open (in part) because Napier’s predecessor, Dan Mullen, didn’t collect enough talent.

But the team-building aspect is key, too. Athletic director Scott Stricklin acknowledged that on the day he fired Mullen.

“You’ve got to put really good structure, culture in place in order to sustain at a high, high level over a long period of time,” Stricklin said. “That’s, going forward, what we’ve got to focus on.”

5. Napier is respected by the league.

Sun Belt commissioner Keith Gill began his portion of the Zoom session by congratulating Napier for getting the UF job. Though it’s good for the Sun Belt’s brand to have a premier program snag one of its coaches, it’s also unusual to hear a conference commissioner be so excited about a rising star leaving his league — especially at the start of a news conference about the championship game.

“(I’m) certainly excited for Coach Napier,” Gill said. “I’m probably more excited for Florida in a sense that they’re getting an unbelievable coach — unbelievable person….

“He’s one of the coaches that I certainly leaned on when I was trying to get advice and just the way he kind of approaches things, the level of care and deliberation he puts into making decisions. I was really impressed by that. Just a really smart, thoughtful, high-character person.”

🏀 MBB Rankings Jump 🏀

Gator Sports

Florida basketball is off to a fantastic start to the 2021-22 season. The Gators are 6-0, snapped their seven-game losing streak against rival Florida State and took down the Ohio State Buckeyes on a buzzer-beater to win the Fort Myers Tip-Off on Wednesday night.

After a hot start for a team that didn’t begin the year with high expectations, UF is quickly rising in the polls. In the latest update to the USA TODAY Sports Ferris Mowers Coaches Poll, the Gators saw a 12-spot rise from No. 24 all the way up to No. 12. This is the highest Florida has been ranked in the Coaches Poll since the preseason poll to begin the 2019-20 season, in which it ranked No. 6.

The Gators are now the third-highest ranked team in the SEC, behind No. 9 Arkansas and No. 10 Kentucky. UF ranks ahead of No. 15 Tennessee, No. 16 Alabama (who fell seven spots after a loss to Rick Pitino’s Iona team), and No. 21 Auburn. LSU isn’t ranked, but it was the third-highest vote recipient of teams outside the top 25.

Florida coach Mike White is off to perhaps his best start with the Gators, and though the next game is a difficult one on the road against Oklahoma, this team could enter conference play with a lot of momentum (and potentially, an undefeated record).

Here’s the full top 25 in the Coaches Poll this week.

Rank Team Record Points Change
1 Duke 7-0 761 (16) +5
2 Purdue 6-0 742 (10) +2
3 Gonzaga 6-1 706 -2
4 Baylor 7-0 693 (2) +1
5 UCLA 6-1 627 -3
6 Villanova 4-2 563 +1
7 Kansas 5-1 524 -4
8 Texas 4-1 500 –
9 Arkansas 6-0 473 +3
10 Kentucky 5-1 436 +3
11 Arizona 6-0 431 +8
12 Florida 6-0 425 +12
13 BYU 6-0 399 +5
14 Houston 5-1 321 -3
15 Tennessee 4-1 304 +2
16 Alabama 6-1 231 -7
17 Connecticut 6-1 222 +4
18 USC 6-0 205 +7
19 Memphis 5-1 184 -9
20 Auburn 5-1 145 +2
21 Wisconsin 5-1 140 –
22 Michigan State 5-2 138 +7
23 Iowa State 6-0 134 –
24 Michigan 4-2 123 -11
25 St. Bonaventure 5-1 96 -9

 

More on Coach Billy Napier

Gator Sports
From the Sporting News

Napier, a former assistant under such coaches as Clemson’s Dabo Swinney, Alabama’s Nick Saban and Florida State’s Jimbo Fisher, among others, will make the leap to the Power 5 for the first time in his coaching career.

The change comes after Florida elected to move on from Dan Mullen, who was fired after a 24-23 loss to Missouri. It was the latest of a stretch run of misery for the Gators, which saw them lose three straight to LSU, No. 1 Georgia and South Carolina before surviving FCS opponent Samford, 70-52.

Mullen went 34-15 in four seasons at Florida, starting with seasons of 10-3 and 11-2 records in 2018 and ’19, respectively. The Gators were a thrown shoe away from competing with Alabama in the 2020 SEC championship game for a College Football Playoff berth as well; following that incident, the Gators went 5-9 under Mullen.

That’s the challenge facing Napier in Gainesville. With that, Sporting News breaks down everything you need to know about the Gators’ next coach:

LSU COACHING UPDATES: Lincoln Riley | Ed Orgeron

Billy Napier coaching history

Napier has only four years of head coaching experience, but has done a good job building the Louisiana football program into a perennial Sun Belt contender. He took over the Ragin’ Cajuns program in 2018, leading the team to a Sun Belt West division title and 7-7 record in his first season. The team had suffered three straight losing seasons prior to Napier’s first season in Lafayette, La.

Following that, Napier led the program to an 11-3 record and berth in the 2019 Sun Belt championship game, losing 45-38 to App State. In 2020, he led the Ragin’ Cajuns to a 10-1 record and another West division title, but couldn’t play Coastal Carolina in the conference title game due to COVID-19. Louisiana is 11-1 through 12 games in the 2021 season and set to face off against App State in the conference title game on Saturday.

Year Record Final rank (AP) Bowl outcome
2018 7-7 N/A Cure Bowl (loss)
2019 11-3 N/A LendingTree Bowl (win)
2020 10-1 15 First Responder Bowl (win)
2021 11-1 TBD TBD

Prior to taking over at Louisiana, Napier served as an assistant under some of college football’s top coaches. That includes a stint as Swinney’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach at Clemson from 2009-10 (at 29 years old, he was the youngest offensive coordinator in the Power 5); an analyst for Saban at Alabama in 2011; tight ends coach for Fisher’s national champion Florida State team in 2013; and Saban’s receivers coach from 2013-16 (the Crimson Tide made the playoff every year from 2014-16 and won the title in 2015).

Napier’s final stop before taking over at Louisiana was as Arizona State’s offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach in 2017.

Billy Napier offensive scheme

According to a 2018 feature from SI’s Dellenger, Napier installed “an abridged version of Alabama’s elaborate system, a one-back spread offense with pro alignments that can operate at varying speeds.”

“The offense’s run game is mostly derived from longtime Alabama assistant Joe Pendry, and its play-action passing game comes from Lane Kiffin’s offense. The scheme includes some Air Raid from his stint in 2017 under former Sun Devils head coach Todd Graham, and he borrowed Jim McElwain’s tactics for instructing and teaching passers. …”

Napier, who also coaches the quarterbacks, has seen tremendous offensive success leading the Ragin’ Cajuns since 2018. That includes one 3,000-yard passer and two 1,000-yard rushers. Below is how Napier’s offense has stacked up nationally since 2018:

Year Total offense Passing offense Rushing offense Scoring offense
2018 424.3 YPG 205.6 YPG 218.7 YPG 31.9 PPG
2019 494.1 YPG 236.7 YPG 257.4 YPG 37.9 PPG
2020 421.5 YPG 208.5 YPG 213.0 YPG 33.6 PPG
2021 374.8 YPG 196.3 YPG 178.5 YPG 31.3 PPG

 

Strength & Conditioning Coach

Gator Sports

GatorCountry.com had a discussion of changes in the Gator Strength & Conditioning program. It appears that Coach Napier will bring Coach Hocke with him. Given the amount of time the S&C Coach spends with the players, this only makes sense. Below is Coach Hocke’s bio.

Mark Hocke is in his third year as Head Strength and Conditioning/Associate Head Coach of the Ragin’ Cajuns Football team after successful stints at Alabama, Georgia, Florida State and Texas A&M.

Hocke spent the 2017 season at Texas A&M where he served as the Football Strength and Conditioning Coach under head coach Kevin Sumlin seeing the squad earn a spot in the Belk Bowk.

Prior to Texas A&M, Hocke spent one season as the co-associate head football strength and conditioning coach at Florida State where he served under head football coach Jimbo Fisher and strength coach Vic Viloria. The Seminoles won the final five games of the 2016 season on their way to a 10-3 record that included a 33-32 win over Michigan in the Orange Bowl.

Hocke served as the head strength and conditioning coach at the University of Georgia in 2015, where he directed a 15-person staff that trained a pair of All-SEC honorees in offensive lineman John Theus and safety Dominick Sanders. The Bulldogs finished the year with a 10-3 record, which included a win over Penn State in the Gator Bowl.

Hocke received his collegiate coaching start at the University of Alabama in 2009 spending six seasons on head coach Nick Saban’s staff. Under the tutelage of respected strength and conditioning coach Scott Cochran, Hocke helped coach three teams that won BCS national championships (2009, 2012, 2013). He also headed the offseason Player Leadership Council and reported directly to the head coach. During his stay in Tuscaloosa, Hocke helped train over 35 players that signed NFL contracts, including 10 first-round NFL Draft picks. He also served as the head strength coach for the men’s tennis team for one season.

Hocke’s first coaching job was at Jesuit High School in New Orleans, La., where he served as a position coach (wide receivers, running backs and defensive backs) and oversaw the team’s strength and conditioning from 2003-2008.

His certifications include CSCCC Certified, FMS Screen Certified as well as USA Weightlifting Level 1 Sports Performance Coach Certified.

A native of New Orleans, La., Hocke earned his bachelor’s degree in business from the University of New Orleans in 2008. He also completed two years of business school prerequisite undergraduate work at Tulane University.