Head Coach Billy Napier Weighs In On the QB Room, Recruiting, & Tampering
Billy Napier Weighs In:
Head Coach Billy Napier weighed in on several topics:
Billy Napier:
Overall excellent with the body of work in the QB room.
Feels really good with Graham Mertz – he has raised the bar for the other QBs in the room, Jack Miller and Max Brown. They start working with the team today – essential Summer ahead for those guys.
Recruiting:
November/December: Hectic relative to your program (recruiting) part of the evolution of a program with portal and NIL – no blueprint, history, or manual, and that has probably been the biggest challenge with a new set of variables and layers of work for your staff.
Very important for the school and administration to be on the same page. Has to be some checks and balances. State laws are a bit different, but all play the same game, which presents some challenges. There was little uncertainty a year ago, but now we are more comfortable, but we need parameters and guidelines to create some parity. Financial compensation for the player, but what infrastructure are we setting for the players – education, research, we need to put things in place to guide the players in the right direction.
Tampering
Cutthroat business, tampering is real. It is an issue, and until there is something done about it, we will continue to see it happen. Puts importance on the culture within your building – evaluation process becomes even more important – who is the player's circle of influence, the initial part of the recruiting process becomes even more important in today's dynamic.
(Players becoming employees)
The number of variables that contribute to this issue we have relative to employee law, anti-trust law, and the difference in state law – regardless of my opinion, federal oversight is the answer to this question. Who is going to do that? Our government, SEC college football playoff, the SEC? SEC has outstanding leadership – SEC will always lead from the front – history of making the right decisions because of significant choices they have made in the past. Some topics are the recruiting calendar, 12-team playoff, portal, etc.
Are we moving too far away from the Collegiate Model?
The challenge is to remind yourself of your purpose and why you got into this profession in the first place. The way we put together our program is all about development, and in the recruiting process, that is the approach – development as a person, prioritizing education.
Concerned about Gambling:
We have good checks and balances for our league and at our institution – it has made the game more popular, but the big thing is to educate your players to prevent some of these things from happening.
Teams calling out other programs:
Ultimately, to each his own. We have an approach we take, and we can only control what we can control at the University of Florida.
Florida/Georgia:
Reality is – good for the city of Jacksonville, and that's what it comes down to. We have three more years on the current dynamics as we go forward, and we will focus on that.