The 2024 season has come and gone for Florida Football and we here at Hail Florida Hail have had our fair share of things to critique about Billy Napier this season. But one thing we want to make clear is that while we will continue to have our concerns, and we are not the ones who are going to engage in an apology tour, we also do our best to be fair and objective.
And since it’s Christmas Eve (and I’ve only wrapped two ****ing presents. It’s Christmas Eve, and I’ve only wrapped two ****ing presents), we wanted to take a positive approach with the Gators today.
So, the following are five things Billy Napier did get right in 2024.
Evolved Elijhah Badger
The transfer from Arizona State was one of the last transfers Napier picked up in the portal prior to the season. We liked the pick up at the time and we noted back in May that he had a lot of similarities to Eugene Wilson:
“Last year Badger had 65 catches for 713 yards. Similar to Wilson, Badger is a yards after catch nightmare for opposing defenses. 546 of his 713 yards in 2023 came after the catch, and average of 8.4 yards after the catch.”
But what happened in Gainesville was Badger evolved from a player who would just catch and run near the line of scrimmage to a legit deep threat down the field.
In 2023 with Arizona State, his average depth of target (how far down the field when targetted) was 7.3 yards. In 2024, his ADOT was 17.3 yards, and he had an average yards per catch of 20.7 yards.
Stopped playing soft zone
It’s hard to put an exact metric on this beyond the eyeball test. One of the things we wrote about when Florida’s defense was getting shredded in the opening four weeks was this perception that the Gators were insistent on playing their two safeties extremely far off the line, which made life a cakewalk for opposing QBs.
But Sports Info Solutions does have a couple of metrics to back up this belief that Florida stopped playing soft after the Mississippi State game.
Against Miami, Florida was in Cover 3 for 11 passing attempts and gave up an average of 11.8 yards per attempt. Florida continued to play Cover 3 against Samford, and then, according to SIS, didn’t play more than five snaps in Cover 3 between the Texas A&M game all the way through the Texas game.
Similarly, Mississippi State ran the ball 39 times when Florida had six or fewer players in the box to defend the run, and the Gators got shredded for 5.8 yards per carry against.
Coming out of the first bye week, there were only two other games where Florida got run on with six or fewer players in the box more than 30 times.
The point is that Florida did make adjustments on defense to play more aggressively after the Mississippi State game, and the defense as a whole improved.
Cycled out ineffective players
In some ways, this was one of Napier’s flaws was starting these players in the first place, but one of the reasons he was eventually able to right the ship in 2024 was because he cycled out the players who weren’t getting it done.
For example, Napier made a huge mistake by starting Kam Waites against Miami at right tackle, but he recognized Waites wasn’t cut out and cycled him out of the position. The same goes for players like Justus Boone, Taylor Spierto, Arlis Boardingham, and DJ Douglas, who all got significant snaps at some point during the first four weeks of the season.
This isn’t an attack or knock on those guys, but the reality is that Florida wasn’t winning with those guys in the lineup, and either you are good enough or you are not in a place like Gainesville.
Adjusted offense for DJ Lagway
For the record, Napier still needs to hire an OC. That is a discussion for a different day.
But when DJ Lagway officially took over as the starting QB after Graham Mertz went down for the season, Napier didn’t treat Lagway with kiddie gloves and force him to be a Check Down Charlie.
If anything, the offense expanded under Lagway.
In 2024, Mertz had a completion rate of 76%, while Lagway had a completion rate of 58%.
But the kicker is that even though Lagway’s completion percentage was 18% lower than Mertz, his yards per attempt beat Mertz at a rate of 9.8 yards to 8.8 yards.
Another way to view Lagway’s green light to throw deep, Mertz had 411 attempts in 2023 and completed 16 passes over 20 yards. In 2024, Lagway had just 225 attempts but still completed 19 passes over 20 yards.
Found a punt returner
In 2023, Ricky Pearsall had 11 punt returns for an average of 11.5 yards per return. It was a decent enough clip, but during Florida’s five-game losing streak, he didn’t have a return in four on them.
So when Napier brought in Chimere Dike for the 2024 campaign, we weren’t 100% sold on him prior to the season. But not only did Dike have a nice season as a receiver, but he also found a home as a useful punt returner.
Dike wound up with 14 returns for an average of 13.4 yards per return, good for top 20 in the country. He had big returns against Samford, Mississippi State, and Tennessee before teams figured out they couldn’t punt to him anymore and were forced to adjust.
