Florida Gators

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The setting doesn't matter. Maybe it was the locker room, maybe a team meal, maybe on a bus ride to a road game. Given the way Billy Napier, quarterback and team captain, is recalled during his playing days at Furman University, the exchange could have happened in any of those spaces; or in the middle of a parking lot, for that matter.

A handful of seniors were hanging out and shooting the breeze. The subject turned to a certain team member — let's just say it was an offensive lineman — with one of the players taking the opportunity to mock the other for his single-minded focus on football and only football.

The term used was "meathead."  

Across the way, Napier took exception. 

"What are you talking about?" Napier shot back. "You need to calm that down because we should all be sold out on football and this program like he is! We should all be meatheads!"

Napier's roommate, fellow senior and cornerback Rodney Johnson, was there that day. 

"I respect people who know what they want and are willing to chase their dreams," Johnson said. "By that time in his life — even well before — Billy had figured out what he wanted to do with his life, and I don't mean in a weird, psycho kind of way. What he said, it all makes perfect sense, especially when you see where he is right now." 

Born in Cookeville, Tenn., raised in Chatsworth, Ga., Billy Napier was the son of a high school football coach and aspired to be a high school football coach. That was Napier's single focus. To do that, he had to play quarterback for his dad, a fixture of northwest Georgia prep football for nearly three decades. Coach Bill Napier provided the core foundation and fundamentals that directed young Billy's path to the coaching profession, but every bit as pivotal were his five years in Greenville, S.C. Napier's time as a Paladin further honed the principles, philosophy and code instilled by his father and coach. 

This is not a story about a guy who went to college and shattered a bunch of Southern Conference or school records. Napier wasn't even the best player on his team. But the impact he had on the Furman program during his 1999-2002 run there remains among the best in school history and is something they still talk about. In fact, they'll be reliving Napier's QB contributions next spring when he's inducted in the Furman Athletic Hall of Fame's Class of 2022. Napier graduated with a degree in Health and Exercise Science in 2002 and immediately embarked on a coaching odyssey that last fall led him to the University of Florida. 

The first season of his Gators rebuild is six weeks away, but the hype of SEC Media Days is in the books and the team is well into Napier's eight-phase plan and run-up to the Sept. 3, 2022 opener against powerhouse Utah at "The Swamp." 

That plan has roots at Furman, also. They saw it. 

"Look, Billy Napier is going to win at Florida, and I don't say that flippantly," Johnson said. "I know what the challenges are there. I know it's going to take some time, so I hope they're patient with him. But there's no doubt he's going to win because that's just what he does. What he did to get that job, it didn't just happen over night or just last year. Check his track record. He's been winning his whole life and this opportunity is something he's been preparing for his whole life." 

Greenville was a pivotal stop on the preparation trail. 


"BELL COW QB" Napier was an all-area, two-way player (quarterback and free safety) at Chatsworth Murray County High School. In two seasons, he tallied 2,600 yards of total offense and 30 touchdowns. 

"My dad was an option guy. We ran inside, outside veer, midline trap, trap option, midline triple and a little two-minute package we used a little bit," Napier said. "We didn't throw the ball probably more than 10 or 15 times a game. I used to give my dad a hard time. 'Dad, can we maybe throw it a little bit this game. I'm trying to play college football somewhere.' But we were always an option team."

It wasn't about what Napier did as a high school player that caught the attention of Bobby Johnson and his coaching staff at Furman. They knew about him long before he took a snap at Murray County. That was because of Johnson's predecessor. 
 

Before he was one of the most successful coaches in North Carolina State history, Dick Sheridan put the Paladins on the NCAA Division I-AA map during eight seasons that included the program's first appearance in the I-AA title game in 1985. But Sheridan also made a mark by starting a quarterback/wide receivers camp that grew into one of the best and most recognized in the southeast. Bill Napier would load his Murray County players onto a bus and bring them to camp every summer, with young Billy tagging along from the time he was in sixth grade. 

"He'd jump right into the drills, too," Bobby Lamb recalled. 

Lamb was in the middle of a 15-year run as an assistant at Furman, the bulk of which he served as quarterbacks coach. So he got to know Napier, the coach, very well over the years, and therefore got annual doses of Billy during camp. He watched him grow, mature and develop into a recruit whose first offer came from Virginia Military Institute — "Back then, the offer actually came in a letter in the mail," Napier said — and eventually narrowed his choices to Duke, William & Mary and Furman. 

The choice was Furman, where the most famous football alums were Sam Wyche, a career NFL backup who gained his notoriety as a head coach, and running back Stanford Jennings, who played for Wyche's Super Bowl XXIII team with the Cincinnati Bengals. At Furman, Napier would get a high-end academic experience and a chance not just to play football, but to win. That the Paladins played I-AA was no deterrent; not for a kid who grew up 45 minutes from Chattanooga, Tenn., the annual site of the I-AA national championship game. Napier went to that game every year. He pictured himself one day playing in it. 

"We got Billy Napier committed and thought we had a bell cow quarterback who was going to attract other good players from that area," Lamb said. 

In August of 1998, Napier left Chatsworth to begin his college career 185 miles away. In those days, freshmen checked in four days before their upperclassmen teammates. They were given a two-hour window to arrive, move in and report for a mid-afternoon meeting. At 3 p.m. Napier wasn't there. Four o'clock. Nope. Five o'clock. Still no Napier. 

Turned out, Napier was so locked in on the drive up Interstate-85, so focused on the start to this next big football chapter of his life, that he daydreamed his way past Greenville, blew by Spartanburg and was almost to Charlotte when he realized he'd overshot his destination by nearly 100 miles. 

"So our bell cow quarterback showed up about four hours late and came in on two wheels telling us how sorry he was," Lamb said. "He'd only made the trip about a million times." 

Napier spent the next five years making up for that lost time.

Furman was an outstanding I-AA program, with eight Southern Conference titles at the time, plus seven 1-AA playoff berths, including a run to the 1988 national title (under Coach Jimmy Satterfield, who followed Sheridan) when the Paladins defeated league rival and SoCon juggernaut Georgia Southern in the championship game. When Napier arrived, GSU was again the class of the conference, but Furman was on the come. 

Offensively, the Paladins were similar to what Napier's father ran (a Nebraska-like option from that era), so the familiarity fit was a natural. So was the respect Napier commanded from the start, even though he red-shirted as a true freshman and was a backup the next two. 

"I was not a great player. More of a try-to-make-everybody-around-me-better kind of quarterback. Really worked at trying to affect other players," Napier said. "The leadership? I loved that part of it. That's what a quarterback is, right? But what kind of quarterback I was, that's for others to decide." 

And they did.  "He was pretty much a ready-made product from the start," said then offensive line coach Clayton Hendrix, now the Paladins head coach. "Billy was never much of a rah-rah guy, though he had a little fire about him; a fire I'm betting you'll see now. There was an intensity. He was competitive as heck."

Case in point: Napier and Johnson were rookie classmates. It was the first week of practice and hitting the quarterback was off limits. On one play, Johnson was working from his spot at corner when a run action came his way, with Napier keeping on an option, coming down the line and readying to turn upfield. Johnson closed in on the play, mindful of the no-hit rule, and expected Napier to pull up. Nope. The QB ducked his shoulder and instigated a wicked collision that sent both players to the ground and Coach Johnson into a tirade, screaming into the defender's facemask.

"I was like, 'Why am I getting yelled at? ' " Johnson said. "But that was Billy. He was always in the game, you know? He had a fire for it. A desire. He came there to win every single day." 

Plus, he knew how. 

"There was an X-factor about him," recalled Hunter Reid, longtime assistant athletic director for communications. "Once he became the starter, he just affected everybody around him. When Billy talked, they listened." 

And when Billy quarterbacked, the Paladins usually won. 


ANNUAL PLAYOFF PALADINS  
 

When Napier's 1998 freshman class reported for duty, Furman was on something of a dry run; eights years with just one playoff appearance. After red-shirting (and missing the postseason again), the Paladins made the playoffs each of Napier's four active seasons, with Napier under center every game during the 2001-02 campaigns. The program's success was good enough to get Bobby Johnson, after eight seasons in Greenville, the head-coaching post at Vanderbilt following the '01 season that ended with the Paladins in the I-AA national championship game. 

Napier, indeed, became that bell cow. 

"He was just one of those players you were looking for," Hendrix said. "He was accurate, on time and knew where to go with the ball. Just really, really efficient. As a coach, you play to your strengths and Billy knew what his strengths were, and also knew his weaknesses. Like I said, that's what you're looking for."

There were the intangibles, too.  

CHARTING THE GATORS
Billy Napier's QB stats at Furman / regular season

Year	G-GS	Att.	Comp.	Pct.	Yards	TD	INT	Rating	Rush	Yards	Avg.	TD	W-L
1999	7-0	16	11	.688	156	1	0	171.20	16	44	2.8	1	0-0
2000	7-1	50	27	.540	353	1	3	107.90	30	64	2.1	1	0-1
2001	11-11	207	129	.623	1,772	10	9	141.47	61	41	.7	3	12-3
2002	12-12	276	189	.685	2,475	16	8	157.10	79	27	.3	6	8-4
Totals	37-24	551	356	.646	4,756	28	20	146.66	186	176	.911	11	17-6

Napier QB stats / I-AA postseason 

Year	G-GS	Att.	Comp.	Pct.	Yards	TD	INT	Rating	Rush	Yards	Avg.	TD	W-L
2001	4-4	64	35	.546	554	4	4	135.52	36	28	.7	0	3-1
2002	1-1	41	26	.634	310	0	1	122.04	14	1	.07	2	0-1
Totals	5-5	105	61	.580	864	4	5	130.26	50	29	.6	2	3-2

"When you have a guy who you see every day put in the work — on the field, in the weight room, in meetings — when they talk you're going to be more inclined to listen," said Donnie Littleton, who started at left tackle during Napier's junior season. "Sometimes, he only had to give you a look. If something went wrong and Billy gave you that look, nothing else needed to be said."

There was the game at Wofford in a driving rainstorm, impossible soggy conditions, when no one could even make out the numbers on the field. Napier and the Paladins, down by four, drove the ball 74 yards inside the final two minutes and scored on the next-to-last play of the game to pull out a 23-21 victory. "Billy completed clutch pass after clutch pass in that slop," Reid said. "He just had a knack of rising to the occasion. When you needed a play, he made it." 

Littlejohn recalled a trip to Western Carolina when Napier took a big hit in the first half, all but surely suffered a concussion, but didn't want the coaches (or trainers) to know.

[Note: This anecdote comes with the disclaimer that things were different back then.]

"We had what we called 'reminders,' which were mini-breakdowns of each player and what they needed to know for each play. We gave Billy a tutorial at halftime — and he aced it — so he could finish the game," Littlejohn said. "That's just an example of how tough he was."  The best example of how good Napier was came during the 2001 playoffs. Furman won a share of the SoCon title, but its lone league blemish was a 20-10 loss at co-champ Georgia Southern, which also happened to be the two-time reigning national champion. As fate would have it, the Paladins and Eagles were paired up in the I-AA semifinals at Statesboro, Ga., where GSU had won 29 straight homes games, along with 27 consecutive playoff games. The Paladins, however, were without their star, senior tailback Louis Ivory, winner of the Walter Payton Award given annually to the nation's best I-AA offensive player. Ivory, a 2,000-yard rusher the year before, had amassed more than 1,700 yards and 19 touchdowns when he rolled his ankle in a first-round playoff win at Western Kentucky two weeks earlier. 

Someone else had to pick up the Paladins.   

All Napier did was go 12-for-12 for 159 yards and a touchdown in what still stands as one of the biggest wins in Furman's 132-year football history. 

"He refused to let us lose that game," Littlejohn said. 

Yet it was a different game that sent Reid's respect for Napier into an altogether different stratosphere. A loss, no less. 

At Appalachian State, it's still referred to as the "Miracle on the Mountain." 

"That's what they call it," Rodney Johnson deadpanned. "We call it something else." 

Oct. 12, 2002. It was Napier's senior season. The Paladins, ranked No. 5, had won their first three conference games and were bee-lining toward another showdown with GSU when they went to App State, which had a five-point lead, 14-9, when Napier and his offense took over at the Mountaineers' 27 with 5:39 to play. Napier surgically moved his unit up the field, working the clock magnificently, and fired a 12-yard touchdown pass to slanting wideout Bear Rinehart with 7.4 seconds to play, pushing the Paladins in front 15-14.

"I think we could have clinched [a playoff berth] that day," Napier said. "I thought we had clinched." 

On the Furman sidelines, Lamb, who had taken over as head coach after Bobby Johnson left for Vandy, opted to go for the two-point conversion and shot at a three-point lead. Lamb called for a pass play. The ball was tipped at the line and intercepted by Mountaineers defensive end Josh Jefferies. Immediately, Jefferies turned around and shoveled a lateral to cornerback Derrick Black, who returned the ball to the opposite end zone, giving Appalachian the two-point conversion and, as it turned out, a 16-15 win. 



The fans at Kidd Brewer Stadium emptied onto the field and tore the goal posts down, while dejected and devastated Furman's players slumped to the visitor's locker room. It was there that Reid, charged with post-game media duties, suggested to the quarterback that some prepared remarks would suffice, given the crushing circumstances, rather than trotting him out for what figured to be some hard-hitting questions. 

"Billy would have no part of that. He was not going to pass the buck," Reid said. "He stood outside the locker room and answered every question. Every. Question. I was so impressed with how his character rose to the surface that day. Looking back, I just think that was very reflective of him." 


"GREAT MIND AND MINDSET FOR FOOTBALL" 

Napier's record as a starting quarterback was 20-8, postseason included, good enough for a winning percentage of .714. As a junior, by virtue of that stunning road upset of Georgia Southern, he lived out his boyhood dream of playing in the national championship game in Chattanooga, falling to Montana 13-6. 

"One of those days you want to forget," Napier says now.  At Furman, they choose to recall the best of his days. The Paladins have been back to the I-AA playoffs six times since Napier was there, but only once have they advanced past the quarterfinals. 

Napier's final collegiate game was the best statistical outing of his career. The Paladins lost 45-38 at Villanova in the 2002 playoffs, but Napier completed 26 of 41 passes (both numbers setting school single-game records) for 310 yards, while rushing for a pair of scores. With that, his playing days were done and it was time to redirect onto a different path.  By now, Gator fans know the story — the journey — that took Napier from graduate assistant post to a rewarding/humbling stint with Dabo Swinney as offensive coordinator at Clemson, to an opportunity for growth alongside Nick Saban as both an analyst and receivers coach at Alabama, as well as stops at Colorado State and Arizona State before landing his first head coaching post at University of Louisiana in 2018. He went 40-12 over his four seasons with the Ragin' Cajuns, including 34-4 with a Sun Belt Conference title the last three. His winning percentage was .769, better than his turn as the Paladins' quarterback.

Napier was named the 29th head coach at Florida on Nov. 28, 2021, bumping him way up on that list of Furman's most famous alumni. 

"I was the one who called him and gave him the news about the Hall of Fame," Hendrix said. "His response was something like, 'Well, if they wanna put me in the Hall of Fame for handing off to Lewis Ivory, OK then.' "

Napier's on-field heroics got him in the Furman Hall of Fame, but his drive, character and humility — traits all traced  to his father — converged along the way and were major factors in landing him an opportunity like the one he has at Florida. Those who lined up with him as a player see only great things ahead for him in college football's grandest coaching arena.

"It hasn't been a straight climb for him to get where he is, which is a testament to his perseverance and determination," Johnson said. "Billy has a great mind and mindset for football. He's so organized, believes in his plan and — I promise you — is not going to have any problems getting players to come to the University of Florida." 

If Napier has his way, they'll all be meatheads.