re: Billy Napier has supposedly expressed interest in the Souther Cal job

quote:

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I don’t think you are looking at this in the right way … you seem to want to look at a few win-loss games and have that define whether a young coach is a good prospect… Well, in that case go hire Herman from Houston or some flash. Guess what…

Now I’m going to channel Saban for y’all so it can be understood. It isn’t the wins-losses, it is the process. If you organize, plan, recruit, study, register for the right classes, wetght train.. etc. exactly to a micro managed plan organized by someone with a deep insight into the game, the wins will take care of themselves.

That SI article laid out Napier’s methodology… and that methodology has a direct arrow from Saban towards winning… showing a far better understanding of the underlying philosophy than his other ex-coaches. Napier is an excellent offensive mind, but his time with Saban apparently showed him how to organize a program… not just coach.

And that is what he had done in Lafayette, a true backwater program. People saying “he” lost to Texas… was lucky to beat ISU… etc. that isn’t the point… The point is he has built a well organized machine in that backwater…. And guess what…the wins started coming. He apparently knows how to do it.

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The problem with what you just said is that it sounds nice on paper, but I'm not sure that it has actualized for Billy Napier in real-world applications.

Yes, his recruiting pedigree is very promising, and his time under Saban suggests that he has learned "the process", and he SAYS the right things that imply that he is a "Saban disciple" - but do the on-field results actually indicate that he has implemented, or even knows how to implement said process?

You say that he has built a "well organized machine", but if you actually look at the results - his teams have played a frightening amount of nail-biter games against completely subpar competition. These are games that they ultimately won, but they were by margins that were razor thin, to the degree that had the ball bounced a different way once or twice, they would be L's in the final Win-Loss column. His teams seem to PLAY DOWN against other G5 opponents that at this point in his tenure he should be handling easily. In many of these games, his teams have made baffling mistakes, and he himself has made questionable coaching decisions. Again, this is completely unlike Saban.

2021
27-24 win against Mercer (who got handled easily by Memphis the week prior)

2020
34-31 overtime win against Georgia State
20-18 win against Georgia Southern

2019
31-30 win against a bad UL Monroe team

In each of the past two seasons he has lost the head-to-head matchup against the "G5 Powerhouse" program of the given season: in 2019 he lost twice to Appalachian State, and in 2020 he lost to Coastal Carolina. These were THE "marquee matchups" of ranked G5 teams in 2019 and 2020.

He's in Year 4 at that program and they don't look like they're where they should be. Again, if he was really implementing the "Saban methodology", shouldn't his team be rolling at this point? The fact that they lost to Texas isn't a deal breaker, but they lost so handedly that it actually had people believing that "Texas was back". Then the very next week, Texas gets handled EASILY by Arkansas - so really, the fact that they couldn't hang within 20 points of an average Texas team who was playing their 1st game under a brand new regime in a rebuild is kind of worrying. Then they go out the very next week and squeak out a 3-point win against freaking Mercer. Again, he's in Year 4 here and coming off a 10-1 season. After two games, Year 4 looks incredibly underwhelming.

Now compare him to Jamey Chadwell and Coastal Carolina who are absolutely ROLLING opponents. If I'm hiring an "up-and-coming" G5 coach, those are the results I want to see. Chadwell's only close games last season were to the teams that SHOULD have been close matchups (ie: to teams that are of comparable talent to his own). They handled every team that was below them easily, and I don't see a single scare on their schedule. So far this season they have come out and rolled the Citadel 52-14, and then slapped Kansas 49-22. The same Georgia State team that Napier had to go into overtime to beat last season, Chadwell beat them 51-0.

So we can go on and on about how he "studied under Saban", "learned his methodology", etc. His teams don't seem to play with anywhere near the same polish or consistency that mark a "Nick Saban coached team". What you in fact see is lots of really close games in matchups that should NOT have been close, and lots of losses in the "G5 Super Bowls" on Louisiana's schedule.