It’s been joked about since January when names started to get announced for positions on Billy Napier’s staff. When the new head coach of the Florida football program gave his opening press interview Napier talked about the things he needed to make sure that he program lives up to the standard that is expected around Gainesville. One of the main things was an army of staffers. He got his wish.
We’ve already seen the results on the recruiting trail. Florida has lagged behind no one when it comes to getting the premium athletes on campus to visit. That takes coordination and man hours and many of those people that aren’t coaches have played a big part in that.
The result is Florida currently sitting at No. 10 in consensus team rankings and with a chance of moving a bit higher when the process is done in early February. It was almost as if Florida was bound to get to this point because of all of the hard work to get the prospects to visit and just stay in communication with them. Much of that work was done by extra staffers.
The jokes popped up this week on social media when the Gators released the team picture seen above and all of the support staff was included in the picture. The army of staffers is at least as big as the football team itself.
“I had many people tell me about that,” Napier said at a press conference on Wednesday. “My brother sent me a picture of his team photo-shopped, like, three and four of the staff members on top of him. So, my brother sent me that so I got a laugh out of that.”
All joking aside Florida is trying to compete with the big boys of college football. This is one way to help get that done according to Napier. But he’s also a guy that makes sure those people are appreciated. That’s why they all are included in the team photo.
“Well, we try to make a concerted effort to involve everyone in the team photo, including all our student workers, all the people that contribute to some degree to our operation,” Napier said. “I think that’s maybe gotten inflated a little bit out there. But I’m excited about the infrastructure that we have.”
The staff includes people that work only in recruiting; some in nutrition, academics, health and rehab, weight room staff, and the list goes on. Every department likely has more people than any other school in the country trying to help.
“(The program) is made up of a lot different components, obviously the players, but leadership in each area of the organization – full-time employees,” he said. “We also have I think it might be 85 undergraduates that contribute to our team, as well, equipment room, video, training room, personnel, OCR and strategy. We’re calling that group the ‘G unit.’ We had about 85 of them in here last night. We had kind of an appreciation dinner that WaWa supported and provided them with food for us.
“So, it takes a team. It truly takes hundreds of people to put a good product out there on game day. I think we want each person to take pride in their role, realize they can make an impact and they may well be the difference. I think the team photo is a reflection of that.”
By Bob Redman