Florida head football coachBilly Napier embarks on a new journey as the Gators’ top man this season after spending the last four years at Louisiana. One of Napier’s stops along the way was as Alabama’s wide receivers coach from 2013-16, where he evidently learned from Nick Saban how to build up a program.
“My time at Alabama really opened my eyes up to what that looks like,” Napier said on the latest edition of The College Football Daily podcast. “I think Nick was a little bit ahead of the curve there relative to running it like an NFL team. We had our own personnel department, your own campus recruiting group, you’ve got specific areas within each organization.
I think that the arms race relative to facilities is well documented but I think also there’s an arms race relative to the number of people that actually contribute to your team that you have behind the scenes.
“So we’ve put together an absolute all-star team here at Florida, very thankful that the administration here gave us the resources to do that, it takes what it takes and there’s no question that in today’s college football dynamic it’s extremely competitive, you’re managing a lot of players and you’re evaluating and recruiting a lot of players at the same time.”