Coaching Florida football used to be one of the sport's top jobs. Is it still?

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The day after Florida football coach Billy Napier was fired, UF athletic director Scott Stricklin pitched what makes coaching football for the Florida Gators attractive.

“The University of Florida has, for a long time, been invested in being good at football,” Stricklin said in his Oct. 20 press conference. “I don’t think we’ve ever been as invested as we are right now.

“There’s never been a time, as many financial resources and as much commitment has gone into making Gator football as good as it can be, whether it’s elite facilities like the one standing in here now, Heavener Training Complex, and strong NIL infrastructure, all the other comprehensive things we do to help our athletes.”

But is coaching Florida football still an elite job? Experts have varying opinions.

Florida has won eight SEC titles and three national championships since 1991, all under two coaches — Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer. UF’s last SEC and national title came in 2008, before the league expanded to 14 teams in 2012. The league has since added two more football bluebloods – Texas and Oklahoma – in 2024.

Florida will compete with a number of high-profile programs that also have head coaching openings, including Penn State, Virginia Tech, UCLA, LSU, Oklahoma State and Auburn.

Chuck Oliver, a former high school football coach-turned-successful syndicated SEC radio host based in Atlanta, said he used to consider Florida a top five-to-10 job in the country… until five years ago.

“Now, everything is different,” Oliver said.

Oliver said NIL and revenue sharing have evened the playing field when it comes to recruiting and stockpiling talent. He also wonders about the stability of UF’s administration with UF on its second interim president, Dr. Donald W. Landry, and an athletic director in Stricklin making his third football coaching hire.

“I’m selling the paycheck, but I can get that in a lot of places,” Oliver said. “That’s awful. That’s not a college football world I live in is the best thing Florida can do is, ‘We got fat stacks.’ It’s supposed to be so much more than that.”

Florida football sits in an ideal recruiting footprint

The most attractive aspect about coaching at Florida is its location in Gainesville. From there, coaches can recruit within a 500-mile radius north to Atlanta, south to Miami and west into neighboring states Alabama and Mississippi. It’s an area loaded with four- and five-star high school football talent.

“Florida’s recruiting footprint is as good as anybody’s in the country,” said former CBS college football analyst and Hall of Fame journalist Tony Barnhart.

Under Napier, Florida’s recruiting classes were solid but not elite, ranking 18th nationally (per 247Sports) in 2022, 13th nationally in 2023, 13th nationally in 2024 and 7th nationally in 2025.

Oliver said NIL and revenue share will continue to make recruiting for the next Florida coach challenging.

“When Memphis can get two blue chip players in a high school recruiting class, that’s not enough to win a national championship but it’s two that would always, every single time, go to a blueblood,” Oliver said. “And now, a couple of them are going to Memphis and one of them goes to Tulsa and two of them go to Houston — and so recruiting is all different now, there’s no advantage to being at the University of Florida from the same standpoint as it used to be in recruiting.”

But Phil Steele, a veteran football journalist who’s college football preview magazine is among the most respected in the country, still thinks the right coach can maximize the talent within the region.

“The recruits are ridiculous on top of ridiculous, one of the best recruiting states in the country,” Steele said of Florida.

Steele also said the transfer portal allows for talented players who leave Florida an opportunity to return closer to home at UF, noting that’s how SMU has enjoyed a recent resurgence playing in the ACC.

“You lose players out of state then they want to come home,” Steele said. “Players are coming home to Dallas over the last five to 10 years, and all of the sudden SMU has completely turned their program around.”

Are the expectations of Florida football’s fanbase out of whack in a more competitive SEC?

Florida fans are among the most passionate in the country, regularly filling the 90,000-seat Swamp whether the Gators win or lose. They also are among the most vocal fanbases on social media.

“When I’m evaluating a program like that, I mean first of all, the question is, do people care, do they really care,” Barnhart said. “Well, in the case of Florida, obviously they care and they care very deeply.”

Oliver also views the fanbase as a positive.

“They’re supposed to have expectations,” Oliver said. “As recently as the Jim McElwain firing, it was like ‘How do you fire me? I’ve won two straight eastern division titles.’ The response was kind of, We’re Florida, do you think we care about some kind of stinking eastern division?”

With the SEC’s expansion to 16 teams, the College Football Playoff has expanded to 12 teams and could expand to 16 teams before the end of the decade. That creates more entry points for non-traditional college football powers such as Indiana, which has thrived in two seasons under coach Curt Cignetti, and Ole Miss, which is on the verge of making the CFP for the first time in program history under Lane Kiffin.

“Our quaint notions about what is a powerhouse program and what is a mid-level program are going to change,” Barnhart said. “Indiana comes quickly to mind. If you’ve got the right guy in place and handle the transfer portal well and get the resources any team can win the national championship.”

Florida faced a buzzsaw schedule in Napier’s final season, including four straight games against teams ranked in the Top 10 of the USLBM coaches poll at the time UF faced them. The schedule should lighten up somewhat for the next coach with annual rivals Tennessee and LSU being replaced by Kentucky and South Carolina. But Florida has even struggled of late against UK, losing five of its last eight against the Wildcats, including an embarrassing 38-7 loss on Nov. 8.

“What’s happened more than anything is that the bye weeks disguised as SEC opponents, they don’t exist anymore,” Oliver said.

Steele views the strength of the SEC as a positive.

“This could be the year you get a three-loss SEC team in there because anybody in their right mind can see the SEC has the toughest schedules in the country,” Steele said.

Is Lane Kiffin the ultimate answer for Florida football?

Barnhart said what ultimately ties everything together when it comes to recruiting and handling expectations is hiring a quality coach.

“How many times have we seen programs seemingly done everything right, seemingly made the commitment, but their coach was just average,” Barnhart said. “If you’ve got a rock star coach, I think everything else will fall into place.”

Kiffin, with his brashness and charisma, fits that bill. He’s on the verge of posting his fourth 10-win season in six years at Ole Miss and has the No. 7 Rebels (9-1, 5-1 SEC) in position for a historic CFP berth.

Florida fans will get a glimpse of Kiffin’s explosive offense, which ranks second in the SEC in yardage at 498.4 yards per game, when UF plays at Ole Miss on Nov. 15 (7 p.m., ESPN). Kiffin has yet to publicly commit to coaching at Ole Miss next season. There is a thought a bump in salary, in the neighborhood of $12-15 million per season, could convince Kiffin to leave Ole Miss for UF.

Kiffin offered his own assessment on what makes a good college football coaching job when asked by reporters on Nov. 10.

“People used to say facilities,” Kiffin replied.. “Practice field. Those things. I think that’s changed, and it’s going to change. It’s going to be, ‘How much NIL do you have? How is your collective? How is it run? How much do you have?'”

But Kiffin said tradition matters as well.

“Kids are still recruited,” Kiffin said. “They see sizes of stadiums and traditions and Heismans and national championships and location to talent. All those are in there.”

Kevin Brockway is The Gainesville Sun’s Florida beat writer. Contact him at kbrockway@gannett.com. Follow him on X @KevinBrockwayG1. Read his coverage of the Gators’ national championship basketball season in “CHOMP-IONS!” — a hardcover coffee-table collector’s book from The Sun. Details at Florida.ChampsBook.com

This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Is Florida football still one of the top jobs in the country for coaches?

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