SEC Unfiltered: Billy Napier's recent hires at Florida emphasize recruiting

Welcome to SEC Unfiltered, the USA TODAY NETWORK's newsletter on SEC sports. Look for this newsletter in your inbox every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Today, Knoxville News Sentinel columnist John Adams takes over:

I’m waiting on a phone call from Florida football coach Billy Napier.

No one told me he would be calling. I just know.

Why? Because he will want to offer me a job.

Napier wants to offer everybody a job. If a leaf blows by his office window, he will order one of his recently hired minions to chase it down and offer it a job.

He is a couple of months into the business of building a Florida football program that can compete with Alabama and Georgia. He’s building it one hire at a time, seemingly with the intent of creating the largest football work force on the continent.

In the process, he has done as much for the Gainesville economy as fracking did for the Dakotas.

Napier recently hired Chris Couch as his GameChanger coordinator. Couch also worked for Napier at Louisiana. His title was less cryptic there. He was the special teams coordinator and director of quality control and analytics.

I thought it was up to coaches and quarterbacks to change the course of a game. At Florida, I guess they will need to clear any dramatic plans through their GameChanger.

Katie Turner and Briazja Wade also are game changers of sorts. Isn’t that what recruiters do?

Napier hired them to improve the quality of the recruiting process. Turner is the assistant athletics director of recruiting strategy. Wade is the director of on-campus recruiting. I assume that Napier has carefully structured their jobs so Turner and Wade won’t step on each other's toes.

Although I’m having fun with Napier’s hiring spree, don’t get the wrong idea. It’s not as though the football programs at Alabama and Georgia are so short-staffed that they must outsource vital jobs.

Alabama coach Nick Saban was as responsible as anyone for the widespread use of quality control coaches. Now you don’t have to be a Power 5 program to realize the necessity of such positions.

Some of those jobs will be manned by aspiring young men and women in pursuit of a college coaching position. They will be willing to work long and hard toward that end. And they will be willing to work cheap,

But Napier isn’t dedicated solely to lowering the youth unemployment rate. He also has hired a former NFL scout to evaluate junior college players and college players who have entered the transfer portal.

A former NFL scout could be Napier’s smartest hire. Transfers have become almost as significant to a program’s progress as high school recruits. So why not have an experienced set of eyes check them out? In fact, I like this idea so much, I would recommend that Napier’s next hire be an assistant evaluator of transfers.

I will suggest that when he finally calls.

I’m not qualified to evaluate transfers. But if Napier’s GameChanger needs an assistant, I’m all ears.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: SEC football news: Billy Napier, recruiting, Florida