How Billy Napier is rebuilding Louisiana football

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Billy Napier’s office is freshly organized, so fresh that if “you’d-a come two weeks ago,” he says in his Georgia drawl, “it wouldn’t have looked like this.”

Office décor was not a priority in December when Napier arrived in Lafayette as the new 38-year-old head coach at Louisiana. It’s so Cajun here that some street signs are written in French. For a north Georgia boy like Napier, the locals remind him of his homeland, but “they just talk a little different.”

One corner of the new office is arranged with more significance than the rest. A national championship ring from Alabama’s 2015 team, the second and last title Billy was a part of in Tuscaloosa, sits on a shelf just above a photo montage of his father Bill, a legendary former high school coach in Georgia. Bill battled ALS for five years before he died last September, just months after the neurodegenerative disease deprived him of the ability to speak and just days after football season began without him at the helm of an offense for the first time in decades. Bill and Bama are the two inspiring elements Billy is using to rebuild Louisiana into the Sun Belt championship contender it was a half-decade ago.

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