Editor's note: This story was originally published on May 13

By the time Billy Napier ambles through the door with a Starbucks Venti in tow, the room is packed. Thirty-five people have grabbed their seats -- fanning out from a long center table to each of the walls. It's 7:45 on a pleasant April morning and another four months will pass before the first game is played.

Inside the nerve center of the University of Louisiana's football program, Napier plops down in a chair, peers down at his notes and in his sleepy, Southern voice begins to outline the day's agenda. In exacting detail, the coach runs through the practice schedule -- commenting on the execution of specific drills and the time budgeted for each of them.

His audience is captive.

Among those listening is a small cohort of staff members whose professional roots were established 403 miles away in Tuscaloosa, home of mighty Alabama. There is Mark Hocke, a supercharged Scott Cochran clone serving as the strength and conditioning guru. Nearby is Rob Sale, the offensive coordinator who played for Nick Saban at LSU and then apprenticed under him with the Crimson Tide. A few feet away is Katie Turner, the bubbly director of on-campus recruiting and former president of Zeta Tau Alpha's Alabama chapter. Lurking in the vicinity is Andrew Burkett, the Gardendale native and the director of recruiting research and evaluation.

They have joined Napier, the Tide's former wide receivers coach, in a mission to spread the Bama gospel to Lafayette -- a city nestled in the heart of Acadiana, the pocket of Louisiana known to the rest of the world as Cajun Country. It's here where the food is rich and so too is the culture. The people in these parts have their own vernacular, and their strong connection to Catholicism stands out in a Bible Belt intertwined with Protestant sects.

It's why it is rather ironic the university they support has been in the throes of an identity crisis for quite some time. The college has cycled through a series of names -- starting out as Southwestern Louisiana Industrial Institute in 1898 before eventually morphing into the University of Southwestern Louisiana 62 years later and then switching to Louisiana-Lafayette at the tail end of last century only to recently brand itself as Louisiana for athletic marketing purposes.

To most everyone outside of this region, the school is recognized for the colorful sports nickname attached to it -- the Ragin' Cajuns. It raised the profile of a football team that was a perennial also-ran and had never been to a bowl game until 2011. Mark Hudspeth, Napier's predecessor, led them there and then repeated the feat four more times as the Ragin' Cajuns won 36 games during a four-year span. Attendance surged, the school ditched Russell Athletic, inked an apparel deal with Adidas and erected a fancy student-athlete performance center housing a state-of-the-art weight room. The program had entered a golden age.

Then, almost overnight, it receded into darkness. In 2015, Louisiana lost twice as many games as it won. The following year, the NCAA levied sanctions after an assistant coach was charged with securing fraudulent entrance exam scores for recruits, leading to the loss of 11 scholarships and 22 victories being vacated. It was a crushing blow and the Ragin' Cajuns couldn't recover, stumbling to losing records each of the past two seasons.

To make matters worse, scandal rocked the Sun Belt Conference member when 13 players were arrested last April for felony theft after surveillance video allegedly captured them taking items from a dorm room. Following a 63-14 defeat to Appalachian State on Dec. 2, Hudspeth was fired.

The athletic director, Bryan Maggard, set out to find a replacement who had experienced winning at the highest level, established a track record of developing relationships, understood the value of player development and had the recruiting chops necessary to build a formidable roster. Maggard had major ambitions for the Ragin' Cajuns, believing they could create a national footprint and become the top Group of Five team in college football, usurping the likes of Central Florida and Boise State to reach those heights.

"The sky's the limit," he says.

For much of the same reasons Nick Saban once saw LSU as a sleeping giant before settling in the SEC in 2000, Maggard believed his own football program could succeed at the highest level because of the deep talent pool present in the parishes.

All he needed to find was someone who shared the same lofty vision and had the plan to make it a reality. He zeroed in on Napier, Arizona State's 38-year-old offensive coordinator who was determined to replicate the model he saw transform Alabama into the sport's supreme power. Napier's grand scheme was to copy the Crimson Tide's personnel infrastructure, workflow, recruiting system, practice regimen and strength programs in a cost-effective manner. Maggard liked the sales pitch.

"Fully on board," Maggard says. "My job was to hire somebody who could be the CEO of our football program and knew what that could and should look like. He has the blueprint. We just need to adapt it right now to our abilities and our resources and continue to improve on it each and every year."

So on Dec. 15, 13 days after the 2017 season ended in crushing disappointment, Napier began the process of resurrecting the Ragin' Cajuns and giving them a new identity colored in crimson.

Billy Napier spent four seasons as Alabama's wide receivers coach. Before that, he was an offensive analyst for the Crimson Tide in 2011.

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Billy Napier's office is roomy. Save for a few religious texts that rest on the corner of a desk, a business-card holder and some football memorabilia on the walls, it's also barren. Casually, Napier says he needs to invest some time into decorating his new digs. But it's clearly not a priority. He's been too consumed with his job, the one he has wanted since he realized he wouldn't be able to play quarterback at the pro level. Upon entering coaching, Napier had always envisioned running his own program. He thought he'd do so at the high school level, just as his father had at several programs in north Georgia.

Yet Napier's trajectory changed soon after he threw his last pass at Furman, emerging as a rising star in his chosen profession. At 29, while on Dabo Swinney's staff at Clemson, he became the youngest offensive coordinator in the country. His future couldn't have been brighter. But then Clemson's attack stalled and so too did Napier's career. In 2011, two years after his biggest break, he was fired. A man of faith, Napier sought salvation at Alabama, taking an analyst role at a reduced salary.

What Napier experienced in Tuscaloosa was an awakening.

"I would say that in that first year with Coach Saban I probably learned more in that year than in the ten prior," he explains.

At Alabama, Napier became a student of Saban's "Process" -- a methodology often misconstrued as some socialist construct aimed at promoting the collective good over everything else when in reality it's a philosophy that appeals to an individual's self-interest and personal ambition. Specific role descriptions, expectations and the "Do Your Job" mantra clarify each worker's purpose, reinforcing the notion that he or she can be the difference in the program's success or failure.

"You do this to the best of your ability and you try to be the best in the country about that," says Burkett, who was a recruiting specialist at Alabama.

The "Process," to put it simply, is about people. Saban built Alabama into a machine by recruiting the top players, hiring the best coaches and attracting the most talented off-field employees -- creating the kind of infrastructure that would insulate the Tide from losing.

Upon coming to Louisiana, Napier resolved to do the same. His first step in laying the foundation was to create a deep organization -- one that included quality control coaches at each position, more personnel devoted to recruiting, a graphic designer, nutritionists and an enhanced strength and conditioning department. According to Maggard, the pool of money allotted toward paying assistant coaches increased by $600,000 and another $150-200,000 was set aside for the support staff. Napier is earning roughly $750,000 -- approximately $350,000 less than Hudspeth netted in his final season.

The rebudgeting within the football program is an indication of how motivated Napier was to create a framework resembling the one at the Capstone. In 2016-2017, according to a February 2018 financial statement, Louisiana devoted $3.3 million to coaching and support staff salaries. In the same year, Alabama earmarked $22.6 million for its army of workers -- an employee base so enormous that other Power Five schools complained it gave the Crimson Tide an unfair advantage.

"And we have the same [basic] structure as Alabama," Sale says.

In Napier's eyes, it was essential the Ragin' Cajuns had at least the skeleton of the Alabama monster they'll face Sept. 29 at Bryant-Denny Stadium.

Following his one year with the Crimson Tide as an analyst, Napier witnessed how former Alabama offensive coordinator Jim McElwain tried to apply the "Process" at Colorado State, another Group of Five school. As the quarterbacks coach for McElwain during the 2012 season, Napier worked on a small staff as the Rams went 4-8 during their ascent toward respectability.

"I felt there was a missing component there because we didn't have all of those second-tier type roles," he says.

Napier, a thoughtful person wired with a high-voltage attention span, ruminated about how he would fill those positions and the ones above them. He likened it to a malleable puzzle, saying each new addition changed how he planned to fit the pieces together. Napier searched for young up-and-comers looking to establish themselves. He also eyed veterans like Alabama alumnus Rory Segrest, a former player under Gene Stallings who went on to work in the NFL.

But it was no coincidence the meticulous Napier installed former Tide employees in the positions of greatest influence. Sale is one of the top two assistant coaches. Burkett and Turner oversee the management of recruiting. And Hocke runs the strength and conditioning program, which is a fundamental aspect in team building.

A 12,000-square-foot weight room is part of Louisiana's impressive student-athlete performance center that opened in 2015.

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For the first time in a while, Hocke feels at home and it has little to do with the New Orleans native's ties to Louisiana. It's because he has been allowed to carry out his job the way he learned how to do it while working as Alabama head strength and conditioning coach Scott Cochran's protege from 2009 to 2014. Away from the field, Hocke is more calm and cerebral than adrenaline-fueled. Between the lines at practice he is just as highly-caffeinated as Cochran, who is known to squawk like a bird and bellow catchphrases when the team stretches.

Hocke spews similar nonsense during Louisiana's flex period.

"Like an animal!" he crows at one point.

"Hot chili!" he screams at another.

And just like Cochran, Hocke balls one hand into a fist and punches the other to punctuate his exhortations while strutting around with the bouncy swagger of a peacock.

"That routine is something you believe in not just because you have been successful but because that's how you have been raised, your belief system or whatever. That's probably the most comforting thing being here is you get a real feel for how we do things very similar to the way things are done there," Hocke says, referring to Alabama.

After leaving Tuscaloosa following the 2014 season, Hocke ran the football strength and conditioning departments at Georgia, Florida State and Texas A&M. With more responsibility and control than he had at Alabama, he should have been able to carry out his role as he saw fit. Yet Hocke was restricted. He'd make suggestions and they'd fall on deaf ears. He'd want to run the players after practice and was met with resistance.

At Alabama, Hocke remembers how spent he was after a day's work. When he left the field, he recalled, he was "exhausted" and "whipped." That wasn't the case at his other stops, where he didn't expend nearly as much energy.

"You don't feel like you've even had practice," he says.

Hocke struggled to accept the lower intensity of life outside the Crimson Tide's walls. Sale did too, when he moved on from Alabama after 2011. They realized Saban's taxing approach to everything is strangely seductive. The emphasis on efficiency, the obsessive infatuation with detail, the camaraderie that develops in a stressful work setting and the relentless pursuit of excellence became intoxicating to the point that the culture anywhere else could never measure up. It was like pledging the most elite fraternity that ever existed.

"You don't fully comprehend it until you see it with your own two eyes and experience it," Napier says wistfully. "That's the thing I tell people all the time, especially those young people [at Alabama] that have never been anywhere else: You're going to get out of here and you're going to realize not everywhere is like this."

Napier, who has a softer touch than Saban and is characterized as more "personable" by at least one person who has worked for both, is doing all that he can to ensure the Ragin' Cajuns come as close to becoming as reasonable a facsimile as possible. With Hocke leading the way, Napier created an offseason conditioning regimen that parallels Cochran's grueling "Fourth Quarter Program." It's one segment in a year-long system broken down into eight phases intended to establish the basis of a routine that has reference points and can be repeated and improved over the course of time.

Like Alabama's Nick Saban, Louisiana's Billy Napier supervises a position group. He coaches the quarterbacks.

Not surprisingly, the Ragin' Cajuns' played their spring game on the same day as A-Day, April 21, and staggered the practices that preceded the glorified scrimmage like Alabama did. In turn, Napier has incorporated Saban's repetition-based approach to drill-work, which he says has "80 percent" of the structure that exists at Alabama and is largely concentrated on situational football. Like Saban who oversees the secondary because it's his area of expertise, Napier also supervises a position group. His focus, naturally, is the quarterbacks. Napier roams near them as the players run between drills, staying active during idle moments.

"He's expanded our mental toughness to lengths we never thought we would reach," says defensive back Deuce Wallace, a former walk-on. "It's so different."

But for those who have been at Alabama it's awfully familiar.

"There is never any standing around," Sale says.

The same mindset applies to recruiting, which proceeds in a similar fashion as it does at Alabama. The Ragin' Cajuns copied Saban's evaluation model -- one that is rooted in developing a consensus opinion of individual prospects. In the search for recruits, coaches are assigned a position and a geographic region, which leads to multiple sets of eyes judging talent. Scouting reports circulate from one person to another, becoming more comprehensive as the process unfolds. A competitive spirit among the staff keeps the cycle moving. No one wants to have too many evaluation folders in their inbox, according to Sale.

"We're trying to run the same program," Burkett says. "You can't do it exactly. But we're getting it as close as we possibly can with the resources we have."

And that's what makes Napier's undertaking so intriguing, sparking curiosity about whether he can apply Alabama's methodology toward revitalizing a sagging, mid-major football team with a much smaller budget. Maggart is banking that he can, saying the university is preparing to conduct a feasibility study on a new football stadium with the hope Napier could transform the Ragin' Cajuns into a championship outfit in one to three years. Turner is also confident in Napier's prospects.

The Buffalo native and former Alabama student recruiter didn't know much about Lafayette or the university before she was offered a job there. But she believed in Napier. More acutely, she understood the value of what he was selling.

"I really took a blind leap of faith because I trust the head coach so much, and I trust his vision and the mentors that he's had in the past and the experience he's had and where he's come from," Turner says. "We may not be where we want to be right now. But it's not a matter of if; it's a matter of when we get there. We have all seen it done."

Yes, they have -- exactly 403 miles away from here in Tuscaloosa, where Napier unwittingly began to realize his plan to resurrect a football program in Cajun Country.

Rainer Sabin is an Alabama beat writer for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin