Good article about UF Football

[g8rfan]

And why we are where we are. Much of this has been discussed in depth around here but I thought I’d share this anyway..

theathletic.com/4474815/2023/05/15/florida-football/

[tapsgator]

Can't get to it. Going to assume based on the "we've enjoyed some success, HIGH LEVEL success, but it's been erratic" that it's a lot of Scott Stricklin proving just how ill-equipped he is to handle the job. We have not enjoyed ANY success as defined by the University of Florida and a handful of other schools standards. Winning the East has never been and will never be "success" much less "high-level success." That's the problem right there. We can unpack it endlessly, but this is it:

Put simply the people running a historical top 10 program, and a top 3 in the last 25 years under both Spurrier and Meyer, have absolutely no clue of what the standard is at the University of Florida. Winning the West at Mississippi State would be "high-level success," winning your conference at ULL is about as much success as you can have there, but when you don't sniff national championship contention at UF? That ain't success. We had 2 years since 2012 when we finished the season as a top 10 team. Neither of those years were we even close to the play-off. Thanks to Jeremy Foley's perennial bar lowering and his little buddy taking the baton and running, we're now aspiring to be good but not great. It's not a winner's mentality, and I really don't see any light at the end of the tunnel with the current infrastructure we have in place.

[Rock Gator]

I read it. It was thoughtful and well written. One key point I noted was the implication (no direct quote from Scott Stricklin) that he knows if CBN doesn't work out, he may not (won't?) have the opportunity to pick the next coach. That train has left the station of course, but it's good if he knows this. Maybe he can talk to Coach Billy about an Offensive Coordinator...

RG

[Rock Gator]

Here's what the article said in this regard: "And Stricklin understands he might not be the one making another hire unless it’s a long, win-filled time from now." That's a little unclear to me. Did Stricklin say this? Or did the reporter assume he knows it? Because there are a lot of delusional people in this world and Scott Stricklin may very well be one of them.

RG

[tapsgator]

Unless Napier wins a national title in the next 2-3 years and then another one in the next 10 he's not a job saving hire. Even then basketball would need to be a tournament team. I really think even though the media is starting to come around people aren't ready or willing to process how precipitous our fall from the absolute pinnacle of the college sports landscape has been. Which is crazy to me given that from 90-2000 we were probably a top 5 and definitely a top 10 athletic program and from 2000-2010 if you properly weight things rather than being politically correct we were absolute the preeminent athletic program in the country and we did things in football and basketball (as long as we're being real that's 90-95% of the equation) that nobody has done before and I really don't see how anybody will do them moving forward. Now we're talking about 10 year plans and losing seasons and making the NIT. 5.5 win total in Vegas. I can't remember this type of fall without some sort of (serious) NCAA sanctions.

The main reasons are pretty obvious but Napier is the 43rd ranked college football coach in the country by CBS sports and 11th in the SEC. Sarkisian is also above him so if he doesn't improve (or somebody else suck worse) he'll drop to 12 next year. We're 12th in the pre-season SEC Power Rankings. This "last year was Year 0" crap that seems to have caught fire is asinine to me. Last year was year 1. You know how I know? It was his first year as the coach. In basketball the consensus is that Golden was the worst first year coach in the SEC before he lost basically his entire roster to the NBA or the portal. I guess with Napier Math since he has to build a whole new starting lineup last year should be considered year -1 and this upcoming season is year 0.

It was one year, but if Stricklin knows this is his last hire if it doesn't work out then why is he the one deciding if the coaches stay? He already kept Mike White way too long without a built in financial incentive to accept mediocrity. Why is he the one who decides when enough is enough? He's very very bad at that. He brought in Mullen and watched as he clearly didn't care about the team anymore and then left him in place to poison the recruiting well. In the case of women's sports it's going to cost the University money. I mean look at this list:

hailfloridahail.com/2022/06/18/top-five-florida-gators-scandals/

Stricklin and/or Mullen have a significant hand in everything outside of Pell. It's really tough to root for the Gators with Foley and Stricklin in the mix, I'll soldier through but it sucks and they don't even win. This is a drowning man who is looking up at coaches who seem to be in water that is trending towards too deep. All he's going to do is continue pulling them and the program down with him. The facilities are now competitive 10 years behind everybody else, but we are still getting donkey punched in NIL and suddenly can't raise money. At UF. It's preposterous.

[Mojave Gator]

Odd thing: I have a subscription to The Athletic, and they keep insisting that I log in. Over, and over, and...

[g8rfan]

May 20, 2023 21:07:03 GMT -5 Mojave Gator said:

Odd thing: I have a subscription to The Athletic, and they keep insisting that I log in. Over, and over, and...

Strange. The link works for me on mobile and PC just fine with no subscription. The internet is weird.

[Mojave Gator]

I tried again this morning. I start to read the article, it is obscured by a subscription offer, I log in again and the same thing keeps happening. I have contacted customer support.

[Rock Gator]

I cheated. Opened the page, and once it came up, did a quick CMD-A & CMD-C (select all and copy). Then pasted it into a text file. Formatting was a mess but it worked. I learned something at UF at least.

[Mojave Gator]

I still can't read it. The Athletic asked my opinion of the support that I got, when I never got a contact from them.

[Rock Gator]

How a once-dominant college football program fell permanently two steps behind
Andy Staples
May 15, 2023
GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The television monitors in the dining hall of Florida’s new $85 million Heavener Football Training Center declare a hopeful message: “A new era has dawned.”

As football players and other Florida athletes select their meals from an impressive array of options that include roast pork, grilled cauliflower, pizza, burgers and churro cupcakes, about 10 yards away, athletic director Scott Stricklin sits with his lunch and takes it all in.
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“Since we won our last national championship, we’ve had years where we’ve had some good success — high-level success,” Stricklin says. “But we have been incredibly erratic with some incomprehensible lows that you wouldn’t expect the University of Florida to have.”
Around the corner, banners commemorate the Gators’ eight official Southeastern Conference football titles. Three Waterford crystal footballs sit atop national championship trophies from 1996, 2006 and 2008.
What an era that was. After decades mired in mediocrity, the arrival of alum Steve Spurrier as coach in 1990, followed by Urban Meyer’s dizzying six-year run, turned the program that could never get over the hump into the program that couldn’t stop winning. An avalanche of success squeezed into 18 years trained Florida fans to expect nothing less than dominance. But that era ended when the Tim Tebow-Brandon Spikes class graduated in 2009, and the Gators haven’t been able to recreate that consistency since.
The roller coaster has included an 11-win season (2012) followed by a 4-8 season with a loss to Georgia Southern. It had consecutive seasons (2015 and 2016) that featured SEC East titles – and losses to rival Florida State in which the Gators didn’t score an offensive touchdown. Stricklin, who took over when Jeremy Foley retired in 2016, fired Jim McElwain in the middle of season three. He hired Dan Mullen and fired him near the end of season four after three consecutive New Year’s Six bowl appearances. He hired Louisiana coach Billy Napier one week later. And Stricklin understands he might not be the one making another hire unless it’s a long, win-filled time from now.
How did once-dominant Florida fall behind its rivals — in terms of facility upgrades, recruiting and, most recently, name, image and likeness operations — after spending years ahead of the pack? And how long will it take to pull even again?

[Rock Gator]

“The way out of that is to put things in place structurally and personnel-wise that will allow you to get back to having the highs but have them be sustained,” Stricklin says. “From where we were when Billy got here, that’s going to take more than one year.”

In the mid-’90s, Spurrier delighted in beating up on teams that he felt were wasting money on football operations buildings and indoor practice facilities.
“A lot of people think we’ve got those fancy domed places with AstroTurf,” Spurrier told reporters before his Gators played Nebraska in the Fiesta Bowl following the 1995 season. “We don’t have any of that. When it rains, we either go in the gym or call practice off.”
He quickly changed his tune when he returned to college football at South Carolina in 2005, but his attitude regarding facility upgrades in the ’90s sunk in with Foley and athletic department leadership.
Alabama built an indoor practice facility in 1986. Tennessee built one in 1989. LSU built one in 1991. Florida built one in 2015.
Meanwhile, the Gators’ day-to-day activities remained in the bowels of the south end of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. When Meyer took the Florida job in late 2004, he was shocked to learn that the coaches’ offices could be accessed only by an elevator near the weight room on the ground floor or by a back staircase from street level. Meyer helped raise the money to create a “front door” to the stadium that housed a trophy room and a more pleasing entrance for visitors. That was the only facility upgrade of consequence that took place during a tenure that included two national titles.
The Heavener Center wasn’t finished until 2022. But plans were hatched when McElwain was the coach. By then, most SEC programs had been using dedicated football facilities for at least a decade.
The original vision was a high-rise facility squeezed between the practice fields and Florida’s baseball stadium. But before issuing the final go-ahead to borrow money for that facility, Stricklin balked. He had overseen such a project while serving as Mississippi State’s AD, and the layout planned for the Florida facility lacked many of the efficiencies the building was supposed to produce. So Stricklin asked Florida’s board of trustees if he could alter the project. He’d have to raise more money because it meant razing the existing baseball stadium and building a new one elsewhere, but the end result, he told them, would be better for the football and baseball programs.

Stricklin contends that while the project took longer, required more work and produced frustration at the time, it ultimately worked out better than the original plan would have. He believes Napier’s current situation is identical.

[Rock Gator]

Florida didn’t fall behind in recruiting when Meyer left. That slide took time. Successor Will Muschamp signed some excellent players, and successive NFL drafts confirmed that. Muschamp’s fatal flaw was an unwillingness to change with the times offensively. McElwain also recruited some special players but didn’t recruit as consistently well as Muschamp. On the plus side, McElwain signed quarterback Kyle Trask in 2016, future first-round receiver Kadarius Toney and had future first-round tight end Kyle Pitts committed when he was fired in October 2017.
Trask, Toney and Pitts would flourish under Dan Mullen, whom Stricklin lured from Starkville following McElwain’s firing. Mullen instantly turned around Florida’s fortunes in 2018, and the Gators won consecutive New Year’s Six bowls as they built toward a 2020 season that looked as if it could be truly special.
Staffers who worked with Mullen at Florida tell a similar story: 2020 changed Mullen as a coach. In the pandemic-shortened season, Florida was indeed excellent. Trask, Toney and Pitts fueled an offense that ranked No. 8 in the nation in yards per play (7.3). For the second consecutive season, Mullen – traditionally a run-first play-caller – found success with more passes than runs. The Gators beat Georgia for the first time since 2016, and in the SEC title game they proved to be the toughest opponent eventual national champ Alabama played all season.
Mullen’s claim that the 2020 Florida team’s season ended with the SEC title game felt like an excuse for a 55-20 Cotton Bowl loss to Oklahoma. Things started to get weird four days later with 13 words from ESPN NFL insider Adam Schefter during a 30-second segment on the network’s NFL pregame show.
Dan Mullen in the college ranks is open to going to the pros.
This was curious. Mullen wasn’t a candidate for any of the open NFL head coaching jobs. Was this a ploy to get more money from Florida, or was someone affiliated with Mullen trying to wish something into existence?

On the practice field, staffers noticed Mullen continued to plan for a more pass-heavy offense even though Florida’s best two options, Emory Jones and Anthony Richardson, were also excellent runners. (In hindsight, weeks after Richardson was selected No. 4 overall by the Colts despite inconsistent play in one season as Florida’s starter, it’s curious that Mullen didn’t start building an offense around Richardson in the spring of 2021). The most telling moment, though, came when Mullen agreed to a three-year extension that raised his pay by $1.5 million a year while several of his longtime assistants were left with contracts that expired following the 2021 season. “That’s when I knew,” one staffer who worked at Florida at the time said.
If Mullen truly wanted out to the NFL, he had little chance to recruit against the likes of Alabama coach Nick Saban and Georgia coach Kirby Smart, who make it their mission to chase the best players in America wherever they live. Competing against them requires total dedication, and even that might not be enough. Smart is especially troublesome because the Bulldogs are Florida’s chief SEC rival and an annual opponent no matter how the SEC decides to make its schedules going forward once Oklahoma and Texas arrive in 2024. And even before the attitude shift in 2021, Mullen’s record wasn’t great against the SEC’s best recruiters.
According to the 247Sports composite rankings, Mullen signed 15 players ranked in the top 100 nationally in his four recruiting classes from 2018-21. During that same span, Saban signed 42 such players and Smart signed 40. Special players such as Pitts, Toney and Trask allowed Florida to beat Georgia and hang with Alabama in 2020, but over time that level of recruiting will produce consistent results at Alabama and Georgia and wildly inconsistent ones at Florida.
Mullen didn’t get fired until the Gators lost at Missouri on Nov. 20, 2021 to fall to 5-6, but a 40-17 loss at South Carolina two weeks earlier was the point of no return. The roster looked thin while getting manhandled by the Gamecocks, and it became clear 2021 wouldn’t be a one-year blip if Mullen remained at Florida. Plus, Mullen’s flat-fee $12 million buyout didn’t change whether he was fired in 2022, 2023 or 2024. That incentivized moving on sooner. Stricklin would have to hire another coach, and it would have to be someone who could compete with Saban and Smart on the recruiting trail.
Stricklin already liked Napier, but one of the best endorsements came from a veteran SEC assistant who said that of all Saban’s former assistants, Napier hewed the closest to Saban’s famous process. That included recruiting with maddening repetition. Every week includes the same meetings on the same days at the same times, and the head coach must be the lead recruiter on the top targets.
But even if the process is similar, the results in the first recruiting cycle differed dramatically. Alabama’s No. 1-rated 2008 recruiting class — Saban’s first with a full recruiting cycle to work — might be the greatest of all time. It included a Heisman Trophy winner (Mark Ingram), an Outland Trophy winner (Barrett Jones), five first-round draft picks and two possible NFL Hall of Famers (Julio Jones and Dont’a Hightower). That class provided the building blocks for three national titles (2009, 2011, 2012), and the head-to-head recruiting battles Alabama won provided proof of concept that Saban could turn around the Tide’s fortunes after a rough first season.
Florida’s 2023 recruiting class ranked No. 14 in the country. Three of Florida’s 2023 opponents (Georgia, LSU and Tennessee) finished higher. Saban and Alabama finished No. 1.

[Rock Gator]

Napier’s 2024 class is ranked No. 12, but it’s highlighted by five-star quarterback DJ Lagway from Willis, Texas, who committed in December. Meanwhile, Napier is delivering the message that Florida needs to upgrade its roster, and he’s using Percy Harvin imagery to do so. “I know they need playmakers like me,” four-star Pinson, Ala., receiver Mario Craver said. “Coach Billy tells me all the time he wants to put me in space – the same way the playmakers on the 2006 and 2008 teams did.” But Napier and staff haven’t had the same impression on everyone. One prospect said he was disappointed by what he saw when he visited a spring practice. “They’re in a rebuild in a way,” the blue-chip player with a Florida offer said. “I kind of noticed the coaches were on the players … but the atmosphere was kind of lackadaisical. It shouldn’t be like that.”

(Doug Murray / Getty Images)

At this point, the most famous Napier-era recruit is quarterback Jaden Rashada, who was offered a four-year, $13.8 million name, image and likeness contract by a collective attached to Florida. The deal was voided when the money promised to back the contract didn’t materialize. Rashada signed with Florida, but after another deal couldn’t be reached, he was released from his letter of intent and enrolled at Arizona State.
The debacle was an embarrassing reminder that Florida was once again behind on a concept that many of its rivals had handled better and sooner. Florida had finally caught up on facilities, but now NIL mattered more. And Florida had been humiliated by an NIL operation scattered among various entities with no real oversight.
In his travels around the country this spring, Napier has delivered a boilerplate speech to the ticket-buying public. But at most speaking events, Napier has met with a smaller group of high-dollar donors to stress the importance of NIL to the future of Florida’s roster. The Rashada affair underscored the need for a more sophisticated NIL operation.
A more consolidated, advanced organization would have ensured that there was money behind any deal, but it also would have ensured such a contract was never written. The amount was far too high for a four-star prospect — a reigning Heisman Trophy winner is unlikely to command that much. The deal also called for a $500,000 payment on Dec. 1, before Rashada was allowed to sign a letter of intent with Florida. That would have violated NCAA rules against using NIL deals as inducements. In a way, Florida was fortunate the financial backing fell through.
Plans for a unified collective already were in the works, but some of those lessons informed the creation of Florida Victorious, which includes Stricklin’s former right-hand man Ryan Dunn and former Gator Boosters fundraiser Erick Reasoner among its full-time staff. Though it’s organized differently, Spyre Sports, the collective serving Tennessee, was operational the day state NIL laws went into effect in 2021. Georgia’s Classic City Collective is more than a year old. In the nascent world of NIL, those months are precious. At Florida’s new collective, fundraising efforts are beginning in earnest because the group needs to make up ground.
“This is the next arms race,” Napier told prospective donors on a webinar explaining Florida Victorious in April. “This is the next big thing relative to what you have to have in order to be competitive from a recruiting dynamic.”
Hence Napier’s sense of urgency when speaking to potential donors whom the school might have hit up for facilities improvements years earlier. “The Florida Gators, in football and every single sport in our athletic department, we need to have a credible product in the NIL space,” Napier told the group. “And this can separate us from the competition.”
Florida needs to find a way to separate itself. A 6-7 record with a first-round draft pick at quarterback didn’t inspire confidence. Florida has had 26 players – mostly late-Mullen era signees – enter the transfer portal. This included two starting offensive linemen in December, and Xzavier Henderson, who led Florida in catches in 2022, late last month. The Gators haven’t executed a roster flip similar to Lincoln Riley’s at USC last year. Wisconsin transfer Graham Mertz seems likely to replace Richardson at quarterback, and coaches are excited about 315-pound Louisville transfer Caleb Banks at defensive tackle.
Will any of this scare Smart and Georgia? Brian Kelly and LSU? Probably not. Las Vegas isn’t impressed. Last week, DraftKings set the over/under for Florida’s regular-season win total at 5.5. Other measures, such as ESPN’s Football Power Index, offer a slightly more optimistic outlook, but the FPI’s rosy prediction is around seven wins. No one expects Florida to compete for its division or conference title.
Napier warned everyone that his process takes time. He sneaked a telling comment into his answer to the final question of his first news conference as Florida’s coach in December 2021. “You guys are probably going to get frustrated with me,” Napier said. “We’re going to be very patient and calculated about everything that we do.”
In that moment, Napier was talking about filling out his staff – the largest one Florida’s administration has ever allowed. But Napier was applying to that situation the governing philosophy he applies to every situation.
Agent Jimmy Sexton, who represents Mullen and Napier, ensured Napier’s contract can’t be weaponized against him the way Mullen’s was. Napier’s deal has a buyout that would pay 85 percent of its remaining value. That would be $31.9 million after this season. Florida doesn’t typically spend that way. So Napier should have time to be as patient and calculated as he wants.
But until Florida produces the consistency to which the fan base had become accustomed, Gator Nation will be frustrated. And it probably won’t lower its expectations.
— The Athletic’s Manny Navarro contributed to this story.
(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photos: Cliff Welch, Stacy Revere, Mike

[SoTxCaiman]

Damn Rock, I opened this thread and for a minute thought you were channeling a past member (who shall remain nameless) and were off on a drunken rant. It actually lead to a moment of happy reminiscing, thanks. Thanks for the article too.

[tapsgator]

Thanks Rock. It's actually a good article, lots of stuff on-point. I feel like there's a lot of revisionist history regarding the timeline, his quote about not liking him was not about results, it was about how long his coaching search was taking. That never bothered me, what bothers me is that he doesn't have an OC nor does he appear to be considering one with the biggest staff budget in the country. It's been trotted out as a "see he knew this was part of the deal" myriad places, and that's not the case.

Then there's this contradiction between what we all (especially local writers) want him to be, steady-Eddie-True Blue-Billy Bananas with the consistent hair, and the guy that seems to stammer and cliche his way through pressers, calls weird timeouts, had a historically bad defense, lots of penalties, finishes outside the top 10 in recruiting, and managed to to put a governor on the Ferrari they stumbled into because he was afraid AR would get hurt if he called designed runs.

Similarly, the S&C department last year was a shitshow with Watson as Exhibits A-ZZ (get it because he's so big?) I've gone on about how bad a sign that was but here's something I hadn't considered and could be a combined effect:

One prospect said he was disappointed by what he saw when he visited a spring practice. “They’re in a rebuild in a way,” the blue-chip player with a Florida offer said. “I kind of noticed the coaches were on the players … but the atmosphere was kind of lackadaisical. It shouldn’t be like that.”

If you are a big time recruit and getting courted by every school in the country, in other words the kids that make up top 5 classes, and you come watch a practice that includes a 450 lbs. guy working with the 1s and 2s how do you not feel like the pace and atmosphere is lackadaisical? In these kids minds there is a .2 second difference in the 40 between being a millionaire and slinging dope on the corner of their neighborhood. Most are wrong, some are right, but that's their reality. In a different time and not top 2 revenue sport I heard "iron sharpens iron" from every coach that was dumb/nice enough to recruit me, and I was a long way from a blue chip. They come in fresh from hearing that from coaches like Smart and Saban who have sent 10-50x as many guys to the league as Napier and then come into Gainesville and watch Big Des try to get back down to 415? Where would you go? More importantly where would you cross off the list?

[Rock Gator]

Jun 2, 2023 10:00:15 GMT -5 tapsgator said:

"managed to to put a governor on the Ferrari they stumbled into because he was afraid AR would get hurt if he called designed runs."

Dammit Billy, scared money don't make money, you know?