For that debacle of a bowl game. He’s the leader of the UF athletic program. He accepts or declines a bowl bid. It is ultimately his decision and he accepted. If he accepts then he should of also demanded that the team practice more than 5 times. While they are lame duck coaches they are still under contract and getting paid by UF. Stricklin failed big time here IMO.

Hope everybody stays safe and has a good time tomorrow.

By Franz Beard

A very personal story to jump start your Christmas Day:
Do you remember when you knew in your heart of hearts that you were helplessly, hopelessly a Gator for life? Do you remember when you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that the Florida Gators were the only team that would actually matter for the rest of your life?

That moment for me was December 25, 1964. Two months earlier my life had been turned upside down when I was uprooted from the good life in Gainesville and exiled to McComb, Mississippi. I say exiled because everything I held sacred was in Gainesville. I could walk to Florida Field from my home in 10 minutes. I played center on Mr. Red Dulaney’s Hughes Supply football team. A year before I had played left tackle (Tom Petty was the right tackle) for Mr. Dulaney in the 100-pound weight league and we had gone undefeated to win the county championship. As a 13-year-old I moved up to the 120-pound weight league and because I could snap a spiral (we ran single wing, and of course, there were times we had to punt) I became the center. Before I could move up to the 13-year-old team, I had to teach Mike Sloan (Norm’s kid) how to snap, however.

At Westwood, I had made some very good friends and I made good grades. Mr. Hayes, my history teacher, was my favorite. Fuzzy Fratella was my phys ed teacher. On Saturday’s, Sarge Squires knew me, so I had my choice of selling Cokes or hot dogs. I chose Cokes because I had a regular clientele of Jacksonville lawyers who bought from me. My job was to arrive 90 minutes before the game and make sure they didn’t run out of Cokes. They were great guys, and a couple always had me drink most of their Coke because they wanted about half Bourbon and half Coke. Life was good. On a good Saturday I pocketed about $6, a rather hefty sum for a 13-year-old during the 1960s when we could still buy a Coke out of the machine for 10 cents and I could get a cheeseburger, large Coke and fries at Chandler’s on 13th Street for 50 cents.

All that was interrupted when the Altamil Corporation bought out Adkins Manufacturing, where my dad was the general manager/CFO. My dad was transferred immediately to McComb in September. Six weeks later, our home sold in Gainesville. I had to quit Mr. Dulaney’s team (we were in second place), say good-bye to friends at Westwood and we moved into a new brick house at 202 Westview Circle in McComb that had central air conditioning (I was impressed).

It was life among the heathens in McComb. I was the only Gator fan in the whole place. Everyone else was either Ole Miss, Mississippi State and LSU. Oh, a bunch of folks went to Southern Miss over in Hattiesburg, but they were Rebels, Bulldogs and Tigers first. Fortunately, there was a 50,000-watt radio station in Pensacola that was my lifeline. I listened to Otis Boggs describe those high, lazy spirals and turn three-yard gains by Jack Harper into adventures, but it wasn’t the same as being there. I did get to go the Florida-LSU game in Baton Rouge (COLD that night) on December 5 because my dad’s boss, Mr. Crosby was an LSU grad and he had tickets. The Gators won 20-6. Spurrier was unbelievable and Mrs. Crosby had to put a Florida pennant on their front door for a week because she lost a bet with me.

Christmas Eve we packed up the car and drove all night to Gainesville where my mom’s parents lived at 313 NW 11th Street. We arrived sometime around dawn and my sister (living with my grandparents and a freshman at UF) Donna was the first one out the door. Then came my grandparents and after the hugs and kisses, I had luggage duty, after which I went to sleep for what seemed like 10 minutes. I woke to the smell of bacon. Nobody on this planet ever did bacon like Ivey Van Sickle.

After breakfast it was time to open presents. My sister gave me a pair of white Levis, which were sure to make me the envy of the small circle of friends I had already made in McComb. I highly doubted Denman-Alford had them in stock yet.

After opening all my presents, my grandfather handed me one more. He said he had overlooked this one. Must have fallen back behind the tree he told me. I ripped it open and found a white University of Florida football jersey complete with the orange and blue UCLA stripes on the shoulder and a blue No. 11, Spurrier’s number! He had it custom made for me at Jimmy Hughes Sporting Goods.

The jersey went on immediately. I asked if I could run down to the stadium and I was waved out the door. They knew where I was going, straight to Florida Field. I raced over to 13th street, turning south at Captain Louie’s and west when I got to University Avenue where there was a fresh coat of paint on the SAE lion. As a seventh grader at Westwood, rumor had it that Coleman Stipanovich once poured a can of paint on the lion. I don’t know if it was true, but since Coleman had a rather fearsome persona, it seemed believable for a seventh grader.

Once I got to Florida Field, the gates were locked in the north end zone but I remembered the gate was rarely locked in the southeast corner so I ran down there. Lucky for me, the gate was unlocked and I ran out on the field where I was transformed into Steve Spurrier. I threw passes to Charlie Casey. I handed off to Jack Harper. I avenged Florida’s 17-14 loss to Alabama. I don’t even remember what the final score was against Georgia, but I threw at least 11 touchdown passes to match the number on my jersey. In about 20 or 30 minutes the Gators had gone unbeaten and won their first SEC championship. Oh, it was wonderful.

It was all in my 13-year-old mind, but because I was wearing that jersey, it seemed so real. I looked up at empty stands but in my mind they were full (capacity was about 48,000 in those days) and the fans were on their feet screaming for more.

That was my Gator moment. Right then and right there, standing in the north end zone, I knew that nothing would ever take the place of being a Florida Gator. I loved the Baltimore Orioles back in those days, but eventually Frank and Brooks retired and Jim Palmer’s fast ball lost its steam. I loved the Reds, but the Big Red Machine threw a rod. I loved the Celtics but Bill Russell and Havlicek retired. I loved the Baltimore Colts but they traded Johnny Unitas and moved to Indianapolis.

But the Gators were always in Gainesville and win or lose, they were always my team. To this day, they are the only team in my life that truly matters. I’m 70 years old now, but the Florida Gators were, are and always will be my team.

I walked back to my grandparents home that morning. Dirty Dan the bicycle man was out fixing a bike. I think he rolls over in his grave now that apartments are going up at the place where he used to always have a soft heart and a cheap bike for a student with a sad story. Dan remembered me (he knew my grandfather well) and asked where I had been. I told him Mississippi. He just shook his head, then reached out a greasy hand that I shook although I was careful not to touch my jersey until I got home.

When I got back to my grandparents home nobody really had to ask where I had been or what I had been doing. They knew. My smile told them. I wore the jersey all weekend and every chance I got when we got back to Mississippi. I kept wearing it even when it didn’t fit anymore. It became threadbare and I had to toss it finally, but it will always be my favorite Christmas present of all time.

So where where you and what were you doing when you realized that there was room for only one team in your life and it was the Florida Gators?

Merry Christmas everyone. God bless you.

You know you have a traitor in the Whitehouse

This guy gets it

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Billy Napier is a guy that people want to work for. For this many staff both on the field and off the field to want to come back and work for him says A LOT about Napier as a person and coach.

@JasonHigdon after the holidays do you know what the next few weeks look like for returning players? For example first team meeting to set the stage for off season? When do they start with the new strength staff?
Based on the rumors of how undisciplined the team has been anxious to start the new regime.

thanks in advance!

Savannah Bailey......CJ Wilford....Braxton Morris............Matt Bergeron......Oops...as you were all trying to find out who Braxton Wilson was on Google....I did not mean to say Wilson - the name is Braxton Morris....Sorry about that I was in a hurry when I made the OP....

Off topic, but as we head into Christmas Eve I just wanted to wish you all a very Merry Christmas. I pray that you all have a nice re-charge this weekend now that we're done with Mullen. This is our gift under the tree. A new staff and new direction for our program.

If you're a Believer like me I hope you spend a little time with Luke tonight and remember that miracle some 2025 years ago where our Father showed that He loves us so much that he felt the need to come in person to live with us and die for us.

Blessings to you all.
Mark

Merry Christmas and Happy Holiday to everyone here!

Any whispers?

A team who’s won 9/10 and in the Rose Bowl! Not a FCS school Duquesne like FSU is playing in week Zero. You got LSU and A&M from the Wedt plus the usuals like U.T. who is much improved and Georgia.

Napier Welcomes Marcus Castro-Walker as Director of Player Engagement & NIL

Florida head coach Billy Napier added Marcus Castro-Walker to the Gators staff Friday.



GAINESVILLE, Fla. - Florida head football coach Billy Napier announced Friday that Marcus Castro-Walker will serve on his staff as director of player engagement and NIL.



Marcus Castro-Walker spent the 2021 season at Nebraska as the program's director of player development. In his role, Castro-Walker developed, implemented and monitored an effective student mentoring program for Husker football student-athletes.



Prior to Nebraska, Castro-Walker spent four years as the director of college personnel at Arizona State. Previously, he also worked in a similar role at the University of Central Florida.



Castro-Walker first joined the Sun Devils in 2008 as a graduate assistant, working with the Office of Student-Athlete Development while obtaining his master's degree in higher and post-secondary education.



Upon graduation from his master's program at ASU, Castro-Walker was hired to work with the Sun Devils football team as an academic coach. He assisted student-athletes in the areas of academic support and life skills training to assure quality academic decision making and to support their personal development.



Castro-Walker is a graduate of Eastern Washington University, where he earned his bachelor's degree in communication studies. He was born in Toronto, Canada, before moving to Pullman, Wash.

With Mullen and Hevesy gone, please tell me we can get back in it heavy with him? He was a strong UF lean early (Halapio's cousin) before falling out with the last staff...I know he is in Texas now, but he is a UF legacy, is a 5* OT and an absolute stud. These are the types of kids we need to start landing. Hoping new staff can get back into his recruitment this spring.

I hope you all have a great day and holiday season - enjoy!

That didn’t take long to be announced. Not gonna lose much sleep over this one.

Update from the family of Gators wide receiver Justin Shorter:

"We are happy to share that Justin is doing well, is clear to head home today and is on his way to a full recovery! We would like to thank everyone for the outpouring of prayers, love and endless support - he is going to be fine! Special thanks to everyone on the UF athletic staff and St. Joseph's Hospital for their professionalism, care and support they have shown Justin and our family. Wishing everyone a Happy Holiday and a blessed 2022! Go Gators!"

I have said for years that the only hope with some of these A hole dems is that they acquire some sort of understanding (no guarantee) of the crap they are sponsoring by becoming victims of it themselves.

By Franz Beard
TAMPA – We’ve seen this movie way too many times. We didn’t really need a re-run but that’s what the Florida Gators gave us Wednesday night at Raymond James Stadium.

The Gators came into this game with plenty to play for, which in itself is as difficult to comprehend as the fact that they were playing in the Gasparilla Bowl against UCF. The Gasparilla Bowl is low hanging fruit on a branch of the bowl tree. UCF has been here so many times it’s almost the winter home. For Florida, this game ranks lower than the Birmingham Bowl. You know how that one goes. Win and you get to go home. Lose and you have to spend another week in Birmingham. Yet, the Gasparilla Bowl is even lower. It’s almost incomprehensible that a team that had Alabama on the ropes not only had to settle for the Gasparilla Bowl but needed a win to assure itself of avoiding its third losing season in the last nine years.

The Gators played like they didn’t want to be here.

UCF? This was the Knights’ Super Bowl. In many respects, this was far more important than UCF’s Peach Bowl win over Auburn in 2017. You remember that one. UCF beat a crippled Auburn team to finish unbeaten, after which its athletic director proclaimed the Knights national champions, a never-ending source of ridicule in the five years since. Everybody knows the national title is illegitimate but by beating the Gators, 29-17, the Knights can lay a legitimate claim to the state championship in Florida. After all, they beat the Gators, who beat Florida State, which beat Miami.

You can bet the farm a State Champions 2021 sign has already been crafted, ready to hang just below that ridiculous national championship 2017 sign.

What was clear from the outset Wednesday was UCF coach Gus Malzahn, ironically the losing head coach when UCF beat Auburn to win the Peach Bowl in 2017, had the Knights ready to play. UCF played hard enough, smart enough and with sustained effort. The Knights played like a team that relished the idea of being there, and especially savored the idea of beating big brother. If you’re grading UCF give the Knights an A for preparation, an A for execution and an A+ for coaching.

The Gators? Is there such a thing as an F minus?

From a purely talent perspective, the Gators (6-7) had it all over UCF (9-4), but if the 2021 season has taught us anything about this Florida football team rarely plays to its talent level and quite often plays down to or below the talent level of the opponent. Florida lost seven football games this year. Despite the well-documented recruiting deficiencies of the last four years under Dan Mullen, only Alabama and Georgia had more talent than UF. That was two of the seven losses. In the other five – Kentucky, LSU, South Carolina, Missouri and UCF – the Gators had as much or more talent and yet they still lost.

Why did they lose? For the exact same reason the Gators lost to UCF. There are only so many times you can shoot yourself in the foot before you’ve blown it off completely. Interim head coach Greg Knox knew this was nothing more than a repeat performance of what will define the 2021 season.

Speaking to the media post game, Knox said, “It’s been a lot of different things. Personal foul penalties, jumping offsides penalties, holding penalties. Tonight, all of it. All of it came into play again. You can’t win big ball games when you make those amount of mistakes.”

It was more than just the penalties. You would need a calculator to keep up with all of Florida’s mistakes. There is no such thing as a perfect team nor is there such a thing as a perfect game, but good teams – winning teams that compete for championships – have a habit of identifying mistakes and eliminating them to the point that by season’s end they’ve been minimalized. The same mistakes the Gators were making all too frequently in September they were making against UCF, nearly four months since the season opener.

Too many mistakes by a team that never seemed to care if it got better is pretty much the story of the season and it’s as big a reason as any that Dan Mullen was dismissed as Florida’s football coach after the Missouri loss.

This is precisely why Billy Napier has been hired. He is the designated fixer and there is so much to fix that it is almost like he has a blank canvas to work with. We already know he can recruit, which is a necessity, and we know he can win. His four-year head coaching history at Louisiana also tells us he’s all about discipline and Lord knows the Gators could use a healthy dose of discipline. Disciplined teams don’t commit an abundance of stupid penalties at the most inopportune times. Disciplined teams don’t routinely blow assignments, miss tackles and miss critical field goals. Disciplined teams convert on third down (UF was 2-13) and generally speaking, complete a reasonable number of passes when there are receivers running wide open.

All the talent in the world can’t compensate a lack of discipline.

When surveying the damage from the Gasparilla Bowl disaster, it’s too easy to rag on Emory Jones. There is no getting around the fact he had a bad game, maybe the worst one he’s played. He completed 14-36 passes for 171 yards and he ran 10 times for 67. He held the ball too long too many times, locked in on one receiver when there was someone else open if he had just turned his head a teensy bit and missed several big plays if he only had put a little more air under some deep throws. There were at least four touchdowns that could have been had with a little more touch.

UCF put a lot of pressure on Jones, but it’s not like the Knights cleverly disguised their blitzes. Some of the throws under duress are the result of Jones making poor reads, but not all. Some of the bad reads were the fault of Florida’s offensive line that had more than a few snaps when they did a dandy impersonation of a sieve.

It should also be noted that Garrick McGee, Florida’s quarterback coach and the play caller in Mullen’s absence, had what can only be described as a baffling day. Quite obviously McGee saw something in the way the UCF secondary covered that made him think big plays could be had throwing the ball, but when the passing game lacks consistency and the other team’s defense can’t stop the run, you shift your focus to running the damn football. UCF had all sorts of problems stopping Florida’s running game, which netted 205 yards and averaged 6.8 yards per carry. On those rare occasions when McGee called an option, the Gators picked up big yardage, yet there was no commitment to exploiting the UCF defense running the ball on the perimeter.

Perhaps the passing game would have worked a lot better if McGee had decided to let Jones use his legs and option skills on the perimeter, forcing the safeties to cheat toward the line of scrimmage. McGee shouldn’t have abandoned the pass altogether, but ground and pound with option would have worked a whole lot better.

So the bad game isn’t all on Emory Jones’ shoulders. Garrick McGee pretty much set his quarterback up to fail by the way he called the plays. It’s kind of like baseball. When your pitcher can’t get the curve ball over for a strike, you go with something else that works. In this case Jones couldn’t throw strikes but he darn sure showed he could run the option. It should have been a no-brainer.

Unfortunately, the brains must have been left in the hotel safe or in the locker room.

Defense? Florida fans spent three-and-a-half years blaming Todd Grantham and demanding Mullen to replace him. Mullen fired him after the South Carolina game, but really, what changed? Christian Robinson is a bright young coach who nearly everyone says has a bright future in the game, but as the interim defensive coordinator, he pretty much called the game the same way Grantham did. With Grantham, the Gators missed too many tackles, consistently overran plays and blew assignments. Nothing really changed with Robinson. UCF ran for 288 yards on the Gators and had two backs each gain more than 100. The defensive line wore down as the game went on but too often they did their job only to have the linebackers overrun the play or miss the tackle. We’ve been humming that tune since September.

Give the secondary credit for shutting down the UCF passing game. With the exception of one long TDP pass late in the fourth quarter, they kept the UCF passing game in check. Take away that one play and UCF’s passing game was good for 4.0 yards per attempt. You’ll take that every day of the week.

Special teams? The lack of a scholarship kicker who could consistently get the job done came back to haunt the Gators just as it did in the loss to Alabama. Chris Howard badly missed field goals of 51 and 45 yards. Punter Jeremy Crawshaw averaged 44.7 yards on six punts, but he shanked one that barely crossed midfield. One play later, UCF broke open a 19-17 game with a 54-yard TDP from Mikey Keen to Ryan O’Keefe and that pretty much was the ball game.

Knox summed it up.

“You can’t make the mistakes we made,” he said. “There’s a lot of guys [in the media] who have covered us. A lot of you guys in here that have covered us this year and you’ve seen us make mistakes. You can’t make those mistakes and expect to win games. We just made too many again tonight.”

Yes, there were way too many mistakes but that’s the same story it has been for an entire season. The Gators never came close to putting it all together on offense, defense and special teams. Always there was something missing and even in the wins there were way too many mistakes that we waited to be corrected. There weren’t enough fingers to plug the holes in the dike. Plug one hole and there was another crack from which water poured.

We kept waiting for this team to mature. Eventually, we figured they would get past the silliness and stupidity. Well, we were wrong. It never happened.

This was at best a Humpty-Dumpty existence. The Gators kept breaking until finally, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put them back together again. Now, it’s up to Billy Napier to survey the damage, make however many changes are necessary and devise a systematic plan to put this football program back together again. It is not going to be an easy job and if we’re realists, we have to know that it might take more than one season to do it.

That is sure to evoke groans from Florida fans who want the football program fixed yesterday. They have heard “Patience, Grasshopper” four times since 2011. Will Muschamp spent four years but couldn’t fix the program that Urban Meyer said was broken. Jim McElwain promised an offense to go with the NFL defense Muschamp left him, but he couldn’t get it done and then compounded matters with that phony death threats story. Dan Mullen had three good years and then everything fell apart in year four. It might take hours on Dr. Phil’s couch to get to the root of what and how it all went wrong.

Now, it’s Billy Napier’s opportunity to step in and fix what is wrong. He’s been on the job less than a month, but he says all the right things. So far he’s done all the right things and the people he’s hiring all seem to be an upgrade over the people who are departing. Every bit as important, athletic director Scott Stricklin seems to have no problem whatsoever stroking the check to give Napier the tools he needs to make it all work.

So far he seems like the guy who can produce a brand new movie, one that has a happy ending. This old movie we’ve been watching over and over again needs to be burned.