Acknowledging hindsight is 20/20, is Florida a victim of really bad timing? Recent history as I understand it:
1. Dan Mullen is an offensive football coach whose game plan was based upon the players’ strengths. I still don’t understand what took him so long to replace Franks with Trask. It seemed he convinced himself that he could succeed with any players and put recruiting on the back burner.
2. The University’s focus is on creating one of the best public colleges in the nation. They succeed.
3. The UAA wants to do things the “right way” while our rivals embrace pay for play schemes well before NIL.
4. As a result of number 3, Mullen gets increasingly frustrated. He realizes regardless how great of a coach he thinks he is, he can’t keep up with the Bamas and Georgias. He starts to look at NFL opportunities.
5. Mullen mentally checks out. We can’t talk about pay for play publicly, and so, we believe that we can’t keep up with recruiting as a result of outdated facilities and poor infrastructure.
6. We learn Mullen is lazy and disinterested.
7. High net-worth boosters were told to invest tremendous amounts of money into facilities in order to get to a level playing field. They agree and commit large amounts of money JUST before the NIL era.
8. Meanwhile, Mullen wouldn’t fire his friends. He checked out. He was lazy and didn’t prioritize recruiting. Mullen is fired. The opposite type of coach becomes available - enter Billy Napier. He doesn’t vacation. He does not stop thinking about football. He is constantly planning. He is a CEO. He values infrastructure and learned how to build it after working for Saban. He embraces recruiting. He is authentic and genuine. Scared money don’t make money leads us to believe he’s a man with a plan who isn’t afraid to take calculated risks.
9. Money is poured into the facilities and infrastructure. The boosters were all on-board. We are all-in on recruiting.
10. Billy Napier is hired.
11. We open new facilities at the same time (2021-2022) college football becomes the Wild Wild West with NIL. Unfortunately, the recruiting game changed.
12. Pay for play is now done in the open even though most collectives are learning on the fly. The schools that were previously doing things behind the scenes have an easier time adjusting.
13. Recruits/Portal players care less about facilities, and more about how much are they going to get paid.
14. The infrastructure and facilities the boosters just invested in are less important to securing a recruit. (All else being equal - money and on-field success - the facilities can be a tiebreaker).
15. Fans unfamiliar with the actual financial transactions of the boosters complain that the boosters are unwilling to compete with other school’s boosters while not acknowledging all the money they had recently JUST invested. These same boosters who are asked to contribute to NIL are shrewd business people asked to contribute to players who haven’t proven anything and have no guarantee of a return on investment. Perhaps greater risk would be taken if so much money hadn’t just been dumped into the university.
16. When Billy Napier is considering the UF job, we are told that he reached out to his friend and confidant, Jim McElwain. Is it really any surprise that history has repeated itself?
17. The game has changed. Nick Saban recognized that NIL was going to create a more level playing field. Before his reputation could be tarnished, he dipped out. He could foresee the new direction of college football.
18. Billy Napier was late. He was going to build what worked in 2010. It no longer works.
19. As fans we make lots of assumptions when we don’t have all the facts. We assume we aren’t going after the best players in the portal. Maybe we are. Maybe we are even offering as much $ as anyone else. All else being equal, right now, are you sending your kid to UF over UGA? It’s so easy to negatively recruit UF right now.
20. Here’s my assumption why we aren’t good - it’s the players. Coaches can’t come out and publicly blame the players. So, we get coach-speak. We expect top 10 results but we don’t have have a top 10 roster. We are in a deep hole.
21. I’ve listened to many people who know much more about football than I do criticize Billy Napier’s coaching decisions. I’m not saying he is without blame. He’s stubborn. Never had success as an OC. The problems seem obvious. However, great players can make good coaches better. Did Bill Belichick forget how to coach? Did Dabo Sweeney forget how to coach? The list of coaches who succeed and then don’t goes on and on. It’s the players. We had the players when Urban was here. He left when he knew we didn’t have the players anymore. We haven’t recovered.
22. It takes GREAT players and GOOD coaching to get where we want to be. A successful college football coach has to be good at football and great at sales.
So, who is to blame for where we are? Who actually started the domino effect that lead to the current state of UF football? Whose job was it to see this coming before it happened? The athletic director? The president? That’s where the negative attention should go if you need to place blame. Or, is Florida just a victim of bad timing? Either way, get great players. Mario coached a better game - but they had Cam Ward and better players on both lines of scrimmage. It’s the players.
