MILLER REPORT: It is what it is

Just a few days ago I wrote suggesting that folks calm down and just enjoy watching college football. Saturday night, I raced from my deer stand back to the hotel so I could watch the Florida game. What I witnessed was much worse than not having football to watch at all. There was no enjoyable part of that game. Sure, it was almost nice when Florida finally scored late but by that point I was too disgusted to even care. In fact, by that point I was flipping back and forth to the FSU-Notre Dame game because I longed to see what real football looked like. The display put on by the Florida Gators in the Swamp Saturday was atrocious. It was absolutely pathetic. The coaches should be embarrassed. The players should be embarrassed. And quite frankly at this point Jeremy Foley should be embarrassed that he went into Saturday’s game believing that he had the right head coach.

I realize that Foley wanted to believe. Foley might even have Fox Mulder’s poster on his wall. I wanted to believe in Muschamp too. He seems like a good guy trying to do things the right way. But, that game removed any doubt about the status of this football program. The program has completely collapsed. Florida will be heavy underdogs in three of their remaining five games. They will be favored in two games unless Vanderbilt gets hot real quick. The unthinkable has now become a probability. It is likely that the Gators will not be bowl eligible for the second season in a row. Let that sink in for a moment. We are not talking about being eliminated from SEC East contention, we are talking about not being bowl eligible two years in a row. No matter what the UAA says publically right now, nothing short of winning out can save Muschamp’s job and even that might not be enough. It probably would since it would mean defeating two top ten teams. Such a thing happening is almost inconceivable after what I saw against a slightly above average Missouri team.

First we should put that game in perspective. For the first time in fifteen years a team allowed a kickoff return for a touchdown, a punt return for a touchdown, a fumble recovery return for a touchdown and an interception return for a touchdown. Just the thought of that is mindboggling. And yet, it is just another item in a list of records for futility that Mr. Muschamp has managed to log in the last two seasons at the helm of the USS Gator. I do not want to see his next trick. I do believe I have seen enough. I keep hearing people say that these players will run through a wall for Will. I think those people are grossly mistaken. It doesn’t look to me like they would even get up to answer the door if he rang the bell.

I do not know who is making the decision on which quarterback plays when. It could be Kurt Roper. It could be Will Mushcamp. Whoever has made those calls has bungled it horribly. If Treon Harris had come in and taken his lumps late in the Alabama game and then played most if not all of the Tennessee game he would have most likely been ready to handle playing the entire game against Missouri and that game might have been winnable. I truly believe that the coaches lost the players early last week when they announced that Jeff Driskel would be starting Saturday. Continuing to send Driskel out there against Missouri after seeing him wander around lost the whole game was just foolish. This team has no belief in their ability to win games with Driskel. When the coaching staff tells them that Jeff gives them the best chance to win the players lose faith in the staff as well. Against Missouri, the Gators played like a team that came into the game expecting to lose. When that happens, it is the end of a coaching staff.

To this point, I was a strong proponent of giving Muschamp every opportunity to turn this thing around. I believed, and still do, that the best possible scenario would have been for Muschamp to become successful at Florida most importantly because of recruiting. However, there is a point at which keeping the current coach becomes more damaging to recruiting than firing the man who has built a relationship with recruits. I believe we reached that point Saturday night. Again, unless something drastic plays out over the last five games, I believe that keeping this staff intact would be a detriment to recruiting and this recruiting class is absolutely critical.

This Florida Gators team lacks quality players. Notice that I did not say that it lacks talent. Muschamp’s recruiting classes have been ranked quite high. Quite a few people thought these players were talented. Where is that talent now? How is it that so many SEC teams have multiple elite running backs and Florida doesn’t appear to have one? UF has paraded out dominating linebackers for decades. I would be hard put to pick one linebacker off of this team that I felt good about even being drafted by the NFL. Jonathon Bullard and Dante Fowler JR were both elite defensive ends coming out of high school. Saturday night they were the third and fourth best ends on the field. Wide receiver recruiting has been noticeably thin but there are some on this roster that were highly touted prospects. Right now, only Demarcus Robinson appears even adequate and he is very inconsistent. A lot has gone wrong for this program the last few years and some of it was just bad luck. Two 5-star tight ends were signed and neither is still with the team. Jeff Driskel was the MVP at the elite eleven quarterback camp. What has happened to all of that talent? Were they all recruiting misses? Is it a problem with player development? Something has gone awry. The current Florida Gators do not look very talented and that should not be the case.

All of this makes it hard to imagine that this coaching staff will be in Gainesville in 2015. Florida Athletic Director Jeremy Foley once said that what must be done eventually should be done immediately. The Gator Nation wants to know why something has not already been done. I would caution people to be patient. These things are very time sensitive. Sometimes the best move is to move right away. Sometimes patience and secrecy are required to land the best possible replacement. The best person to make these tough decisions is the one making them, Jeremy Foley. I am confident that he has already identified his top choices. Now, he needs to manage the situation and the timing to give himself and UF the greatest chance of success. I think he should and will make a change. I can wait.

Mark Miller
Mark Miller's bravery knows no limits. He's a Gator living deep in the heart of Georgia. Mark's weekly columns appear in the Coosa Valley News in Rome, Georgia, where Gators are few and Bulldogs are many. His updates about football and life among the heathens will appear in Gator Country on a weekly basis.

3 COMMENTS

  1. Well said. After that game if Muschamp was your brother you’d have to tell him to start packing his belongings. The product we’ve put on the field, as I said before, is below the quagmire of mediocrity. Somewhere down by Dante’s inferno. Wherever the hell that is…one player should be QB on Saturday in JAX, that’s Treon. And the next guy should be anyone other than Driskel. Enough is enough. Go Gators.

  2. I think that UF is the victim of being too confident before the season. They didn’t seem to understand that they had just come off a year when they only won four games. They ought into the injury and coaching excuse and believed in the talk. It was a false confidence that was based on a foundation of sand, and there is no recovery from it. I said before how striking the difference was between Alabama and Florida t the SEC meetings. Alabama was humble and very cognizant of the way they had finished the last season. Florida, on the other hand, was very cocky and acted like the last season had not even happened. In one of the worst evaluations ever uttered, Vernon Hargreaves pronounced that Jeff Driskel was the best quarterback in America. Sometimes you can’t avoid the truth, and that’s what the Gators have, seemingly, been trying to do for a long time. n what was a telling statement, Max Garcia said that UF didn’t even watch the film of the LSU game. How are you going to get better if you only watch your victories and not your defeats? How are you “going to fix it,” one of Muschamp’s favorite cliches after a loss, if you don’t even watch the film on what went wrong? UF football is irrelevant now. It’s so bad that even rivals say sympathetic things because they don’t even consider UF to be a threat. When your rivals don’t take you seriously, that is the lowest point you can reach. The people who follow Florida are in a stupor now, they know what happens next is going to be ugly and just want the season to be over. What makes it even worse is that UF’s biggest rivals are primed for a very big year. Ah, the agony…