Can Florida football thrive in all kinds of weather, and what does it need to do so?

This piece is not about Billy Napier, Urban Meyer, Steve Spurrier, or any other single person. It’s about college football in general and how to contextualize where Florida’s been of late and what the future may hold.

I’ve been thinking of the big picture across decades after working my way through the Split Zone Duo podcast’s Dead Letters episode about Nebraska. Dead Letters is a recurring offseason miniseries they started doing for their paying members about programs that either were once great or could’ve been great but ended up far from the mountaintop. They recently ran 2022’s episode about the Huskers in their public feed to promote the new season of it, so the link above is the whole NU episode for free.

Nebraska was one of the top college football programs for a long time, and they were especially prominent from the 1970s to the 1990s. They appeared in the 2001 season’s national championship game and seemingly fell off the map ever since.

That run by Nebraska coincided with the rise of the state of Florida to prominence. The Sunshine State has consistently been one of the fastest growing states by population in the post-World War II era, with things really starting to take off in the 1950s as air conditioning became more widespread.

Not coincidentally, it was about 20-30 years later that the state’s Big Three started making some noise while riding that population tailwind. FSU had its first top ten finish in 1979. Miami landed there in 1981 and won its first national title in 1983. Florida finished in three straight AP Poll top tens from 1984-86. NCAA penalties stunted UF’s rise in the ’80s, but all three programs were top shape by the early ’90s. Only NCAA penalties against Miami in the second half of the decade kept the Big Three from all being elite concurrently for about a dozen years.

To wit, the road to the national championship went through the state of Florida once the sport decided to make a formal title game setup.

The first two schemes, the Bowl Coalition (1992-94) and Bowl Alliance (1995-97), didn’t include the Big Ten, Pac-10, or Rose Bowl since they were still holding out, but everything got unified with the BCS (1998-2013). Every national championship game but one from 1992-2002 included a team from the state of Florida — and the ’96 game featured two. The one exception was 1997, but that was only because the Gators upset the otherwise undefeated Seminoles in the Greatest Game Ever Played in the Swamp.

If you take a few steps back, you can see that the 1980s and 1990s were two eras overlayed. The old era was the one that saw Nebraska as one of the oligarchs, where proximity to top recruits was a plus but not required. You could have programs like Ole Miss in the 1950s-60s or Tennessee in the 1960s and 1990s or Nebraska for three decades be true national powers without being in or bordering a true talent hotbed.

You just had to find some kind of secret sauce, like the Rebels’ incredible coaching continuity under Johnny Vaught or the Cornhuskers’ then-cutting edge strength and conditioning program. Miami’s rise is something of a bridge between the eras because it had a special-sauce component with Howard Schnellenberger’s “State of Miami” recruiting strategy.

But the newer era was a more modern one where having recruits right nearby just mattered more. Ole Miss had long since fallen off in part due to integration and part to its own idiosyncrasies (this is a Dead Letters episode in the new 2023 run). But while it’s a coincidence that Nebraska’s last national title game appearance and Tennessee’s last top five finish were both in 2001, it’s not a coincidence that both faded around the same time.

If you look at teams making national title game appearances starting in the 2000s to around the end of the BCS era, you’ll recognize a lot of schools in the biggest talent-producing states. You have the top tier states of Florida (UF and, just under the wire in 2013, FSU), Texas (UT and, right across the border, Oklahoma), and California (USC). Oregon’s rise also came from mining both California and Texas. But also you had schools in or adjacent to the next tier of recruiting states like Ohio and Pennsylvania (Ohio State), Louisiana (LSU), and Alabama (Bama and Auburn).

The only notable state missing is Georgia, where UGA came tantalizingly close on three occasions (2002, 2007, 2012) in the Mark Richt era but never played for it all. Kirby Smart rectified that issue more recently.

The catch with this place-centric era of championships is that Florida schools lost their consistency. A lot of that was due to turmoil at the head coaching position. Florida and Miami have each fired four head coaches this century. FSU has only fired one 21st Century hire in Willie Taggart, but it also had to fire Bobby Bowden after he hung on too long and saw Jimbo Fisher wreck the place before bolting to Texas A&M.

That turmoil helped lead to a breakdown of the pattern of the best Florida talent staying in-state. In 2010, only two of the top 16 players in the state according to the 247 Sports Composite left the borders. Two years later, three of the top ten went to Alabama, two went to USC, and one went to Georgia. By 2023, only four of the top 15 Florida prospects — setting aside IMG Academy guys not originally from the state — signed with a Big Three school.

The Internet recruiting era also just made it easier for everyone to find all the gems from around the state no matter how far away their schools are.

Florida is an overfished pond, as no midwest assistant ever got fired for finding and signing fast dudes from the state regardless of whether they’re actually good football players yet. Once in a long while you’ll see something about a Big Three school finding a purported true diamond-in-the-rough, such as when both the McElwain and Mullen staffs recruited Ja’Markis Weston out of Clewiston.

But in general, the Big Three can no longer build depth by loading up on good in-state players that outsiders would’ve had a hard time finding 30-40 years ago. All secrets get out now, and without quality depth, consistency is impossible. The same dynamic plays out elsewhere too; Virginia Tech can no longer stay near the top of the ACC by pulling nearly all the best Hampton Roads players because a lot more schools recruit that area than did 20-30 years ago.

Internet recruiting services have also made national recruiting easier than ever, and top prospects are clustering more than they’ve previously done. Place just doesn’t matter as much as it used to. For example, UGA has signed more than half of its class from the state of Georgia only once since 2018, and last cycle it signed just five Georgians out of 26 players. Clemson’s big rise came largely from recruiting the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida, but now its roster has more players from Alabama than Florida and more from Texas than North Carolina.

I go back-and-forth on Florida as a program. It’s always put up high on lists of best jobs in the country because of its location, conference affiliation, financial resources, and fan support. Three of the four coaches the program has fired since Spurrier left still won ten games at least once. It’s remarkably resilient even when mismanaged for years on end.

Yet the program has a hard time winning big by its own standards when it doesn’t have a hall of fame coach on the sideline. There is more than a whiff of circular reasoning here, since winning big by Florida’s standards will itself qualify someone for a hall of fame in a way winning big by, say, Iowa State’s standards may not necessarily. Is eventual legendary status a prerequisite or a consequence?

Dan Mullen might’ve been a good test case for the program and its famed purported impatience. Everyone knows by now that he wasn’t recruiting near the level required to regularly compete for national championships. For instance when The Athletic’s Max Olson re-rated the 2019 classes nationally this week, not only was UF outside the top 25 but it missed the ten honorable mentions from 26-35. However when Mullen wanted to, which wasn’t always, he could put together a game plan to give even clearly superior teams a run for their money.

Mullen could’ve been on track to be Florida’s Richt, or John Cooper, making a long tenure out of regular but not annual top ten finishes with down years interspersed. According to reporting from Andy Staples though, in that linked piece and on his podcast, Mullen had a change of heart during the pandemic disruptions in 2020 and decided he wanted to try the NFL. Staples points to the report from Adam Schefter shortly after the 2020 season’s end that said Mullen was open to the pros, which had to be leaked by Mullen or his agent since no one in the NFL was talking to him at the time, and the fact that Mullen’s eventual raise and extension in the 2021 offseason didn’t come with corresponding extensions for even his oldest buddies on the staff.

This what-if game assumes that UF could even have a Richt-like coach who gets a decade or more without national titles. I don’t know whether it could. It’s fairly tautological around here. If someone is maxing out the program’s potential, then national titles — or at least competitive appearances in national title games — will start coming in. If someone is not maxing out the program’s potential, then why keep him around?

I don’t think Florida is unique in this regard, as nearly everyone who can win a championship churns through coaches until they find the right one. Richt’s tenure at Georgia is the aberration, not UF constantly riding the coaching carousel. And between Jim McElwain crumpling under the pressure of a big-time job to the point of inventing fake death threats and Mullen increasingly checking himself out mentally after deciding he wanted an NFL job, half of Florida’s recent dismissals came when the guy in the seat left the administration no choice.

For so many reasons, UF is not Nebraska. The state of Florida may be an overfished talent pool, but it’s better than a dry prairie. National titles are still the realistic ceiling for the Gators, as opposed to the Huskers’ ceiling of ten wins and an early exit in the upcoming 12-team College Football Playoff format.

But while Florida is not Nebraska, lately it has basically been Texas. Since 2002, both the Gators and Longhorns have 181 wins. In that span, both attended two national title games but have just two conference titles. Both have four under-.500 finishes. Both have had stretches where they obviously underperformed their average recruiting rankings. And both are presently hoping a former Nick Saban assistant will get them back to glory.

If the recent recruiting trends continue, the key goal for a coach is to make his program a place where top talent wants to cluster. Napier seems to have had a breakthrough in that regard by securing elite quarterback DJ Lagway’s commitment early in the 2024 cycle and building what’s shaping up to be a monster class off of that foundation. It’s a long way to signing day, but it’s the first time we’ve seen a Gator coach with a realistic shot at a top-five class since the early Muschamp years.

Only two programs in the postwar era have basically never been bad for an extended period: Ohio State and Oklahoma. You can find some sub-.500 years here or a down three-year stretch there from each since the ’40s, but most of that time consists of double-digit win seasons or something quite close to it. That Florida didn’t enter that club in the 1990s isn’t so surprising since it’s such a small club to begin with.

Florida has won big by catching two waves at just the right time: its own state’s population boom and the spread option. Napier is trying to bring about a third era of success less by catching a wave than by just out-planning and out-executing everyone else.

I wish I could say with confidence that UF is a special enough place that it doesn’t need to catch a wave to get to the top, but it may not be. Most places aren’t. If Napier can achieve an elite level of competence, one he’s not reached yet but could with time and growth, then we’ll learn a lot about what the Florida program requires to thrive.