Obscurantism and Jeremy Foley’s Genius

I am not a fan of obscurantism, the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details about something becoming known or realized. I have found that ignoring critical facts or pretending like they do not exist usually serves to further some sort of selfish interest- typically, in its most innocuous form, it’s to win and argument. In its most nefarious forms, it can lead to genocide or prevent necessary progress for civilization.

Over the past four seasons, watching the Gators on Saturdays felt like a labor. Many times, even after a win, the game wrenched every emotion out of me. I know many Gator fans felt the same way. I am not a football guru; I don’t know the intricacies of the spread offense or the merits of a 4-3 defense versus a 3-4 defense. However, no one needed to know any one of those things to see that something was not right with our football team.

Even at this late date, I am still not sure where the failure occurred. I cannot sit here and say that I think our previous coach was a bad coach at the Xs and Os of the game. I know that he wanted to succeed, so it wasn’t an issue of effort or will, pardon the pun.

I am not an insider to the Gator program, so I am not sure what occurred behind the scenes. However, I have my own set of theories, mostly they revolve around the idea that the previous steward of our program simply focused too much on one aspect of our program – the defense, which admittedly, was the strength of this program during his tenure.

Mr. Muschamp knows defense and has landed at Auburn to try to fix their sagging defense, which seems to be the only thing holding them back from toppling Alabama as the dominant team in the West. I wish him well.

However, as a result of the past four years, our athletic director, Jeremy Foley, has become the latest target for some members of the Gator Nation. The chorus shouting against Mr. Foley laments the hiring of Mr. Muschamp to the dilapidated conditions of our antiquated facilities. Moreover, what has transpired over the past couple months with Mr. Muschamp walking away with an approximately $6 million buy out and new job at Auburn and the ability to recruit kids he had been recruiting at Florida has done nothing to quell the criticism.

However, obscurantism and 20/20 hindsight happens to the best of people even Florida Gators. Perhaps a history lesson is order.

So let’s hop in the Wayback Machine and visit 2010. The Florida Gators needed a coach. In 2010, Mr. Muschamp was the head coach-in-waiting at Texas. The University of Texas, thought highly enough of Mr. Muschamp to make him the heir apparent to Mack Brown.

Let’s not pretend that Mr. Muschamp was not a highly regarded assistant coach nationally; it’s simply disingenuous. One of the biggest programs in the country was grooming him to be their head coach. It may not have been a sexy hire like Urban Meyer, but it’s simply not the reach that so many people claim. Mr. Muschamp also grew up in Gainesville; on paper he looked like an extremely viable candidate to coach Florida for decades.

Mr. Muschamp did not need to accept any restrictions on his contract with Florida regarding buy-outs, non-competes (which, may or may not upheld, if vigorously litigated), non-disparagement clauses, or recruiting restrictions. At this point in time, Mr. Muschamp was a valued commodity and had a superior negotiating position.

In all actuality, Mr. Foley probably asked for some form of all of those and Mr. Muschamp simply told him, “No.” At that point, it’s simply a question of what you can live with or not if you want that person to come and coach your program. Painting someone with as much experience as Mr. Foley as some kind of rube that got his lunch money taken by Mr, Muschamp is simply ridiculous.

Moreover, let’s not act like the Gator program was a juggernaut when Mr. Muschamp took over.

Mr. Meyer’s final season was not a banner year and many people had already come to the conclusion that a change in leadership was only a matter of time in Gainesville. Few coaches can come back from the bizarre drama of what happened after the 2009 SEC Championship Game and during the 2010 Sugar Bowl with Mr. Meyer resigning for his health and then coming back. The 2010 football season under Mr. Meyer was no less of a disappointment than any of the last four seasons under Mr. Muschamp. The program was an absolute mess when Mr. Meyer left.

Mr. Muschamp came into the Gator program with a lot of work to do. The dysfunction that he presided over the first season involved cleaning up discipline and the locker room. He kicked off Janoris Jenkins, probably the best player on the team. He had to make the hard choices that his predecessor avoided. Granted he had a bit of a leash to clean up these issues, Mr. Muschamp’s first season saw the Gators struggle to a 7-6 record; however, we lost several close games. Firing him Mr. Muschamp at this point was out of the question because the sample size was not big enough; typically, athletic directors don’t fire coaches after one year.

This is where things get fuzzy for most critics of Foley.

In February 2012, Mr. Foley gave Mr. Muschamp an extension through 2016. Additionally, in August of 2012, before the 2012 season, Mr. Foley gave Mr. Muschamp his final extension through the 2017 season.

So let’s move to the close of the 2012 football season. The Gators finished 11-2. The Gators were a couple of plays from playing for a National Championship that season. Granted, we played a brand of football that not even I could even describe as exciting. However, the Gator program seemed to be on the rise. We had a true sophomore starting quarterback. Mr. Muschamp had brought in a highly regarded recruiting class with lots of skill players that many people believed would help the anemic offense that we saw in 2012. Firing Mr. Muschamp at this point would have caused many people to question Mr. Foley’s sanity.

Thus, the extension that most people complain about was done before Mr. Muschamp’s “one good season”. The last time that the parties addressed any contractual issue before the firing of Mr. Muschamp was in August 2012. At that point the parties were happy with their arrangement. Muschamp and Foley both talked publicly about building something long-term at Florida. In fact, the extension looked downright prescient after National Signing Day in 2013.

You don’t go in and negotiate terms at that point. Why would you mess with a good thing? Besides the Gators looked like a team on the rise.

Optimism abounded in Gator Nation before the 2013 season. I am not going to relive that season, but 4-8 was not what anyone expected. Who knows why Mr. Foley didn’t fire Mr. Muschamp after 2013. I am sure that he considered it, how could he have not? However, there were mitigating factors that probably played a role in his decision. Injuries involving the first and second-string quarterback and our best defensive player in Dominique Easley, probably played a factor. Additionally, we played in a slew of close games despite all the injuries. Finally, that 2012 season was still out there for Mr. Foley to consider. There were arguments for and against retaining Mr. Muschamp; retaining Muschamp after the 2013 season was a judgment call.

At this point, Mr. Muschamp had absolutely no incentive to renegotiate his contract with Florida. No one in Mr. Muschamp’s position would have agreed to the terms that many of Mr. Foley’s critics claim he should have pushed for against Mr. Muschamp.

Sure, after the Missouri game this past season it looked like a bad decision; but those are the risks inherent in negotiating contracts. Neither party can anticipate every possible permutation of risk. Moreover, you face the risk of turning off the other side by pushing too hard on certain issues.

In retrospect, it is simple to see what happened with Mr. Muschamp and think that all of it could have been avoided if Mr. Foley had simply stuck to his guns. It is easy to forget that at some point in time prior to his termination that Mr. Foley and a great many fans, myself included, wanted Mr. Muschamp to coach football at the University of Florida.

Currently, it’s en vogue to question Mr. Foley because of his failure with Mr, Muschamp. Moreover, besides the hiring, many have leveled criticism of his handling of Mr. Muschamp’s contract. Now, it seems that his critics have upped the ante criticizing Mr. Foley for the state of Florida’s football facilities. However, it’s important to keep things in perspective and to look at all the information available, not just the information that supports an argument.

I am not saying that Florida didn’t need an indoor practice facility, to upgrade the athletic dorms, or other upgrades to the football offices; we do. However, to assert that Mr. Foley had allowed our facilities to fall into such a state of disrepair that Florida can’t compete with other schools in the SEC doesn’t really capture the whole issue.

Our athletic department runs in the black. It is one of the few athletic departments that in the country that do. A lot of the criticism regarding the facilities is that our competitors like Bama have built majestic cathedrals to their football demi-gods. What most people fail to mention is that the price tag attached to this largesse. Not rushing head long into a facilities arms race should be something we commend Mr. Foley. All of those shiny new things cost money and most needed to be financed; I commend Mr. Foley for taking a measured approach.

The Florida Gators are now ready to take on additional debt to make upgrades, but its not simply because of the chorus, it’s because the time is right. The economy is slowly improving and Mr. Foley’s slow and steady approach may pay longer-term dividends because our athletic department is not mired in debt like some others in the SEC. This will allow the Gators to be more nimble than other programs. We could be saddled with over $200,000,000.00 in debt like Tennessee because of this economy and reckless spending.

Additionally, the most stinky red herring in all of this is to think that somehow Mr. Foley’s new football coach has suddenly corrected his flawed thinking; that’s the red herring. The facility improvements occurring for Florida’s football program do not happen over the course of two months. They take years to budget for and plan. They do not magically happen because Mr. Jim McElwain suddenly takes over the program.

Claiming that Mr. Foley, who manages an athletic program that many experts consider one of the best in the country, is asleep at the wheel just does not reflect all the facts or, simply, reality. While I do not believe that anyone is above reproach, I think that the stinging accusations leveled against Mr. Foley just do not stand up under rational criticism. Moreover, I have not even rebutted his critics with the extensive string of success in multiple sports over multiple decades that the University of Florida has enjoyed under Mr. Foley. At this point in his tenure, he deserves a little more deference and benefit of doubt.

This is not to say that every decision Mr. Foley makes will pan out. He will have failures; however, if critics take a step back, they will realize that Mr. Foley’s decisions and courses of action were all reasonable under the circumstances, they just did not lead to the desired results. Sometimes bad results happen despite your best intentions. That does not make him a bad athletic director, it only makes him an athletic director that is not perfect – and that athletic director does not exist. So I will take my chances with this one.

Christopher has followed Gator football since he stepped on campus in January 1994. After getting degrees from the University of Florida in 1997 he attended law school at the University of Florida Levin College of Law and graduated in 2000. He currently owns a construction business with his father and two brothers and practices law in Stuart, Florida. He brings plenty of experience to his writing as an arm chair quarterback and professional second-guesser with the extraordinary ability of hindsight. Christopher enjoys his free time reading, writing, and spending time with friends and family. Follow him on twitter @clscammell.

15 COMMENTS

  1. Well stated. No he’s not perfect, but I know 121 other FBS schools who would give away their first born to have him. There is no question that the football program is down, but when you look at the big picture baseball, softball, swimming, track, basketball, gymfreakingnastics plus the success from the last two decades on the football field, you have arguably the biggest brand in collegiate sports.

    I know everyone thinks that Sabans and Meyers just grow on trees and they are available every year whenever we need one, but that is just not reality. Yes, the Muschamp era was a failed experiment. Looking back now in hindsight firing him after 2013 would have been the right thing to do …. Only because we now know what we know. We didn’t and couldn’t know back then. And I’m sure goofballs will jump on here and declare that they knew Muschamp was bum the moment he was hired. Whatever. Foley had to give him 2014. The silly season of injuries in 2013 could have had the same results with any coach. And regardless of what any Foley critic might say, you can’t fire a coach 1 season removed from an 11-1 campaign. What potential coaching candidate could trust him if they knew he had a backbone made of peanut butter?

    • It was a judgment call at the end of 2013, we fire him then its another few million we are out of pocket…I think giving Muschamp another year was the right call. It didn’t work out; I am not going to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

  2. -Foley reached on the hire by tapping somebody who had not previously been a head coach. That was a mistake at the time and remains so in hindsight.
    – Anybody who watched the team knew, even at 11-2 we were barely getting by in games with a great defense and a very high turnover margin. That season did not scream “extension”. A smart negotiator would know that a good year was not going to lead CWM to leave. That would only come if he had multiple years and championships. There was no need to sweeten the pot.

    Foley is a terrific athletic director. But he has made the same mistake twice: wanting to hire someone he knows rather than the best coach he can get an hiring a head coach with no head coaching experience. Let’s hope he does not get a third bite at that poisonous apple, or that if he does then he learned something. I agree he should not be fired and I think he got the Mac hire right, but there is no denying he screwed the pooch with CWM.

    • It is reported that Patrick Kennedy was told by his father that, ‘It is not who you are that is important. It is who people think you are’. It is obvious that AD Foley has developed a cult following among certain members of Gator Nation. Those, who for rather opaque reasons, believe him to be ‘a genius’. In my opinion and based upon his record I believe Foley has been generally competent at his job. His legacy will, however, be forever tainted by the Muschamp/Zook Fiascos. A mistake made not once, but twice and for essentially the same reason. The four year record of Muschamp incompetence is objective fact not wild opinion. The Gators IN FACT lost at the Swamp to Georgia Southern. The Gators had IN FACT one of the worst offensive teams in the country for four years. Foley hired and invested in Muschamp until to do so further became almost comical. Foley has beenreasonably competent . Foley, the genius, please spare us!!

  3. Keep in mind that the AD does not have autonomy. The university president certainly relies on input from the AD, of course, but in the end it is the president that makes the final decisions, especially budgetary ones.

  4. “Even at this late date, I am still not sure where the failure occurred.”
    This is an idiotic statement. The performance of the football team lies at the feet of the head football coach. He finally ran out of offensive coordinators to scapegoat. I am fairly certain that Alabama and Ohio St. fans know the primary reason why their football teams are successful. This just a flat out wish-washy thing to write.
    “Moreover, let’s not act like the Gator program was a juggernaut when Mr. Muschamp took over.”
    No, Muschamp did not take over a juggernaut, but you do know that Muschamp’s sole “successful” season was primarily due to players recruited by the previous regime. To completely disregard that fact would be idiotic.
    “It is easy to forget that at some point in time prior to his termination that Mr. Foley and a great many fans, myself included, wanted Mr. Muschamp to coach football at the University of Florida.”
    Using “great many” to quantify the number of Gator fans who were still pro-Muschamp despite the debacles on the field is quite vague. Great many to you could be five people plus your dog. Of course Muschamp still had some fans in his corner, just like Ron Zook had loyalists in his corner to the bitter end.
    “However, to assert that Mr. Foley had allowed our facilities to fall into such a state of disrepair that Florida can’t compete with other schools in the SEC doesn’t really capture the whole issue.”
    Even Muschamp said that he was recruiting at a disadvantage because of the facilities. This wasn’t some anonymous internet poster that said that. Foley chose to build a women’s lacrosse stadium and waited until his football program was the only one in the SEC without an indoor facility before building one.
    “Our athletic department runs in the black. It is one of the few athletic departments that in the country that do.”
    You do know that most of the athletic department’s revenue is generated by the football program or football-related activities. I can imagine how much more in the black the athletic department would be with a consistently successful football team.
    “Moreover, I have not even rebutted his critics with the extensive string of success in multiple sports over multiple decades”
    The multiple sports success thing is a cop-out. Football by itself is 50 times more important than the other sports combined. Even college basketball has lost a lot of buzz with the one-and-done mentality of its elite players and sagging T.V. ratings. And if college basketball is so important and generates a lot of revenue, wouldn’t the power five conferences be clamoring for UCONN? As many others have pointed out before me, the individual most responsible for the current state of the football program isn’t Muschamp, it’s Foley.

    • Good work, RJohmson32. But, please do not confuse the Foley Is Genius crowd with facts!! It is time for pushback against the Foley/Muschamp apologists. I will be impressed with this group once they can convince me that the disgraceful reality of the Foley/Muschamp years did not really happen.

    • Apparently, you failed to read the following paragraph where I said Mr. Muschamp probably spent too much time and effort on the defense. I clearly laid the fault at Mr. Muschamp’s feet. The fact that you lacked the ability to process and internalize the information that was clearly there for your consumption shows that you only parsed and digested what you wanted to…very obscurant of you.

      Additionally, Meyer was not the coach of the 2012 team. Say what you want about Mr. Muschamp but he did coach the 2012 squad. No one was giving Zook any credit for the 2006 Championship team despite the fact that he recruited most of the starting roster. So your argument cuts both ways, but I doubt you would acknowledge that because it only reflects that you are picking and choosing which facts you want to present.

      Mr. Muschamp was not the nincompoop that the Anti-Muschamp and Anti-Foley crowd makes him out to be. I openly acknowledge that the Muschamp and Zook tenures were failures, but I do not have to make up things about them to mask my personal distaste for them like you and other posters do. Just because you were right about one thing doesn’t make you right about everything. I fully supported the firing of Muschamp, in fact I think it should have been done earlier in the season. However. I can understand why Foley waited. I would be more critical had his actions been without justification. That is the problem with how the Anti-Foley crowd functions; dismissing all arguments, rationalizations and justifications doesn’t make you right, it only makes you think you are right. Many people supported Muschamp, just because you want to read arguments on these boards that support your position doesn’t negate the fact that Muschamp was not universally reviled as a hire and as a coach while he was here. Just because you were right does not mean that everyone in the Gator Nation felt the same way. That is called revisionist history.

      We aren’t the last school in the SEC to build an IPF, UGA still doesn’t have one or one in the works. It doesn’t seem to affecting their recruiting. Additionally, I don’t care what Muschamp said about an IPF holding him back, he used it against us on the recruiting trail. The fact the Anti-Muschamp crowd is using that against Foley is actually somewhat hilarious to me; for the anti-Foley crowd Muschamp was wrong about everything except the facilities issue. The simple fact of the matter is the reason we are lagging in recruiting is because of our on the field performance over the last two seasons. That is Muschamp’s fault because he was not a good HEAD football coach. He could not manage all the aspects of a program. That’s why he was fired.

      We are still running in the black despite the awful product on the football field the past few seasons. I do realize that football is king and is the engine that drives everything, its the most visible aspect of our athletic department. That’s why the failures with Zook and Muschamp are magnified.

      The multiple sports issue is not a cop-out, Foley is not a football czar, he’s the athletic director; which means he manages all the sports. It also means he has to balance multiple interests. There is a thing called Title IX, that’s why women facilities get built. If we didn’t have it, most Universities would spend every penny on their football programs. Instead of looking at Title IX as a burden, Foley has used it as a strength. Our women’s sports programs are important and our athletic director doesn’t pay lip service to it. If some fans of the University of Florida had their way we would only play football. However, the women’s sports teams and lesser sports play a larger role in the University of Florida’s broader mission. Additionally, overall athletic success of the University of Florida in other sports besides football is something I am proud of, be it football or gymnastics, they are Gators and they represent a school I take a lot of pride in. It would be easy to say, that football should rule the roost because they bring in millions of dollars, but to take the less popular position that all sports are important and to fund them in a manner that reflects that takes a lot of foresight. Foresight that many so-called Gator fans like yourself lack.

      Finally, your ad hominem attacks say much more about your lack of depth as a person and understanding of opposing view points than they do about me. I didn’t have to stoop to them to make my points against you. You made a couple valid points, but like so many of the Anti-Foley crowd, you pick and choose your arguments and you outright misrepresent facts to make your point. You made the point of my arguments so much more eloquently than I could. Thank you.

    • OK, I got it. Everyone who has commented negatively about the ‘Foley is Genius’ opinion piece by Brother Scammell either, did not read it completely, read it completely but is too stupid to comprehend the insightfulness of its content, is irrationally anti-Foley, anti-Muschamp and anti-Scammell. Mr. Scamell’s article and his attempt to respond to those who disagree may be interesting but hardly convincing. Sometimes, reality is just reality and cannot be spun to look like something else.

  5. no doubt JF has been a successful AD at UF, the record of the entire program shows that, HOWEVER for you to defend or create doubts ref either WILL M or the facilities makes you in this article you wrote be an apple to the teacher guy, I read every word , you are crazy man, WM stunk at UF STUNK , and JF standing up for him and defending him was the most frustrating thing GATOR NATION has endured since 1979 , and yes CHORUS as u said is the cause of the movement to upgrade facilities , it was not long ago JF said UF does not need an indoor practice , the headaches and stomach aches caused by WM are thank GOD finally gone from UF , please do not ever bring this guy into articles again he is gone , hopefully UF can re invent itself , in SEC is not easy to climb back ( ask TENN ) ——–there was no need for your article JF was wrong period , but he is strong guy even those types have the right to learn and move forward and this is what all of us need —-a strong JF to lead GATOR NATION back , finally I wish people and writers stop taking shots at Urban, three 13/1 seasons in 4 years come on we all be lucky if we ever see that again, and guess whose players were in that 2012 defense ????————–GO GATORS

    • My position was never that Will Muschamp was a good head football coach. My position is that he was a mistake and that we have moved on and that we should be giving Foley the benefit of the doubt. It was also about the persistent misrepresentation of facts and circumstances by the Anti-Foley/Anti-Muschamp crowd.

      I am happy that Muschamp is gone. I am happy that Foley made the change.

      I don’t think Foley openly campaigning against his football coach would have helped our performance on the field. Foley couldn’t be anything but be supportive. I am not sure that Foley coming out and openly criticizing Muschamp while he was coach here or not is productive to the Gators winning football games in 2013, 2014, or beyond. You just don’t see that very much and when you do, it never looks good for a program.