This weekend, my wife and I took our two kids to Disney World for the first time. They’re six and two, so we just did a day of Magic Kingdom. They weren’t going to be up for more than that, and honestly, neither were we.
Because I am me and do what I do as a writer, I couldn’t help seeing some analogies for college football in my first visit to the Mouse House in more than 20 years. If you’ll indulge some opining about one Florida institution, I promise it’ll tie into the other Florida institution that I normally write about here.
Going to any longstanding theme park is going to be a little like an archaeological dig, where you find evidence of different layers of history here and there. It’s explicitly so at Magic Kingdom, where there are some relics among the attractions like the Carousel of Progress and It’s a Small World (sorry for the song that’s now in your head) that are direct tributes to Walt himself and sit alongside the more recent attractions.
If you have any kind of eye for aesthetics, you can tell when some areas were last updated. The area that stands out as the most dated is, ironically, Tomorrowland. It’s supposed to be a vision of the future, but it was last re-done in 1994 and very much looks like it. The place screams ’90s with its design language, and indeed only two attractions have been added since that decade.
Disney is somewhat stuck with Tomorrowland because there are a lot of things there that are “classic” rides with direct ties to Walt. A space-theme roller coaster was his idea, even if Space Mountain wasn’t created until after his death, and the Carousel of Progress and PeopleMover are very much Walt things. The former is based on a World’s Fair attraction he built, and the latter was part of his vision for the city of tomorrow that was eventually scaled back to just the Epcot park. For a lot of reasons, Disney can’t touch things that have such deep connections to Walt.
At the same time, Space Mountain is one of the most update-resistant attractions out there. The concept is a roller coaster in the dark. You know what can’t be upgraded? The dark. It is the same as it has been since a few hundred thousand years after the birth of the universe, once what’s now the cosmic microwave background was being created by the great cosmic soup cooling down enough for there to even be darkness in some places.
Space Mountain has been updated mechanically and for sponsorship and theming reasons, but it’s a classic for a reason. It works because you can’t see what’s coming next. It’s a killer idea for a roller coaster that can’t be substantially improved.
But ultimately, Tomorrowland is only half what it was supposed to be anymore. It’s supposed to be a vision of the future, but anything that’s remotely new there is just references to the company’s franchises.
The new Tron roller coaster has nothing to do with the theme of the Tomorrowland area. It’s just a movie tie-in. The Monsters, Inc. show and Buzz Lightyear ride in Tomorrowland are the same: just movie tie-ins that don’t tell you anything about what the future might be like.
The PeopleMover and Carousel of Progress have passed into retrofuturism (the latter only through neglect), but they were ideas of a realistic future at one time. So realistic, in fact, that the carousel’s finale from its 1993 update of a home with virtual reality games and voice controlled appliances came to pass years ago. Even Space Mountain and the Astro Orbiter, which are really just space-themed amusement park rides, have some perfunctory theming about them being spacecraft that future people might ride. Imagination can supply the future vision with those rides in a way that it can’t with stuff involving fictional monsters and sentient toys.
Disney has lost the plot with Tomorrowland, and you can really feel it when you’re there.
College football is an institution that goes back a long way. Many individual programs do too, like UF’s dating to 1906. The balancing act of honoring the past while staying current and looking to the future is a challenge for them just as much as it is for Disney as it manages its parks.
There are some obvious strategies here. The UF program doesn’t celebrate its admission practices in the pre-integration days, for instance, and it long ago quit playing the verse of “Orange and Blue” that includes a reference to Dixie. It does retain “We Are the Boys from Old Florida” despite it coming from when the school enrollment was for only men, but it markets it as a song for everyone. Some things are easy calls.
But Florida’s relative futility since Urban Meyer’s first resignation has made things more difficult.
Of course you want to celebrate Steve Spurrier, Danny Wuerffel, and Tim Tebow, but there are recruits who just enrolled this month who were born the year of Tebow’s Heisman win. They don’t remember seeing any of those guys play.
There is more recent excellence to celebrate, such as the offensive trinity of Kyle Trask, Kyle Pitts, and Kadarius Toney in 2020. There are fewer defensive standouts to highlight thanks to struggles in recent years, but you still have the likes Gervon Dexter, Jason Marshall, Ventrell Miller, and others to spotlight.
The trick is, because of the (justified, I think) string of dismissals, there aren’t any recent head coaches to celebrate. It’s pretty much just Spurrier, since Meyer disgraced himself with the Zach Smith affair at Ohio State and pretty much everything he did with the Jaguars. Because players necessarily come and go so quickly from the college game, head coaches are the enduring stars. Yet, Florida only has one such star coach (other than the current one) it can lean on in that department.
Part of good management of a program is figuring out not just who is a potential winner of a coach, but who will win the right way for the institution. Fans get accustomed to certain styles, and those styles typically relate to what kind of talent is available to the school. Even as recruiting has become increasingly national and the portal has allowed for more coast-to-coast movement, a lot of guys just want to play close to home so their parents can see them play most weeks.
Places like Georgia, Ohio State, and Alabama prefer winning with rushing and defense, despite each’s recent success with air attacks. USC likes to win with pro-style passing, which makes sense for how many such quarterbacks come out of California. Sometimes you see a program make a significant departure like when Luke Fickell thought running an uptempo Air Raid was a good idea at Wisconsin, but it crashed and burned for three years before he gave up on it and found a more conventional offensive coordinator for this upcoming season.
That core identity is a bit like the Space Mountain of your program. It can and must be somewhat malleable as trends and circumstances change, but you should have a one-sentence summary that doesn’t change. We run the ball and play defense. We put on a good show through the air. It’s a roller coaster in the dark.
Everything else must flow from that core identity. It’s when you try to do too much that you lose your identity and find your nominally futuristic area hosting a show based on a nearly quarter-century old movie and a ride based on a 30-year-old movie.
The slow, grinding process of Billy Napier’s tenure in Gainesville has not just been the process of him figuring out how to run a big-time program, or figuring out the annual changes to NIL, transfers, and now revenue sharing. It’s been trying to change the one-sentence summary of the program from, “we win with offensive fireworks” to, “we win with complementary football”. He’s not the first who’s been hired to change that one-liner, and he’s made it longer than a couple of the others who tried.
I don’t like it; I grew up on the Fun ‘n Gun and would like to see those fireworks. However Notre Dame this year and Michigan last year have demonstrated how complementary football can contend for and win a title now. The age of pure offense peaked with 2019 LSU and 2020 Alabama, as defense writ large has finally caught up up to the innovations of the spread, hurry up, and RPO enough that you don’t need a genius to slow down the top attacks anymore. Texas’s Pete Kwiatkowski has been around forever and isn’t an all-timer of a DC, but he slowed down the dynamic Ohio State offense in the Cotton Bowl without the Michigan mental hex that haunts Ryan Day.
I still wish Napier the best because I always want Florida to win now, but the process of changing the narrative around the program isn’t complete. It’s not going to be for quite some time, as this kind of change is slow. I think he does have a coherent vision for what he’s trying to do, far more coherent than the present state of Tomorrowland anyway, but it still remains to be seen if it’s the right vision for Florida specifically.