I am back at this newsletter writing thing since everything has gone well with my new daughter. She was born on schedule on July 15 and has been the picture of health ever since. My writing will still be intermittent for a bit as I spend time with my family, but the season is fast approaching. It’s easier to think of things to write when stuff is actually happening, so that helps me hammer good stuff out for you.
Anyway, I saw a piece yesterday from the great Neil Blackmon about patience and Florida fans. I don’t want to critique his writing necessarily, but I do want to address the subject.
I myself wrote about the need for some patience not much more than a month ago in the wake of the Jaden Rashada mess. Fans were upset about that whole deal, which was the culmination of months of worry and anger about Miami and NIL, and crystal ball predictions about recruit destinations for key targets were trending away from Gainesville.
I tried to explain why the most impatient fans were upset and also why they weren’t realistic in their desires. It was never going to be a straight line upwards in the Billy Napier era. Like a stock chart, there are going to be ups and downs in the short term even if the bigger trend is in the right direction.
Ever since then, though, the impatient fans have gotten much of what they wanted. One of those guys who had been trending away — RB Treyaun Webb, cousin of former Gator defensive back Dee — committed to UF and brought Penn State quarterback flip Marcus Stokes with him. They were two of 11 different 4-star commits to come since Rashada announced for the Hurricanes, a group that included high priority receivers Aiden Mizell (another UF legacy) and Eugene Wilson.
Short of 5-star CB Cormani McClain announcing for Florida, something he hasn’t been scheduled to do or anything, it’s just about been all good news. The Gators are up to No. 12 nationally, and every class ahead of them but one (Miami, again) have more commits. Only one (No. 11 Tennessee) has a lower average player rating than UF’s, to be fair.
The thing is, UF always had the potential to bring in a bumper crop of top talent this cycle. As I pointed out in my piece, Florida massively upgraded its recruiting. The current assistants versus the last staff is a first round TKO. The off-field staff is also far larger and better organized. Things should have improved because the people in charge of recruiting improved.
That’s the thing about the meme regarding Gator fans being impatient, or spoiled, or unrealistic, or whatever. My view isn’t exactly comprehensive, but from what I can see, the most vocal UF fans tend to be fairly high information fans. You can still find the idiots who’d be at home on Message Board Geniuses posts, but they largely know what they’re talking about.
Take the infamous FireRonZook.com guy. Perhaps no single person has done more to establish UF fans’ reputation for impatience.
Well, was he wrong? Turns out, no. The job was far too big for the Zooker. He had recruiting success to be sure. But his game day coaching wasn’t near good enough, and nothing in his background had suggested it would be. His judgment was suspect too, given the frat party incident. FRZ guy was unfair in how quickly he made his call, but it didn’t take long much of his case to be borne out.
As for Gator fans supposedly running off other coaches, spot the flaws.
Most fans did give Will Muschamp a real chance, but he threw up warning flags at the start. The biggest: the spread, with or without the option, was going nowhere by 2011, but Muschamp took the program away from it by hiring Charlie Weis. Hiring offensive assistants proved to be too hard for him in general. It was a mitzvah from Jeremy Foley that he even got a fourth year. And given a second chance, Muschamp did poorly enough that South Carolina was willing to eat $13 million to send him packing in a year when the pandemic was stressing budgets everywhere.
And Jim McElwain? Like Zook, he wasn’t mentally up to the task. He also didn’t help himself by hiring and sticking with subpar assistants, and I defy you to find someone who thinks UF ultimately did him wrong. Tellingly, he landed not at a lower to mid-tier P5 program like Muschamp did but at Central Michigan.
As for Dan Mullen, every complaint about recruiting from the “impatient” crowd at the beginning was a chicken that came home to roost. Other major points of contention, like picking Feleipe Franks over Kyle Trask and standing by Todd Grantham, often proved to be places where the fans were right and Mullen was wrong. It’s not that the fans lacked patience, it’s that they lacked patience with obviously questionable decision making.
The one place where fans’ impatience was a real, actual problem was the second half of the Spurrier era. The first half set such an impossibly high bar — finishing first in or winning the SEC six of seven years — that it was never going to be sustainable. It was great fortune even given Spurrier’s genius to have Shane Matthews buried on the roster ready to be found with Danny Wuerffel the almost-immediate successor.
The comparative quarterback wilderness of Doug Johnson, Noah Brindise, and Jesse Palmer probably helped stoke the impatience after watching the brilliance of Matthews and especially Wuerffel. I think that played into the fan overreaction to the 2001 Tennessee loss that kept UF out of the SEC title game and likely the national title game, as Rex Grossman was as good as those first two quarterbacks. Blackmon’s piece linked above goes over that time, if you’re not familiar.
But overall, the reason Florida football has comparatively struggled since Spurrier left is that the coaching hires just haven’t been that good. Urban Meyer is the one exception, but that man had some real issues with workaholism that would’ve presented no matter which elite job he inevitably got after Utah. The way things ended at Ohio State and transpired with the Jaguars further illustrate how you can’t blame his problems entirely, or even mostly, on Gator fan impatience. He’s just a very flawed individual.
Napier seems pretty grounded, and his army of support staff should help everyone avoid burnout. Those are promising signs.
And yes, there are a lot of pressures that come with the Florida job. They come because it’s a place that can win big, and quickly. As long as someone is going about things the right way, there’s no good reason a UF should finish below .500.
Florida is in no worse a situation than Oklahoma or Ohio State, programs that register a losing season about once every two-to-three decades. They’ve just been very good about their hires. If Foley and Scott Stricklin had been as good as those in charge in Norman and Columbus, the past 12 years would look very different.
In some sense, those two are outliers because their good hires tend to stick around a while. That reduces their sample size of head coaches, which makes extreme outcomes (like losing seasons coming only every few decades) more likely.
Hiring the right guy is very hard. Muschamp was head-coach-in-waiting at Texas when UF got him. I know some UF fans were against his hire for his lack of head coaching experience and for being a defensive guy, but he was a hot name at the time. If the Gators weren’t going to be the ones who learned the hard way about his deficiencies as a head coach, no less than the Longhorns would’ve. And sometimes, it’s a bad cycle to be hiring. The pick of McElwain inspired no one, but Michigan hiring alum Jim Harbaugh is the only P5 hire in that year’s coaching carousel to really work out.
But let’s be clear: much of the impatience that Florida fans get tagged with, at least post-2001, has been about bad hires that didn’t look great from the jump. Having foresight in that way is to fans’ credit, not to their detriment.