As long as he sees it as the ability to make some money he probably won't make once he is done with college basketball, I am okay with his decision. Now all he needs to do is to invest it prudently. Perhaps no different than Jack Pyburn.
In basketball? Like Georgia, they don’t even deserve the respect of being called a UF basketball rival. Our only true basketball conference rival is UK. All the others are just upstarts. Out of conference, there is something brewing between UF and UCONN that stems back to the Shabazz Napier season. Golden and Hurley look like they will be going at it for years to come. Side note, we should avoid anyone with the last name Napier in all sports going forward.
You're assigning motives and, in this case, I don't think you're doing so correctly. Pope did a horrible job of constructing a roster and one of his problems is that he vastly overvalues some players and undervalues others. He isn't plugged into sources that can give him some sense of the market for a given player. He valued Aberdeen way too highly. No other school would have been foolish enough to give him 2 mil and Pope didn't realize this. This isn't my theory either it's information being leaked around the program. UK mainly missed out on every top prospect they went after due to the opposite problem - not being willing to pay as much as other schools. Ironic given our overpayment for so many other players. He needs a GM. Well honestly just needs a different job. Either way, Pope wasn't trying to screw Florida. He just overvalued Aberdeen so much that even Aberdeen's own school knew he wasn't worth that much. And Aberdeen would have been stupid not to take it. Bruce Pearl said it best when he said UK "paid starter money for backups."
You know what they say, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery...IF you can prove I did that. Otherwise...
He was a pretty good Xs and Os coach, as well as a player development coach. But he wasn't a good recruiter. At all.
