Puzzled- Major Stadium Upgracde, Poor NIL Money

And?

 

I know every coach out there is watching how much cooperation Napier is getting in buying his players.

 

It starts with buying a top roster. If that doesn’t happen, no amount of coaching can win. No established coach will go to a team not consistently buying those classes either. Kiffen has his baggage and his question marks. He is proving himself at ole Miss and will move to one of the few teams buying top talent if he can keep it together there. Not only is Napier having to prove himself, UF is also auditioning for future coaches. Napier needs to be given time to fail or succeed and be given the talent to do so. The next week will tell a lot about whether we keep these handful of players or do they all flip. If they all flip, that’s not only a knock on Napier, but it is a knock on Florida also.

 

I just don’t see how you can determine this from the outside looking in. It appears to me that the school is trying very hard, but we are in a slump. People were calling for Billy Napier to get fired by the middle of his second year. That’s just insane and counterproductive. If you don’t have stability at head coach, what message does that send? You should only fire a coach if you have to. As in, they have zero chance to turn it around. Napier has a great class coming in (even with the de commits) and the #2 QB in the country showing up soon. Firing him now… after he took his lumps and hopefully learned from his mistakes is shortsighted. The admin is exercising patience and wisdom in the face of an unruly mob of fans who want to burn it all down at the first sign of trouble.

 

I don't think BN (or any coach, for that matter) should be fired after 2 years. Outside of some egregious off field, for cause type incident, I don't think its fair. I do have, unfortunately, the opinion that he is not on a track to be successful in a time-frame that reasonable fans will agree is enough to see the "process" through.

As far as the Admin not being all in, you look for signs....and they are clearly there. There are more, but I'll give two examples:

1) UF chose to sit on its laurels after the ultra successful UM run and not invest in Football program facilities right at the time the SEC Network was being launched and all the other SEC programs were using all that extra revenue to go all in on any upgrade in order to attract recruits. This was after UM was appalled at our facilities and begged them to create something in the stadium to act as a gathering area for recruits. Even Shane Matthews said that UF's football facilities were among the worst in the conference. That was quite telling because in the early 1990's they were among the best.

2) Despite Florida being the second State to approve an NIL law long before the NCAA's announcement that they would allow NIL, UF appeared completely unprepared for the transition that would immediately be the #1 inducement to join any program. They even sent a letter to every booster warning them not to set up vehicles to provide prospects funding which probably confused a lot of people that might have been willing to begin exploring ways to set up NIL funding ventures.

I agree that an insider has more knowledge, but sometimes those folks can't see the forest because of all the trees.

 

My 2 cents after decades watching ufaa.
- Foley wanted the best athletic department in the country. This meant all sports and he lost sight of the importance of investing in facilities for revenue sports. This has been fixed.
- UF still carries the scars and lessons learned from the 80s probation. Their institutional memory makes us conservative despite the world having changed. I personally do not want to see us behave like FSU (sell souls). However, our aversion to any action that nears rule bending is problematic.
- Most importantly, we have either made misfit/bad hires, or not given them the time to succeed. whatever your perspective, poor coaching, and constant transition is not a recipe for success.

I think it is wrong to say that the university administration does not care about football. There are other explanations.

 

From where I sit, they appear to care a lot more about the revenue that the football program generates than the program itself. I'll give an example: Will Muschamp exhibited early on that he would not be able to make the leap from really good coordinator to good head coach. Despite this, Foley (and admin as far as I know) chose to retain him into year 4. When the stands emptied out (revenue) and recruits stopped returning calls, they were forced to act. I can't tell you how many times I heard the sentence "We believe we have got our guy." Maybe it was just ego that blinded them to the troubling signs....I really don't know. What I do know is that it took them too long to realize he wasn't going to work out and long after most fans came to that conclusion.

 

They fixed the facilities issue by building a brand new one that is among the best in the nation. Our NIL is now very strong as well. This goes directly against your claim that they are not “all in”. Perhaps, what you meant to say is that you feel they are too slow to react, but that’s an entirely different criticism.

 

15-20 years late on a football facility after facilities becomes an increasingly secondary piece of the recruiting puzzle and finally getting around to setting up a viable NIL program 3 years in is nothing more than barely keeping up...not all-in. If UF wants to be in the top group of football programs, the admin needs to innovate and come up with novel solutions to attract top recruits.

 

We had just won 3 national championships in 12 years with the old facilities, so I don’t blame the university for not jumping to spend a huge sum of money on new facilities. We were still pretty relevant up to about three years ago, so it’s not as if the facilities held us back.

Even still, that is an argument about timeliness, not about being “all in”.

 

Then the only other option was that they were inept and made foolish decisions. Take your pick, either way the program got spiked.

 

It is not a binary option. There are many factors which go into the decision to build a gigantic $85M facility. It doesn’t happen overnight.

You are also assuming that the athletic facility would have made a significant difference. The Patriots couldn’t lose for two decades and now they are terrible. I doubt it’s because their facilities are lacking. It’s the direct result of the loss of one player.

You are putting way too much stock into the facility as a cause of our woes.

 

I gave 2 examples and indicated there are others. I never said the facility was THE cause of our woes. I said it was just an example of one many reasons we find ourselves in the rut we are now in.

 

You used those examples to demonstrate that the administration isn’t all in, yet they have already fixed both those issues, so your points don’t align. You can’t use past deficiencies to demonstrate present administration not being all in, today. The time phasing doesn’t align. If anything, you could say that the administration previously (if they are even the same people here today) was not all in. That would be the better argument, even if I don’t think it’s accurate.

 

From an outsider's perspective, it appears to me paying players became unenforced 15+ years ago. We may be funding NIL now, but our infrastructure of bag men, jobs for parents and uncles, paying off high school coaches, and other shady dealings is either nonexistent or decades behind the top schools.

 

Sorry, but no. Kids can leave the class due to NIL money or lack of faith in coaches. It's not a knock on the University itself. Maybe a knock on the NIL organization.

 

The scool should come out and say he has five years unless he humps a shark. Put the stability out there for everyone to see. If they don’t make that statement, the stability is in question.

it all goes back to the school no matter who is paying the bill. Coaches and players both see it

 

It’s implied by the contract they gave him as well as the absence of stating the contrary. Employers typically don’t go around making cold statements that an employee will not be fired. Are we suggesting that President Sasse or AD Stricklin put out a statement? That would be bush league and silly.

 

I don’t think it would be bush league at all for our president or athletic Director to come out and say we fully stand behind Billy Napier and he will give the time to turn this thing around.

 

Those types of statements are usually a death knell.