The Root Cause of Florida’s Decline

Regarding "being like Stanford", around this same time, friends who are teachers were hearing whispers that UF wanted to become the "Harvard of the South". I was proud of that at the time. I didn't know it might end up as a zero-sum game with sports. It seems we acted just like a Pac-12 school & ignored the trends in college sports.

 

Save me the trouble bro.

WTH does "probablistic" mean, and who is Glenn Schumann?

EDIT: NM. Did my own homework.

Another @#%:&n nut licker roaming our sidelines?!?!?

Hell to the hell no thank you.

AND he's a Bammer alum?!?

@#%#@& no.

Mac, Chump, and Naptime were all tainted Bammer/nut licker, and here you're proposing yet another...

Just...hell no.

We need to Go Gator!

Plumb *OUR* coaching trees.

 

I think what all of those coaches have struggled with, and the rapid intensification of this phenomenon since NIL has made it worse (but ever since the recruiting death stars were put in place at Bama, GA, Oh St, etc), is that being in Florida does not provide any greater access to ‘Florida talent’ than anywhere else. The admin. has been so to adapt to that, and, I think, with good reason. It is tough to embrace the fact that recruits will not pick Florida because they think the School is special, and instead it was the one offering the most money.

In a world where money talks and bullshit walks, we are strollin’.

 

Champ man. Couldn't get out of his own way. Could've stuck with the spread (especially with how the roster was constructed) and still have the ball control/down hill run game he craved. Interested in how Weis ended up on his staff tho. Lol! Oil and water indeed

 

I don't think Foley consciously thought he was sacrificing anything with football. He just thought the other schools were stupid and UF had a different way of winning than everyone else and all he needed was one of the greatest head coaches of all time. Easier said than done.

 

Interestingly, Weis recruited the QB who would go on to start more NFL games than any QB in Gators history.

 

I was watching the Raiders play yesterday and was impressed by Antonio Pearce, not that he’s an option but he seems to know what type of assistants he needs for support.

He hired Marvin Lewis and another vet then every week at the 5:00 mark before halftime and end of game, he huddles up with them and says “ok, how do we handle time management with the situation we are in.”

That’s a recipe for success, a young coach looking for mentorship from his veteran subordinates. Give me that and I will happily take growing pains!

 

Everyone who did was called negative and shouted down.

 

Georgia Southern.

 

Call me disloyal, but I don't care if they coached for a rival. Bo Schembechler coached at Ohio State. That was a great hire for Michigan, and a similar hire would be fine by me if it took us back to the top of college football.

He's coached with Kirby Smart for 17 seasons. He was Kirby's first hire at UGA. That is all I need to know. If you've been around Kirby for 17 seasons then you must know something about winning football.

 

...The answer can be found in the Basement.

 

I knew Napier was a mistake when his pre game speech before our last bowl was broadcast where he basically said, in a reserved, quiet voice, essentially said "okay guys, let's go out there and play football." No fire. No excitement, just go and do whatever...

 

Waited one year too long to fire Muschamp. Absolutely would have done well here.

Muschamp was a home run hire who just didn’t pan out. I’d he could have developed a competent to good offense, would still be here.

 

Just curious: How can a decision be considered
"good" when the results of that decision were disastrous?

It seems that your only criteria for deeming a decision "good" are factors taken into consideration at the time of the decision, not the results of that decision.

 

You have a choice between option A, a 40% chance at a million dollars or option B, a 100% chance at $100 dollars.

The correct decision here does not always lead to the best result. The person who chooses option B has a 60% chance of being better off than the person who chooses option A, but option A is by far the better option.

What we want to avoid is what I would call scarred-ex syndrome where we never choose option A ever again because we have PTSD from choosing option A one time.

We need to move away from opinions that are primarily formed by experiences with our exes (Muschamp, McElwain, Mullen, Napier, etc), and we need to look at recent successful hires in the broader college football landscape (Kirby Smart, Dan Lanning, Ryan Day, Lincoln Riley (at OU), Steve Sarkisian, Kalen Deboer, etc). I would even argue Brent Venables could enter into the conversation as well.

We need to look at the successful hiring decisions and look for common denominators.

The best hires of the past decade for the most part were coordinators of elite football programs.

I think it could be argued with McElwain that he was not an elite coordinator. The same is true with Napier. Mullen and Norvell were both good coordinators, but both struggled to recruit because they did not come from elite football programs with elite recruiting connections and draft picks galore to sell recruits on their ability to get you to the NFL. If you are an elite coordinator at an elite football program, then you can scheme, develop, and recruit. You also have relationships with players on an elite roster that could net you several portal players over the 3 year time horizon you get at UF.

Bottom line…I think we overvalue head coaching experience, and we undervalue coordinators who have recently been talking to 5* players and know a bunch more 5* players on their team who could be in the portal in the next 1-2 years.

It took Kirby a little while to learn the head coaching piece. He made some mistakes. He hired James Coley, but he was so good at recruiting, scheming a defense, and creating a competitive culture that it made up for his deficiency in coaching experience.

Head coaching experience is way overrated.

 

I'm with you that we ought to be open to best possibilities without needlessly limiting the search in reaction to previous bad hires. But of your six examples above, half don't follow your example of coordinators at elite programs with no prior head coaching experience. So rather than assert that coordinating at a top program is the path to success, I'd just keep it at look for potential success wherever it might be, understanding that that high level coordination AND previous head coaching experience BOTH have their upsides and downsides. Great head coaches at top programs can come from either.

 

Lincoln Riley
Kirby Smart
Dan Lanning
Ryan Day
Brent Venables

None of them had head coaching experience before they became top 5 to top 10 coaches. Steve Sarkisian and Kalen Deboer did have head coaching experience, but Sarkisian also was a coordinator at the best program in college football buttressing the observation that in the past decade elite coordinators from elite football programs proportionally dominate the best head coaching hires in college football.

 

Lincoln Riley was OC at East Carolina before being hired by OU. No offence to the Pirates, but they're not what I'd call an elite program. He was just an excellent, and dynamic young coordinator at a smaller program. And though not my initial point, does he get the USC job without his head coaching success at OU? So which category does that put him in--successful coordinator to a big program or experienced head coach to a big program? Both?

And as you've now said, Sarkisian and Deboer were both head coaches before their latest stops. Sark was a head coach at 2 different large programs before becoming an OC (UW and USC), and Deboer was HC at Fresno before UW and UW before Bama. I get that time spent at Bama coordinating could have given Sark something he was missing prior to Texas, but someone could just as easily argue his earlier head coaching failures also prepared him, in their own way, for his latest success, and that he wouldn't be doing what he's doing without those lessons learned the hard way.

And Ryan Day? He was OSU's offensive coordinator for like a year before he was named interim when Urban stepped down. He's absolutely kept the ball rolling, but I don't think he fits your argument about WHY elite coordinators are good choices, other than the fact he happened to BE a coordinator at his elite school when they needed to suddenly promote from within.

As I said, I'm with you. Try to find the best choice, regardless of their current position or our past mistakes. I just don't think insisting on an "elite coordinator" is any more of a sure bet than insisting on an experienced head coach. They both have their pros and cons.

 

All this talk about: "We need this type of coach, or that type of coach"... We just need a GOOD coach! Every time time we fire a coach, we try to make up for it by overcorrecting. Enough! Just. Hire. A. Damn. Good. Coach.

(I have no idea who we should hire, and everyone's guess is just as good as mine)

 

They are all taken! We are shopping at TJ Max