The Root Cause of Florida’s Decline

I think a big part of our problem has to do with the teams we’re playing being so much better than teams we’ve played in the past.

The level of coaching has gone up, plus they have much better players.

 

Could we at least go to Neiman Marcus? Or even Dillard's?

 

In the old days recruiting was regional so every school would go through peaks and valleys depending on what their local talent was doing. Now days recruiting is pretty close to national and the top recruiting schools have a much more consistent pipeline of talent.

 

The true root of decline at Florida is the UAA.

 

The main cause of UF's problems is its own arrogance. And I say that as an Alumnus. I would say, certainly from the 60's on, UF has had this idea that because they were UF, everyone would line up at the door wishing to get in. Whether it's the school itself or the UAA, we're Florida, was the over-riding theme. UF managed to get Spurrier in the early 90's and snagged Meyer a few years later, but the success those coaches had added to the arrogance of the UAA. Well those days are long gone. That arrogance, that allowed UF to fall way behind all the other SEC schools in practice facilities, administrative requirements, and the philosophy behind hiring football coaches, has caught up with them. UF's in a bad spot right now. I hope someone down there in Gainesville will finally realize they must COMPETE with every other school out there because being UF doesn't mean squat to most people.

 

Yep. UF has an ego problem.

 

To imply I said that is a massive overstatement.

 

Would I have said it had I known what it meant, no I wouldn't have. But I don't feel guilty about it. I stopped when I understood.

 

What if that means becoming a football team first and a university second? Honest question that UF fans and alums are going to have to deal with eventually.

 

17 years with Kirby and still not one other team made him their head football coach. And still you want us to take that nobody? You want us to hire this nothing coach? NOPE, just stop... we've done that, and it has never panned out.

We have one type of coach to get, and that is the ALFA-DOG winner that knows how to win games in the SEC... A championship winning coach would be nice, but I'll settle for a winner in the SEC.

No more projects on up-and-comers or career position coaches that need on-the-job-training. That should be a sure fire way to get and AD fired.

Like some have mentioned here before, we need the UAA to be involved in this next coaching hire, and that's the way it used to be... until we got the one AD that thought he had all the answers in football and failed miserably to find that next SOS. Some even give him credit for what Bernie Machin made happen. Nope... NO more PROJECT, REJECTS..

 

Wilson throwing the shoe started it and we need another idiot to throw two shoes to end it.

That is my prediction and it will ultimately get BN fired on the tarmack.

 

Then you would have passed on Brent Venables, Dan Lanning, Ryan Day, Lincoln Riley (at OU), Bob Stoops, Steve Sarkisian and evaluated them as chaff because they were not successful head coaches when they were hired.

When you combine a coordinator who has a national championship pedigree as a coordinator to the recruiting ties that come with coaching at national championship level programs…you have an opportunity to recruit at an elite level and coach at an elite level. That is what we want: recruit at an elite level and coach at an elite level.

When you add to that personal relationships that have been forged with 33% of the players on a top 2 roster that will be in the portal within the next year…you have a unique opportunity to recruit the portal an elite level as well with players that already know your scheme.

 

We tried to find those types of coaches several times in the recent past, and we failed... Now we're in a new era of college football, and we have to get this coaching hire right.

 

I think he was making a joke.

 

You start off ok but the real reason is because we don’t have a generations old network of bag men flooding cash into every pee wee league in the southeast. The other schools have been doing that forever but generally had clown coaches who couldn’t capitalize on it. We had great coaches who could neutralize it on the field. Now the other schools have great coaches to go along with their dirty money.

 

This post is a good way to filter out people... Ignore.

 

I see multiple issues that could be the root causes of Florida's decline:

• Outdated group-think within the football program. As mentioned above, Florida football as an institution became arrogant and complacent. The Florida football model under Spurrier and Meyer worked under the Bowl Coalition, Bowl Alliance and Bowl Championship Series era from 1995-2014, but not the College Football Playoff era that started in 2015. UF should hire an external agency to evaluate its business model for football and overall athletics. Consider adding an independent non-profit organization just for football operations with its own general manager who reports to the university president co-equal to the athletic director, or add a board of interested parties (UF alumni with connections to the NFL) to add gravitas to the GM position that is subordinate to the athletic director. One of those two directions is probably the right way to make the Gator football program relevant as a pipeline to the NFL. If the solution is to fire Scott Stricklin, then it needs to be done in conjunction with the hiring of a football general manager and a new athletic director who can lead or co-lead all varsity athletics with football being operated as differently as the NCAA rules allow.
  
• Stagnant vision for modern "semiprofessional athletics". Jeremy Foley will go down as one of the greatest athletic directors in history. His vision for the football program and all 19 varsity athletics was cutting edge for most of his tenure from 1992 to 2016. However, he still wields power within the University Athletic Association (UAA) today as AD Emeritus. I have seen reports that current AD Scott Stricklin is often treated like the figurehead or a lesser influential vote compared to Foley and some of the more influential members of the UAA. The members are listed near the bottom of this page: Overview & History. Since nobody of note has been allowed to report from the inside what the board of directors does in UAA meetings, we can only speculate how bad things are by looking at the results or by extrapolating from sparse information. It is safe to conclude that at least in terms of football and likely with other sports affected by NIL that UAA is outdated in its thinking and is no longer the innovator of college sports as a revenue driver. In terms of revenue, Florida has fallen from #3 in the nation during the Meyer era down to about #15 in the Mullen and Napier eras. With revenue sharing becoming a reality in 2025, UAA needs to revamp itself now to take advantage of NIL deals and revenue sharing across all sports, and it should probably coexist with another non-profit just for football.
  
• Inability to balance funding priorities as an academic and athletic power. The University of Florida is among the top 5 in terms of donations from athletic boosters at around $760M of endowment but is not listed in the top 20 for NIL collectives. Granted, the metrics for "top NIL collectives" are highly speculative, but we can safely conclude when watching athletes flip to schools ranked with higher NIL collectives that NIL must be a factor. There is a report stating that Florida leads in one aspect of NIL--amount of NIL deals. For all we know, that could be 5,000 NIL deals each worth a $20 gift certificate at the nearest Flanigan's. That might be 4 hours away. UF president Kent Fuchs and Ben Sasse successfully led Florida to an era where UF is considered one of the top public universities in the USA and a top "public ivy school". All that is great, but looking at the publicly accessible annual financial reports, the UAA brings in twice as much funding as the UFRF (University of Florida Research Foundation). The University of Florida Foundation (UFF) is the top revenue stream other than UAA, with UAA being the top revenue stream other than UFF. Gary Condron and Hugh Hathcock are the two big name donors that most of us talk about on social media, because we do not have alumni who are CEOs of national brands like Phil Knight at Oregon (Nike, Inc) or Doug McMillon at Arkansas (Walmart, Inc). To make matters worse, out of the 413,000 alumni (14th largest) or 6 million fans (6th largest), it is hard to convince enough of us to donate more than $120 a year. Nobody knows the NIL donation rates amongst schools, but we can safely assume that is it not 100% and it is not 0%. It will take a change in the product on the field to convince more fans to donate to NIL. At some point the wealthy donors will experience donor fatigue if they have not already. The Gator Boosters and the actual UF staff need to figure out a way to navigate today's era of football as being integral to the national identity of the University of Florida and not treat it as a nice windfall of cash that will always be there even with losing seasons.

 

There’s a lot more to what you're saying than most of us realize. There's a systemic issue that permeates UF and sabotages the football program from being elite. I don't know many of the people that maintain a strangle hold on Florida football, but it's there, nonetheless. There are people who are better qualified to speak to the problem, due to being closer to the inner workings of what is holding UF back. There's an elephant in the room and it needs to be addressed. I'm not implying that I know what it is exactly, but it's a common sense sort of thing--putting two and two together. There are people involved at the top who don't understand a lick about football who control outcomes. If UF wants to be elite, a radical, philosophical, change, needs to occur! There is a moralistic piety that infects governance. There is more of a desire to have names on building projects than building up the football program. If we want to seriously attract Lane Kiffen, everyone at the top needs to get on board with NIL and recruiting! Ole Miss and Tennessee have and they're leaving UF behind. It's time to wake up and smell the coffee!!!

 

We need a proven winner, and it's Lane Kiffen!

 

UF wouldn’t have fallen from the top unless a systemic change made football less of a priority. People are hesitant to embrace this realization because it might mean we can never return to that level.