For all you naysayers, who berated our coaching staff most of the year:

Self importance? Defensive? WTH man?

Wow, talk about weird posts. Never mind tho, not worth the trouble. .

 

Cool man, just tired of all the Kiffin bashing here. Ready to move on.

I agree, Kiffin did not coach a great game and Dart was disappointing for ole Miss.
Go Gators!

 

Respectfully disagree. He was listening to Napier who was effusive in his praise of the team coming into the year.

 

Wow, you're on a roll tonight.

His post was not false or revisionist. Almost nobody was expecting to make the playoffs, but there were plenty here of your so called "homers" that thought we would beat Miami and even A&M to open the season and we would finally get a winning season in year 3. The early blowout losses that were referenced shocked most everyone ( maybe not you I guess).
Its the LSU and Ole Miss teams that most thought we had no chance beating, that we did beat and renewed the hope in Napier.

 

Of course the coach is going to sell optimism. What else would he say. I don't believe there was anything near a consensus about a "breakout year" for the Gators. Most assessing the team's prospects saw an unusually difficult schedule & a chance at a bowl game; not much more.

 

To be fair, With a raise of hands , how many here, Including yourself thought Miami and A&M would be top 5-15 ranked team near seasons end? I guarantee there were far more people who thought we would beat miami and A&M than thought we would beat Ole miss and LSU. That's partially why people are elated. Because one of the marks of a good team is they play better ad the season goes on, and we played our best vs the toughest stretch of the schedule.

 

Miami had a great offense. They still lost two games and the refs handed them two wins that should have been losses. I just don't see claiming Miami and aTm were good teams as an excuse to get blown out at home. Do we believe we would fair as bad today if we played them given our recent play? We had an experienced qb and Napier heaped tons of praise on both the offensive line amd defense overall. Again, I'm on board for next year and I give credit for the recent change but he also gets the blame for the start of the season.

 

Broooooo! That was me literally extending you an olive branch trying to make a fun, spirited joke since somehow our exchanges always end in a back and forth. But somehow you still turn it into something it's not. I'm not "conflating" anything. You told the poster that "he should not have to believe in anything that's not actually there" and Santa came to mind. I even threw in the extra "my whole childhood would be a lie" just so you would get that it was a joke. But damn....... nevermind this is futile.

 

Not sure what your point is.
I'll raise my hand to say I cautiously thought we would best the canes and the Aggies with their first year coach. At the beginning of the season there was no reason to think either would be significantly better than UF and at seasons end neither were. The rest of your post just reiterates what I said.

 

My post was about thebposter saying many of us thought we would beat those two teams. Well that's bc many of us didn't think they would have been as competitive as they were. Not saying thatsvan excuse of why we lost, I was explaining why many of us thought we would win.

 

Again, agree to disagree on this one. Just like his comment last year when he said something to the effect of "I don't think people know what we know about our defense" and then proceeded to field an even worse defense than the year before. There is positivity and then there is making statements that set expectations. Spurrier was confident but blunt about team strengths and weaknesses. Napier wasn't just being positive but lamenting his best team yet. Over and over.

 

I just don't see it that way. My take as a staunch supporter of Napier was that with the exception of Georgia and Texas, Florida should compete and expect to win against anyone on the schedule IF we were improved. Miami was in the same year of a rebuild and we bust on Mario as a bad coach. They were on the road and we had a statement to make in front of recruits. Mario for the record proved to be what we said he was against the rest of the competition and underperformed with a stacked roster and an easy schedule.

aTm, new coach, backup qb and at the Swamp. Tennessee toss-up. Georgia loss but Beck regressed and they were weaker than normal on both lines. LSU at home. Ole miss at home. Fsu I never feared ....at all with DJU and all of that lost production.

I didn't see the schedule as "easy" but I didn't see the gauntlet many others did IF we had in fact improved. That's all.

The only difference in Miami, aTm and Florida at that time was that they got better and we got worse. Fast forward to today and I'd be hard pressed to believe we get blown out. Maybe we lose but that wasn't the issue. How we lost was as many have said

 

Can 2 things both be true...
1) That our team and staff was woefully unprepared for the first part of the season, which is the sign of a bad coach.
2) We improved markedly throughout the year, and ended up being a pretty good team. Which is the sign of a good coach.

I know, I know...How can he be a bad coach and a good coach at the same time in this binary world of good/ evil?
Life is such a mystery... or maybe our understanding of people/ politics/ coaches could be a bit more nuanced.

 

Miami should have lost five games this year but for kindly officiating.

 

If you believe the reports, it was the players scheme which led to the improvement on D, lol.

 

And I can't stand it when folks use their ranking at the time. Miami missed the CFP, which seemed like a virtual lock for them and they should been there, but they failed hard down the stretch. TAMU didn't even finish in the Top 25. We could have absolutely hung with or beaten TAMU with the amount of talent we have, especially at the Swamp. Same is true for Miami, although Ward is tough to contain and their offense was legit. No reason to get blown out at home by a non-CFP team though.

 

Fair enough. Olive branch accepted. Merry Christmas.

 

But football doesn't work that way, does it? Coaches aren't "bad coaches" and become "good coaches" within a span of a few weeks. Even as late as the FSU game, there were multiple face palm moments with his decision making in-game. That's the part that worries me the most about CBN and again, it cannot be stated enough... Ron Zook was at one time a pretty damn good DC for Spurrier. But as HBC, Zook hired a DC. While Mullen used the co-offensive coordinator approach, he more than proved how well an offense can run under his stewardship. The fact that CBN refuses to hire an OC should be above all else, an indication of his unwillingness to adapt and grow.