**Buzz Buzz Buzz** - Scott Strickenbaum's finest hour?

lol. Gator fans (like most fans) tend to be all or nothing. They either go all in and drink the entire jug of koolaid or they are having nothing to do with it. The truth is somewhere in between. We look like we are improving, but we only beat two decent teams in year three. The jury is still out.

 

Gotta disagree here.
When we took the field against UCF their vaunted running attack was gonna bury us. Kentucky’s defense was gonna shut us down. Both were damn sure considered “decent” before we upset them. The fact that they basically imploded in the weeks following losing to us does not mean they were shitty teams when we beat them.

 

FSU is always a shitty team...before during and after and you dont even need to check their record.

 

Thx Skink!!

 

So when does @ETGator spill the beans about the O-line changes coming.

 

Look at what we did to vaunted powerhouses UCF and Kentucky!!

 

Mullen owned his year 4. How did that go?

 

Not that anyone asked, I'll interject anyway.

Marine ain't Okeechobee. Big difference in the type of criticism and cautious optomism in my opinion.

The LSU and Ole Miss wins were great for us. No one should deny that and credit is due to Napier and company for doing so. But this tired argument of the going 7 and 5 against the toughest schedule should also be considered objectively and how the season played out. There were clearly some massive issues with the team to start the season. Napier owns that as well especially given his outspoken praise of the team going into the season. And then....thud.... A competent effort to start the year would have resulted in a much better record. Our defense struggled against miss state. That is irrespective of a tough schedule and eventually got corrected.

In year 3 to come out like that against teams in similar situations no less was inexcusable. I'm ready to move on from it and hope we continue this unprecedented improvement in his tenure so far but there is a large continent who are cautiously optimistic with a pinch of doubt until we see how we start the season next year. I believe that's where marine is at although I may be mistaken. I know that's how I feel anyway. I think florida could matchup with anyone at the moment and hopefully.....we resemble the Gators after the bye week rather than the Gators after an offseason.

 

I remember page 136..

 

Not good at all. But if I had to pick between the two in terms of who I'd have more confidence in to have a good season, it would still be Dan Mullen by a mile and that was my point. Mullen proved he could win in double digits here, twice and by all accounts, he is the vastly superior in-game head coach. It's not even close.

No, I don't want to bring him back, but I wonder how he would have embraced the NIL changes and if he would not have simply delegated recruiting to other coaches as the solution. Who knows. But he ain't coming back and we should turn the page on Dan Mullen. The only point I was making was, Mullen absolutely proved he could hang in the SEC as a head coach.. at least for three seasons he did. Gators finished ranked 7th, 6th and 13th in the AP respectively his first 3 seasons.

Kyle Trask would have been over 300 yards per game in 2019 if he had been playing over Franks the entire year. What Mullen did with Trask in 2020 is insane. 357 passing yards per game. A 43:8 TD:INT ratio. For a kid who was a 2-star recruit out of high school. When Napier pulls off something like that, I'll be the first person here to lavish praise upon he and his process. I am not disrespecting Napier for the sake of disrespecting him.

 

I'm with Antny1: My amphibious brother-in-arms is a curmudgeon, at times, is a "prove it", at times but also is reasonable to concede when differing opinions are well presented. He also makes me say "That's a good point." But he is a Marine so shorter words help him a lot. (JK JK - I gotta get my Marine shots when I can!) He's different from the guy-named-after-a lake by a country mile.

 

Again, many here aren't "lavishing praise" on Napier, some are but objective fans accept there was a difference in the competitiveness of the team and significant improvement in the defense. I'm still a critic of his game management but I take the good with the bad and hope Napier felt enough pressure this year to not repeat the same mistakes whatever they were.

As far as Mullen, I'll take him everyday of the week as a gameday coach but that guy created his own mess and wasn't going to recover from it.

 

Not even close. Okeechobee is a troll. Period.
Marine is more of a shit-stirrer. But all Gator. Kind of like Wing

 

I'm an incurable optimist. I see Napier as learning and growing as a Big-Time-College-Football coach. I am glad our admin has not been as quick-on-the-trigger as many people on this site and social media would have wanted them. The funny thing about people: They will give you cause to believe them and cause to doubt them in ample measure.

 

I've heard this site has a handy feature known as "ignore," where you can ignore a specific poster's posts if you find them objectionable or terrifying for some reason. Perhaps that might be a better route than attempting to control other's opinions and insulting them every time they post something you disagree with. Just a thought...

 

My wife would likely tell you I'm a pessimist, as in my personal life I've overly risk averse. I generally expect the worst in people. I would consider myself more a realist than pessimist or optimist. Generally not going to be a guinea pig, especially on things with financial ramifications. I don't panic or dwell on the negatives, but I am aware of them and make decisions accordingly.

For college sports, I would consider myself to just be accepting. These are things I have little control over, and the control I could have I have little interest in pursuing. I watch this stuff for entertainment. Being overly concerned about every minute detail, every lost recruiting battle, every loss on the field, every bad play call, etc, etc, seems like wasted energy to me and makes my entertainment less enjoyable. I follow all of those things closely, but I prefer to celebrate the wins in those same areas rather than dwell on the losses. In order for me to enjoy it, I need to be accepting of the fact that I have no real control over any of it. I celebrate our wins, I try to find a positive spin if there's one to be found. I don't mourn the losses. I don't constantly call for change. I just try to look forward to the next win, wherever it may come from. Luckily our athletic department is pretty solid overall, and our next win is right around the corner at any given time. I'm also lucky in the fact that I am able to find something positive in places where so many others can only find the negative. Again, this is my entertainment, if I make it into this terrible negative thing all the time it just makes me miserable. I don't want to do something that makes me miserable for fun. If watching my gators constantly kept me in a negative headspace, I would find some other way to occupy my time.

 

Napier built a much better roster over four years and Mullen destroyed a roster in four years

 

It is every Gator football fan's entertainment. Being a passionate fan does not equate to having a "negative headspace." That's ridiculous and you're simply belittling fans whom, if they didn't exist, you wouldn't give a rat's ass about Florida football, because the money those passionate fans funnel into the program would vanish and the program would become obsolete. The passion of our fanbase is what drives our success. This is true pretty much everywhere (assuming we are talking about programs that have won NC's before).

You can be a very happy person and lead a perfectly happy life and still be unimpressed by the last three seasons of UF football, lol. You're correct, if it consumes a person's entire life, it would be wise for that person to back away. But it's silly to take a snapshot of what people post on this forum (a football message board) as the totality of their life and it's just your way of leveling an insult, because you can't deal with somebody who posts fact.

But make no mistake about it that if you didn't have fans that were passionate and had expectations, we would be Vanderbilt-lite. Alabama didn't hire Nick Saban by being ho-hum and taking whatever they could get. Hell, Steve Spurrier used to mock opponents with regularity. Speaking of Spurrier, I highly doubt he is okay with the pedestrian offense and results of the past 3 years. Does that mean he's an unhappy person?

It is not as if I am posting pejoratives about the team or the coach. I'm simply posting stats and facts. There is the ignore button. Use it if you can't handle facts.

 

There's 0 disagreement from me about the beginning of the season. Seeing how CBN had this team after the BYE week is where they should have been game #1. Also 10000% agree that the changes he and the team made in that BYE were incredible and they deserve all the credit and love for the culture shift.

Also... I like probably everyone else that was a CBN supporter before the season, are in the camp he HAS to keep this up to keep this fanbase at bay. Also, to keep the hotstreak going in recruiting and finally crack the code away from these other teams that have a stranglehold on recruiting. I still also believe he seriously needs to target an OC that will maximize Lagway's skill set and leave that OC alone.

 

I believe Skink is just stating facts.. Calling out a troll is not an insult, it's a fact. Also, when the troll calls our head coach a charlatan, I would classify that as a pejorative. When a troll tries to impersonate a gator fan, I would classify the troll as a charlatan.