Will we actually hire an OC?

For the most part, the Florida football program has a people problem, it desperately needs a better staff & players, pronto, imho.

 

Which hire in CFB hasn't been a gamble? Dabo had no HC experience. Smart had no HC experience. Day had no HC experience. Urban was from a "lower" school. Lincoln Riley had no HC experience when he took over OU. Bob Stoops had no HC experience before that.

Almost every single hire that any school makes is going to be a coordinator or an HC from a "lower" program. Who are all these "sure thing" coaches out there that you guys are dreaming about?

 

2013: Fire Muschamp, hire James Franklin. A much safer gamble than sticking with Muschamp and hiring Jim McElwain the following the season. Franklin making multiple bowl games at Vanderbilt was a miracle. He was proven to be ready for the big leagues.

2021: Hugh Freeze. Established winner at Ole Miss. Killed it at Liberty. Can’t hire him though, we don’t believe in forgiveness at UF. He’s about to make us look like complete fools for passing him by.

I’m not even mad about the Mullen hire. That was a solid backup plan when Chip Kelly fell through and had some solid years until his last 1 1/2 seasons. On paper Muschamp made sense as a gamble worth taking. The problem was making dumb bets after him.

All hires are gambles but some bets are safer than others. Napier and McElwain had decent success at the lower levels at one school. Spurrier and Meyer proved they could cut it at multiple programs before coming to Florida. Spurrier at Duke and the USFL. Meyer at Bowling Green and Utah. Mac and Napier never worked out their kinks at another stop.

 

James Franklin has won his division once since getting to PSU and has a pretty bad record against ranked teams. he's also a giant douche.

Hugh Freeze I'll give you, but thinking Florida was gonna hire a sleezeball like that shortly after his scandal is simply unrealistic. Winning football games clearly isn't the sole focus of the university

 

James Franklin is at Penn St going against national recruiting brands Ohio St and Michigan. He’s fielding top 10 teams. He would have done very well here.

Winning football games isn’t the sole focus of the athletic department which has been evident the last 13 years. Passing up Freeze could be an exclamation point at the end of that sentence.

 

Agree, especially OL. But if Boone and James come back healthy that will be huge on the games that should be won. Bigger issue is STAYING healthy. I believe with James on the field Arkansas and even possibly Mizzou is a win.

 

Exactly. He only has 2 programs to contend with, and he's not done the best job of actually beating them. There's no guarantee at all that he'd do BETTER going against Bama, UGA, LSU, FSU, Auburn, etc as well as still fighting OSU and Michigan for recruits.

 

You think the Penn St job is on par with the UF job in terms of location and resources? Sorry, I can’t go there and that is just excuse making for the poor results we’ve had over the years.

 

Is that what I said?

 

You maybe right about James being the difference. That is why you have to have more than 1 linebacker that can play.....injuries always happen. That has been a real deficiency in Napier's recruiting.

 

Yet it really doesn’t tell us anything that we haven’t seen the last 2 years does it?.

 

Begrudgingly….agree.

 

Linebacker has been very thin, but we have an extremely promising class coming in so we should not have to worry about that for the next three years.

 

We'll probably still have to worry next year....true freshmen rarely make much impact immediately.

 

But we will have good freshmen working their way in. Something we didn’t have last year. We did have a freshman that took a shirt though, we got a portal that should give us something too. Lb looks bright in 25

 

McElwain and Mullen were hired for very simple reasons: bring back offense to a program that had been ranked in the bottom 50 for the most part since 2009/2010. Napier was hired for a different reason: rebuild the program whose foundation had been neglected since 2009/2010.

I looked back as far as I could on this forum and did not notice anyone predicting better hiring decisions than Foley or Stricklin. They made the best decision from the available talent and available information at the time.

Look at the November 2017 coaching search that led to Mullen. The most popular thread on this forum was about Chip Kelly, a coach who went 34-34 from 2018-2023 with three losing seasons in a row. Scott Frost went 16-31 from 2018-2022. In November 2014 we the fans wanted Charlie Strong (37-15, but went 16-21 at Texas), Steve Spurrier (yeah, right), Dan Mullen, Rich Rodriguez (winning record but had NCAA violations and was accused of sexual harassment in this timeframe), Marc Trestman (13-19 at Chicago), and Mark Hudspeth (ran the program into the ground with NCAA violations and lacked vision for the rebranding from Louisiana-Lafayette to Louisiana…which led to Billy Napier).

Napier was not hired for his offensive prowess. He was hired for the reasons that Stricklin said: a methodical program builder with a vision for the future.

 

James Franklin would have fared worse here than McElwain. He's a complete fraud. If you actually think he's a good coach for a bigtime program, you aren't paying attention.

 

Yeh totally. He’s been a giant disaster at Penn St. I mean he’s sitting in the oasis of college football talent going against two cream puffs in his division. I’m surprised he’s still in coaching at all. Your logic is air tight.

 

Pedo State was competitive before Franklin, and they will be competitive after Franklin. Let's not act like recruiting for PSU is similar to Vandy.

He's so good that he actively petitioned the B1G to leave OSU and Michigan off of their schedule going forward. Smart on his part, actually. What's his record against top-25 teams? Go look it up.

He can't beat the teams he's supposed to beat, he turns a blind eye to sexual assault, err, "hazing".....and he proves that he's a tool whenever he opens his mouth. McElwain or any other coach could post the same record at PSU. Franklin isn't the reason for their "success" in the post-Paterno era, and literally everyone knows it, even PSU fans.

 

Your argument is Jim McElwain, the coach that didn’t have a strength and conditioning program at Florida, is better than James Franklin. And no, Penn St was about to fall off a cliff until he was hired. He’s been posting double digit winning seasons there consistently. His record against ranked teams is overwhelmingly skewed because it’s the same two juggernauts in his division every year.

You can say you’re glad we didn’t hire him for any number of reasons you want to speculate about, but acting like McElwain was the better choice is just intellectually dishonest.