Lose, Rinse and Repeat: Entitled Gator Football Program Set to Stuck on Suck

My entire batch of college buddies are wholeheartedly, unabashedly and unashamedly delirious, and not solely because of all the partying we engaged in during our undergrad years and beyond. 

No, my fellow fan base, without a single exception other than yours truly, is grossly disillusioned, because they still blindly believe the University of Florida is a coveted coaching job.

They comprise only a small part of the reason this is no longer true.

You’ll have to excuse them.  Those of us who went to school there, graduated from there, or have been in any way affiliated with the University of Florida blissfully harken back to the glory days of Steve Spurrier.  We remember his expansion and explosion that downright put the football program on the map.  While the school’s upward climb was in progress before the Ol’ Heisman-winning Ball Coach returned to town, it was Spurrier that cemented the school’s legacy.  Urban Meyer put the cherry on top.

Since then, the swamp water has gotten a little choppy with those who bleed orange and blue becoming a tad too entitled for their own good. 

Yes, gentlemen.  I’m talking about you.

Not me.  I see the football program for what it has become.  A school that boasts national titles, but one that has also unceremoniously and petulantly run its last four coaches out of town so grotesquely that they were never to be heard from again.

Quick, without looking it up, tell me where Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain and Dan Mullen are all coaching.  You’ll get bonus points if you can tell me how long it will be before the recently fired Billy Napier lands himself another head coaching job. 

All four of these coaches (Muschamp, McElwain, Mullen and Napier) were dismissed before their fourth season was complete.

The Napier firing officially marks four head coaches hired and fired since 2011 and I’m not even including the interim head coaches who replaced them.  If you include Billy Gonzales, who now takes over for Napier, that makes EIGHT head coaches since Urban Meyer feigned that heart attack not so long ago.

“I hear you but we’re still a place with resources and recruiting.”

This “Desperado, why don’t you come to your senses” style text came Saturday afternoon from Liar North, an exemplar of one of my disillusioned Gators brethren.  I could look up countless other pathetic messages from dear friends who are so blinded by their school loyalty that they fail to see the swamp for the trees.  I could rummage through old texts, but I’ve gone through fewer cell phones lately than Florida has coaches.

To be very clear to those of you who have made it this far and aren’t downright offended, the University of Florida is NOT THE ONLY SCHOOL with “resources and recruiting.”   What they ARE, however, is the only school to routinely embarrass coaches on their way out the door.  In fact, with the current and ever-changing state of high-profile college athletics, and football specifically, we’re no longer sure which programs have a leg up.

I take that back.  I can tell you specifically which programs have an advantage.  Those with any semblance of stability.  Our beloved University of Florida football program lacks stability so badly, it’s laughable.

I challenge you to find any major program that has run through four head (and four more interim) coaches in fifteen years simply because they felt they deserved better. 

It bears note, you hindsight warriors, that all four of these men were deemed perfectly capable of stepping into their predecessor’s shoes and righting the ship. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have been hired in the first place. 

Muschamp was the fiery defensive coordinator at Texas with ties to the SEC.  He went 11-2 in his second year in Gainesville, then won a combined ten games his next two years and was summarily showed the door.  He is currently a defensive analyst at his alma mater, the University of Georgia.

Jim McElwain was also a hot commodity with SEC ties.  He won conference coach of the year at Colorado State and was once welcomed to Florida with open arms.  He even went 10-4 in his first year at Florida, then won nine games the following season.  After starting the following season 3-4, he was booted from campus.  Somewhere within that time, a photo of him emerged posing naked with a shark on a boat.  I’m not making this up.  If that doesn’t signify a bad omen for a program, I’m not sure what does.  After leaving Florida, McElwain went on to coach at Central Michigan and has since retired.

Then came Dan Mullen, who coached under Urban Meyer on Florida’s national championship teams.  Bringing in a man with ties to the program would certainly turn things around.  Wrong.  After winning 21 games in his first two seasons, Florida won eight and then five games.  Mullen was also dismissed.  He now coaches at UNLV, sadly completing the trifecta of coaches since Meyer that have been unable to win a big game.

You can now add a fourth musketeer to that ever-growing list.  In 2021, Florida named Billy Napier their newest victim, er, head coach.  Napier had succeeded at Louisiana-Lafayette, was nabbed as one of the nation’s best recruiters, a hot new commodity who would come in and blah blah blah.  Despite nabbing the nation’s top prospect at quarterback, Napier did not win double digit games in any season.

Before his inevitable firing, this season’s worst kept secret in college football, an entire Gator Nation kept clicking their updates for any word on Napier.  It came on Sunday afternoon, less than 24 hours after a two-point win over Mississippi State.

Rest assured, Gator fans, things will get worse before they get better, for Florida keeps reapplying Band-Aids to open wounds instead of asking themselves why this keeps happening.

My buddies all think that University should be able to land any coach they want.  To be fair, Gainesville is a beautiful place to live.  Win there and they’ll erect a statue in your honor, fawning over you for all eternity.  The umpteen million dollars they’ll pay you won’t do you any good as you’ll never have to buy a drink anywhere in town, if you win.

If you don’t, you’ll never be allowed in the town again, a bitter break up War of the Roses-style.

Let’s continue with the delirium, shall we?  Every single friend has texted me the name Lane Kiffin, so much so I thought the letters were going to burn into my iPhone screen.  This assumes Kiffin would want to come to Florida in the first place.  And why wouldn’t he?  His inexplicable loss to Georgia on Saturday proved just how difficult it is to win big games at a program like Ole Miss.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, Kiffin decides to leave Ole Miss, where he’s making a cool $9 million a year, and he jumps to Florida, where he probably wouldn’t make much more. 

Then let’s say Kiffin doesn’t win ten games in year one, or even year two.

Florida’s fan base has proven to be as patient as a road rager in rush hour traffic, laying on the horn when he doesn’t get his way.  Florida is that frat boy who walks into a bar thinking he can score with any girl.  Sure, she’ll look his way, perhaps even be distracted at first by his ravishing, good looks, fantastic weather and state-of-the-art practice facilities.  But as soon as she delves closer, finds the warts and gets a whiff of his pomposity, I ask you, why in the hell would she want anything to do with him?  You know what else she’ll do?  She’ll tell all her friends what a jerk the guy was.

It is about time that the University of Florida, and its fan base, takes not only a dose of humility but a long hard look at itself.  There are plenty of programs out there with proud histories, dare I say even national championships and conference titles, that haven’t acted the fool the moment things don’t go their way.

Should Muschamp, McElwain, Mullen and eventually Napier been shown the door?  Probably.  Were they under immeasurable scrutiny the moment they walked onto campus?  You bet your ass.  Should they have been stripped of their duties so unceremoniously that it left a mark?  Probably damn not.  Watched water doesn’t boil.  Embarrassed coaches do.

I know you’re not supposed to badmouth a former employer at your next job interview, but I would pay top dollar to sit down with all four of those coaches, Muschamp, McElwain, Mullen and Napier, hook them up to a lie detector and have them talk openly about how shitty the program treated them.

Now that’s a bitch session I’d be down to listen to.  Don’t you think these coaches talk?  Theirs is a fraternity, a brotherhood.  Isn’t it highly possibly this is a gig coaches DON’T want?  Florida is not the only job with a rowdy fan base and lofty expectations.  If Florida can’t hire the man they want, which is a short list, they’ll be stuck in the same old cycle of suck with fans counting down the days until we lather, rinse and fire once again.

And to James Franklin, who was admittedly “in shock” that he was fired from Penn State after going a combined 1-12 against Ohio State and Michigan, and more notably fired after 12 years, not four, Lane Kiffin, Eliah Drinkwitz, or whichever poor sap becomes the next to temporarily man the throne at the University of Entitlement, I wish them the best. 

Enjoy the honeymoon.  It will be short lived.