The Fall Of Florida Football

Growing up in Gainesville in the mid-2000s, Florida Gator Football used to mean something to me. It meant domination, success, and competing for tittles every year. Since 2011, it has meant mediocrity with glimmering moments of hope sprinkled in between. A generation of Gators and fans and the current recruiting class were barely sentient the last time the Gators won a national championship. They would have to look up YouTube videos to see the last time the Gators were a force to be reckoned with in College Football. This city and fanbase deserve better than what we have grown accustomed to these last 12 years. There has been one common theme in the mediocrity. Four head coaches since 2011, but one man remains Jeremy Foley. He may have been retired for half a decade, but his dirty fingerprints remain over this program in his emeritus role. Under Foley’s reign, UF has been behind the curve in every athletic building. We were the last in the SEC to have an indoor practice facility, something that Jim McElwain had to force Foley to accept. We were the last to have a standalone facility that was not small and not shoved into the rear of the stadium. We took a while to get our NIL up to speed. Foley got complacent after the second national title and failed to see that in college football, you need to constantly evolve to remain the best. His coaching selection has been shoddy since Urban Meyer. His first hire post-Urban was a person with zero head coaching experience in Will Muschamp. His next hire was Jim McElwain, who started off with promise but quickly faded and was out in two and a half years. Then, Foley was relegated to an emeritus position and Scott Stricklin took the reigns. Stricklin fired McElwain before bringing his old pal from Mississippi State, Dan Mullen, with him to Gainesville. There were many glimmers of hope in Mullen’s reign but his failure to have accountability and fire Todd Grantham brought him to his demise. Now we have Billy Napier, and he also has an accountability problem despite making it the essence of his pitch. He refuses to delegate his play calling despite its mediocrity and fire coaches like “gamechanger” Chris Couch. He had a Top 5 NFL pick at QB last year but failed to maximize his talent resulting in a 6–7 season. Billy is a great recruiter unlike Mullen and McElwain but not a great coach like Mullen. His situational awareness is horrendous. There have been many plays throughout the season where there have been either too few players on the field or too many. His offense is vanilla. It lacks creativity. There is not a good combination of run and vertical pass plays. It feels like he has ten running plays he uses and if those are ineffective, the offense is poor. His teams are not physically enough or mentally strong to compete in the SEC. Napier, McElwain, and Mullen all had different arcs at Gainesville. Napier was a great recruiter but a bad coach. McElwain was neither. Mullen was a great coach but a lazy recruiter. There is a theme through all three, a lack of accountability of themselves and their staff. A part of that is attributable to the fact that both Stricklin and Foley have saddled them with buyouts and contracts worth tens of millions of dollars so there is a motivation to be complacent. And it is a combination of complacency and lack of accountability, that has thwarted the once dominant Florida Gator Football into a purgatory of mediocrity that left a generation of fans failing to understand what they used to be.