We are on the right track...For whatever it's worth, it appears that we may "land-on-our-feet" recruitingwise for 2025 after all. By all accounts the Portal may similarly help us make 2025 "the year the GATORS were COOL again" after all...
But there is al larger issue, SET of issues, still sitting out there:
To get "back" to matching a certain "standard of excellence" that Billy Napier was supposed to be bringing with him when we raised him from a "budding unknown" who'd only JUST begun to raise his national profile (that of himself, his players at a relatively obscure "outlying Louisiana school", and his own ability to find and develop them), we were counting on the young Coach to somehow work that magic on a program that had wandered far astray from the exciting path of talent and innovation that had marked our best days, by then seemingly buried in subsequent years, a full GENERATION of missteps in well-meaning but nonetheless ill-timed hires that had only led us further astray.
In retrospect, this hire HAD to work if we were to avoid ANOTHER generation of life in the CFB Wasteland...and early on it sure LOOKED as if it certainly had NOT.
I don't know that we had any real grasp of how bad things really were, how FAR BACK to that "Main Road", how much hard work and CHANGE this program would have to go through in order to be what we expected ourselves to BE--or how huge the changes in the rules and culture of modern college football were going to pose, CONTINUE to pose, in terms of achieving those goals.
Maybe WE THOUGHT that it would simply be a matter of getting in a guy who took RECRUITING a little more seriously than Dan Mullen obviously DIDN'T. Um, wrong.
It was, and IS, a whole lot more complicated than that...It is, and continues to BE, a long, hard and twisted road, with both rules and fundamental LANDSCAPE changing around us from year to year. NO ONE was going to simply come in and be the "perfect fit", know JUST what to do before these things even happened.
BUT, it is beginning to LOOK like maybe we got as close to "the right man for the job", THIS job, as we could have hoped for, given the times and circumstances.
It might have been somewhat of a fluke, if it turns out indeed to be the case; if so, so be it.
That IS how these things go, if and when they do.
I don't know that we aren't still only halfway THROUGH an even LONGER "era in purgatory". All of CFB may still just be in the early stages of its OWN "Toral Rebuild" that it may or may NOT EVER fully recover from--not in any recognizable form that old-school fans and alumni long for or will ultimately recognize.
We can only hope--and I continue to believe--that not only is that the aim of these changes, but that we are now within reasonable striking distance of reestablishing the sport's strong and exciting identity once more.
But there remain enormous pitfalls, the largest having to do with the whole idea of what is currently lumped together under the general rubric, "Pay For Play".
Personally, I would much prefer they "re-identify" this as "revenue-sharing"...At least TRY and distance Learning Institutions from becoming "The NFL Developmental League"...And THAT is as far into "politics" and/or "philosophical semantics" as I ever hope to GO here!
Let us get back to PLAYING FOOTBALL:
CHANGE that GODAWFUL overtime setup to START with, for example! Simply "APPLY LOGIC" in dealing with that and a host of other topics, large and small: LET FOOTBALL PEOPLE, former Coaches, players and longtime COLLEGE FOOTBALL folks get together to work on these issues--I ASSURE y'all they will come up with better, more satisfactorily workable solutions than the ones we've been getting foisted upon us of late.
S Hylton Stubbs #Miami