Top reasons to not fire Scott Stricklin just because the football team is not winning championships

[Escambia94]

It is hard to believe this post needs to be written, but with losses mounting if it good to have this information on hand for those heated debates over Thanksgiving dinner or Sunday morning Twitter debates.

Scott Stricklin is considered the #2 athletic director in the country. He is a CEO who oversees a $190M business (#8 in the nation) with Billy Napier as an SVP running an $85M business unit (#14 in the nation). Win or lose, Gator investors flow in up to $768M per year in donations (#4 in the nation).

The Internet likes to highlight Stricklin’s mishandling of abuse by Cam Newbauer, but there has been no formal charges on this issue and no complaints have arisen since Newbauer was fired.

All this talk of firing Stricklin, Napier, the special teams coach, or the janitor all needs to stop. This is stupid.

 

[Escambia94]

Athletic programs with largest donor base:

1. Oregon $969M ($500M Phil Knight)
2. Texas A&M $849M ($120M Centennial Campaign)
3. Texas $766M
4. Florida $763M ($22.5M Gary Condron, $12.6M Hugh Hathcock)
5. Georgia $716M

 

[DRU2012]

It is hard to believe this post needs to be written, but with losses mounting if it good to have this information on hand for those heated debates over Thanksgiving dinner or Sunday morning Twitter debates.

Scott Stricklin is considered the #2 athletic director in the country. He is a CEO who oversees a $190M business (#8 in the nation) with Billy Napier as an SVP running an $85M business unit (#14 in the nation). Win or lose, Gator investors flow in up to $768M per year in donations (#4 in the nation).

The Internet likes to highlight Stricklin’s mishandling of abuse by Cam Newbauer, but there has been no formal charges on this issue and no complaints have arisen since Newbauer was fired.

All this talk of firing Stricklin, Napier, the special teams coach, or the janitor all needs to stop. This is stupid.

Yes--and I wouldn't have thought this needed discussing outside the most troll-ridden sites EITHER...but I TOO have noticed the sudden surge in appearances of this specific sentiment in some previously comparatively reasonably-toned sites that up til now were devoid of such ignorance and idiocy.
However, for the moment at least, given the actual "built-in relative immunity" of Strickland's positional support, AND the (albeit temporary) nature of Billy's current unfireability (for the moment rendered purposefully financially forbidding) allows HIM to mostly ignore such caterwalling--and us right along WITH him...So let us for the moment indulge ourselves in our ability to (thankfully) IGNORE THESE FOOLS.

 

[Leakfan12]

I do agree, football is a major sport but it's one of 17 programs unless you count dancing and cheerleading teams as well. The Baseball were CWS runners-up. Unsure about the other programs, how are you doing?

 

[DRU2012]

Well, here's the danger:
Bad news now starting to break against us in terms of our once-building recruiting haul:
We lost TWO important 4-star defensive commits over the weekend...commit LB Mack flipped to Texas, and once-solid commit Edge rusher Waller flipped to AUBURN, was there fir a visit while WE were losing to LSU.
There are apparently several other wavering commits from the defensive side--and this was a class necessarily focused on improving our Defense, as unfortunately this last game has hammered home all the harder.
Not only can we NOT afford to lose any MORE on Defense (which to hear the panic in the voices of fear-mongering click-bait like that weird guy from Gatirs Online, is not just "possible" but "more and more likely), but it probably DOES mean that we WILL need to both at the very least both shore UP our ties to the rest of the current collection of recruits AND redouble efforts to pick up a couple more 4- and 5-stars, now more than EVER.
In addition, it becomes all the more inescapable that we make real headway in adding some experienced upgrades from the transfer portal this time.
Only the prospect of holding onto what was projected as a historic haul in recruiting, then proceeding to even IMPROVE on it may now have slipped away, and perhaps the BEST we can do from HERE is to do enough "plugging and mending" to keep ourselves in nearly as much promise and stature overall.
Our one clear and bright, shining "ray of HOPE" is now threatened--so protecting, even IMPROVING it somehow from here becomes a new and necessary challenge: One requiring us to redouble our efforts in this regard!
Fortunately, if there is one area in which our Coach and staff have shown themselves relentlessly adept at mastering, repeatedly thriving and converting successfully at it is this.
OUR future is tied to THEIR future, and that future is tied to them now successfully redoubling their efforts--and THOSE "efforts" to now yield RESULTS..."results" in the form of 2 or 3 more additional surprises!

 

[Escambia94]

Going back in time to this post with an updated perspective. Here are the problems and potential solutions to fix Florida Gator football:

• Problem 1: The Gator football program business model is outdated and entirely dependent on success experienced under Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer. As mentioned above, Florida football as an institution became arrogant and complacent. The Florida football model under Spurrier and Meyer worked under the Bowl Coalition, Bowl Alliance and Bowl Championship Series era from 1995-2014, but not the College Football Playoff era that started in 2015.
• --Solution 1: UF should hire an external agency to evaluate its business model for football and overall athletics. Consider adding an independent non-profit organization just for football operations with its own general manager who reports to the university president co-equal to the athletic director, or add a board of interested parties (UF alumni with connections to the NFL) to add gravitas to the GM position that is subordinate to the athletic director. One of those two directions is probably the right way to make the Gator football program relevant as a pipeline to the NFL. If the solution is to fire Scott Stricklin, then it needs to be done in conjunction with the hiring of a football general manager and a new athletic director who can lead or co-lead all varsity athletics with football being operated as differently as the NCAA rules allow.
• Problem 2: The University of Florida lacks a modern vision for modern "semiprofessional athletics". Jeremy Foley will go down as one of the greatest athletic directors in history. His vision for the football program and all 19 varsity athletics was cutting edge for most of his tenure from 1992 to 2016. However, he still wields power within the University Athletic Association (UAA) today as AD Emeritus. I have seen reports that current AD Scott Stricklin is often treated like the figurehead or a lesser influential vote compared to Foley and some of the more influential members of the UAA. The members are listed near the bottom of this page: Overview & History. Since nobody of note has been allowed to report from the inside what the board of directors does in UAA meetings, we can only speculate how bad things are by looking at the results or by extrapolating from sparse information. It is safe to conclude that at least in terms of football and likely with other sports affected by NIL that UAA is outdated in its thinking and is no longer the innovator of college sports as a revenue driver. In terms of revenue, Florida has fallen from #3 in the nation during the Meyer era down to about #15 in the Mullen and Napier eras.
• --Solution 2: With revenue sharing becoming a reality in 2025, UAA needs to revamp itself now to take advantage of NIL deals and revenue sharing across all sports, and it should probably coexist with another non-profit just for football.
• Problem 3: The Everything School has become the Everything-but-football School. The University of Florida is among the top 5 in terms of donations from athletic boosters at around $760M of endowment but is not listed in the top 20 for NIL collectives. Granted, the metrics for "top NIL collectives" are highly speculative, but we can safely conclude when watching athletes flip to schools ranked with higher NIL collectives that NIL must be a factor. There is a report stating that Florida leads in one aspect of NIL--amount of NIL deals. For all we know, that could be 5,000 NIL deals each worth a $20 gift certificate at the nearest Flanigan's. That might be 4 hours away. UF president Kent Fuchs and Ben Sasse successfully led Florida to an era where UF is considered one of the top public universities in the USA and a top "public ivy school". All that is great, but looking at the publicly accessible annual financial reports, the UAA brings in twice as much funding as the UFRF (University of Florida Research Foundation). The University of Florida Foundation (UFF) is the top revenue stream other than UAA, with UAA being the top revenue stream other than UFF. Gary Condron and Hugh Hathcock are the two big name donors that most of us talk about on social media, because we do not have alumni who are CEOs of national brands like Phil Knight at Oregon (Nike, Inc) or Doug McMillon at Arkansas (Walmart, Inc). To make matters worse, out of the 413,000 alumni (14th largest) or 6 million fans (6th largest), it is hard to convince enough of us to donate more than $120 a year. Nobody knows the NIL donation rates amongst schools, but we can safely assume that is it not 100% and it is not 0%. It will take a change in the product on the field to convince more fans to donate to NIL. At some point the wealthy donors will experience donor fatigue if they have not already.
• --Solution 3: The Gator Boosters and the actual UF staff need to figure out a way to navigate today's era of football as being integral to the national identity of the University of Florida and not treat it as a nice windfall of cash that will always be there even with losing seasons.

Summary:

• Do not fire Billy Napier without a plan to hire a general manager for football and possibly a new athletic director.
• Do not let Scott Stricklin hire the next football coach without first hiring a new general manager for football operations.
• Do not fire Scott Stricklin without creating an independent football non-profit organization.
• Restructure the booster and NIL donation programs across all academic and athletic endeavors at Florida.