This hire suggests Florida football may be headed in the right direction

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2024 Florida Gators Preseason Magazine Announcement

As many of you know, we’ve released a Gators preseason magazine the past two years. At first, we released a digital version, and because so many people asked for it, last year we offered a hard copy. We gave out a few copies to folks outside of the Florida bubble, and the feedback was universal: they all said “I wish I had one of these for my team.”

So that’s where we’re headed. Our goal is to have one of these magazines for every Power-5 team out there in 5 years. That is not a small undertaking. And to get there, we need your help.

We know that some of you listening own businesses that advertise. We also know that advertising with us might be considered a risk. But consider this: the revenue we’re getting from advertisers is going to be used to make sure that every Gator fan with a Facebook account knows that this magazine is available. The magazine’s timing is a release right before Father’s Day, making it a perfect gift for every kid to get his or her dad. It’s the type of content that sits in a doctor’s or dentist’s office for months, giving a return on your investment well beyond the initial launch. And we will remember people who advertised with us when it was a risk when we have 65 schools covered with a magazine. We’re determined to make this thing grow, and you can be an integral part of it.

Just imagine how cool it will be in 2029 when we’re launching our ACC line of magazines (or whatever that conference ends up being after FSU is finished nuking it) and you’ve been an key part of building that. And imagine Nick being interviewed on ESPN in a few years and us being able to give a shoutout to your business as being there from the start.

To get a copy of our pricing and media kit, email me at Will@readandreaction.com. And if you don’t own a business but still want to help with our vision, you can help by first buying the magazine when it comes out, but also by becoming a supporter over on Patreon at www.patreon.com/readandreaction. We’re going to be sharing exclusive looks at the magazine as we progress this spring for anyone supporting us at the $5 per month amount or more so it’s a great place if you want to see how the magazine is coming along and how it all comes together.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t take this time while I’m asking for help to also say “thank you”. Each and every one of you who has listened to our podcasts, read our articles, emailed support or supported us by joining Patreon or buying the magazine has given us faith that this is something we can build. We need your help, but this is a differentiated product that we think can transform the way college football previews are done. We’d be humbled if you’d join us on that journey.

This hire suggests Florida football may be headed in the right direction

Lost in all of the hubbub of the playoff games, Michigan’s national championship, early signing day and the news around the transfer portal is perhaps what I think is the most important news coming out of Gainesville: the Gators are getting a general manager.

Florida is expected to hire former Texas A&M associate AD for football Mark Robinson in a high-ranking position, sources tell @jacobrudner and me for @247sportshttps://t.co/dJORJ80Uo5 pic.twitter.com/nFG6bbT8ze

— Matt Zenitz (@mzenitz) January 5, 2024

Mark Robinson, Texas A&M’s Associate AD for football, is being brought in as part of a plan to establish an NFL-style front office at Florida. For anyone who has been upset with either Florida’s recruiting prowess recently or the Gator’s on-field results, this is a big deal.

The reason is pretty simple: the CEO of a football program requires different skills than those of a football coach. You can be an elite football coach and a substandard CEO. You can also be an elite CEO and a substandard football coach. The idea that a program is going to get someone elite at both of those requires catching a Spurrier-sized lightning strike in a bottle. But without both of those things working concurrently, a program is going to struggle.

Consider the stories coming out of the Swamp Kings documentary where Urban Meyer was winning national championships and finding empty rooms during the celebration to contact recruits. The fact that those texts and calls couldn’t be delegated to someone else at that very moment is a shining example of why a GM is necessary. You saw the same thing this year where Billy Napier was being lauded by beat reporters for meeting with recruits who were at the games long after the game was over. It’s fine if that’s the way things are being run, except that you can’t convince me that on-field performance is the most important priority when this sort of thing is expected.

Contact with recruits is obviously a huge part of the job. But there’s a big difference between being the face of the organization and having to do the dirty work of putting together the organization. In the NIL era, that means not just deciding which recruits you want to go after and convincing them you’ll be able to develop them, but also setting up NIL offers/contracts and putting together fundraising efforts to support those contracts taking into account the inflation that we’re seeing all across college football.

All season long there’s been all sorts of noise around Billy Napier needing to hire an offensive coordinator. The Gators offenses haven’t been great (29th and 51st in yards per play gained in 2022 and 2023, respectively) but those are hardly numbers that should produce the vitriol that Napier’s play calling has received.

But the thinking has been that Napier needs an offensive coordinator because the operational aspects of his program have been substandard. His defenses have been sub-100 in multiple rankings each of the past two years. Special teams have consistently made mistakes in what seems like every game. Clock management, particularly at the end of halves and games, has been poor in multiple games.

And consider where Florida has fallen short in the past three recruiting cycles:

• 2022 – Napier’s transition class has a chance to finish strong, but Harold Perkins (LSU), Jacoby Mathews (Texas A&M) and Trevonte’ Citizen (Miami) all choose separate programs on signing day. All three of those players hailed from in or near Louisiana, meaning Napier had pre-existing relationships with all of them. Citizen hasn’t seen the field yet, but Mathews has played well above average in 2023 (72.7 PFF rating) and Perkins has become a star. This was the first real NIL recruiting year, with Nick Saban complaining about Jimbo Fisher buying players. The arms race had begun.
• 2023 – Napier’s bump class fell well short of expectations for an eventual SEC Championship-level coach. We can argue about what those expectations are, but what we can’t argue about is that the NIL mechanism at Florida had flaws, exemplified by the Jaden Rashada saga. Rashada signed a letter of intent, but then Florida released him from his NLI after terms of an NIL agreement fell apart. Who was responsible is still an open debate, but there’s no doubt that folks – including Napier – would feel much more comfortable about the QB room if Rashada were in there. And considering that the Gator Collective reorganized into Florida Victorious shortly thereafter (along with Florida legislation allowing more communication between staffs and collectives), it seems safe to assume that there were some NIL operational issues.
• 2024 – Napier had a top-3 class that plummeted to number 16 in the country after eight high-level decommits, including four players rated in the top-82 of the 247 Composite rankings. That has been combined with multiple in-conference transfers (i.e. players who other programs think can produce at an SEC level) in Princely Umanmielen, Jaydon Hill, Scooby Williams, Chris McClellan and, of course, Trevor Etienne.

Taken in isolation, each of these three recruiting class issues can be explained away in a way that sounds reasonable. The 2022 class was a transition year, the Rashada situation was a one-off and not indicative of larger problems and the decommits in 2024 were a one-time wave that isn’t likely to happen again because it was a historic collapse. But the reality is that every single recruiting class of the Napier regime thus far has had some sort of narrative around it that has required explaining, which starts to sound much more like making excuses.

That’s where having a strong GM comes in. By having Robinson in place, the operation of NIL and how it interfaces with players should be much stronger.

That includes predicting what sort of inflation is going to be coming for the 2025 class right now, rather than being outbid at the last minute. Florida has the resources that it should be the one upping the bids rather than the one folding at the finish line.

That also includes increasing Florida’s recruiting footprint in its own state. The Gators have signed only three players ranked in the top-10 of the state from 2022-2024. That comes on the heels of Dan Mullen only signing four in his four recruiting classes from 2018-2021. In the 2025 class, only four of the top-10 in the state are currrently uncommitted, but three of those players are Alabama commits who should be willing to listen with the departure of Nick Saban. Florida isn’t going anywhere significant until it starts owning the state recruiting scene again.

And that includes long-term planning. Coaches end up on hot seats all the time. Napier’s seat may not be as hot as some fans want, but the reality is that as the heat gets ramped up, he is going to make decisions that are geared towards winning now with a moral hazard of mortgaging the future of the program. Having a GM in place to balance the need to win now with planning for long-term success is critical. It means that if a coach doesn’t work out, you don’t have to start from ground zero and it makes sure that in any transition, recruits and boosters will still see a familiar face.

Bill Belichick agreed to part ways with the Patriots this past week and I’ve been reading a lot about his methods of building a team. One thing I didn’t remember until reading it is that he has a degree in economics, and I don’t think that’s a coincidence given how he’s built the Patriots.

He was obviously very fortunate to find Tom Brady in the draft, but the way he found value in the NFL Draft before anyone else did is a big part of why the Patriots were always one step ahead. That also includes SpyGate and DeflateGate, where the Patriots may have been cheating, but they were doing so in search of an edge.

But perhaps my favorite Belichick story is the one about the playoff game against the Ravens in 2015. The Patriots were down by 14 points twice in what would eventually become a 35-31 victory and Belichick pulled a trick play out of his bag where he had normally eligible players declare themselves ineligible but still line up as though they were going to go out for a route. It confused the Ravens so much that multiple times the Patriots had a tight end masquerading as a left tackle running uncovered right down the middle of the field.

It’s not so much that Belichick had the trick that makes me appreciate it. It’s that Alabama ran the same concept against LSU earlier that season. Whether through his friendship with Saban or the scouting department Belichick had built, the Patriots became aware of the technique and then used it with some tweaks against the Ravens. They don’t win that game without using it and so don’t win the Super Bowl later that year either.

Why do I bring this up in relation to a GM for the Gators? When my colleague David Waters asked Dan Mullen about recruiting during the 2021 season, his answer was a flash point for the fan base that knew Mullen needed to recruit better to win long-term. In some ways, it was the thing fans pointed towards when the losses started coming faster in that 2021 season.

I agreed with the assessment that Mullen needed to recruit better, but given the constraints on the Florida program, but perhaps there was a better way to do things. After all, Mullen was certainly quite adept at getting the most out of his players on offense given what he was able to do with Feleipe Franks and Kyle Trask. If he had a GM dealing with the day-to-day aspects of recruiting, would that have set up Mullen to be more successful?

Players cycle through a program every three or four years, and that turnover is becoming even less now with the transfer portal. Coaches cycle through a program every three or four years as well if they aren’t able to live up to expectations. The argument that most seem to make for patience with coaches is that firing them every three or four years produces too much volatility within a program. Having a GM serves to mitigate that, at least somewhat.

But more than anything, it puts someone in place to drive the strategic direction of the program who doesn’t have to worry about day-to-day, on-field operations. That’s where Billy Napier has been trained, yet somehow we expect him to be an economist who is able to predict market trends in a new world of player movement and pay. Other programs have been able to adjust, but Napier has not as of yet and so needs some help. There’s no shame in admitting that. After all, Ohio State has a Florida grad (Mark Pantoni) as an Associate AD and General Manager on its staff whose sole focus is recruiting, and has been for years.

I have no idea whether Mark Robinson is going to be good at providing that help. Certainly in the NFL there are GMs who are fired all the time. But having someone in that position is critical given the direction that College Football is going, and even if you have the wrong person in that position, acknowledging the need for that position is a huge step forward.

And that’s why this announcement may be the biggest one of the offseason for the Gators.

Cardinals, Calendars, Legacies and Home

There are some places where you walk in the door and immediately feel like you’re home. The smells are familiar, everything is organized the same way as the last time you were there, and if you’re lucky, you’re greeted at the door with a smile and a hug.

It’s that feeling that I remembered on Friday morning when my mother told me that my Grandma passed away. Growing up, we lived a nine-hour drive away and would visit every summer (unless I had a baseball tournament). After we parked in the driveway and bounded up the stairs, Grandma was always there as we burst into the kitchen with a smile and a hug.

Grandpa definitely set the tone of the household, but she was no slouch either. He was a gruff, no-nonsense World War II veteran who had opinions about everything. It wasn’t until he passed in 2012 that I realized that many of his opinions were a more tempered version of his wife’s. When Grandpa told us to stop misbehaving, there was a twinkle in his eye, but when Grandma told us to knock it off, we knew it was time to fall into line.

The house was always decked out in cardinals (her favorite bird) with tons of pictures of the family attached to the refrigerator door. The calendar hung on the wall with today’s weather written on it (so she could go find evidence when she got into an argument with Grandpa about the weather from years ago). There was an endless supply of chocolate in the dishes on the tables next to the couch, and the kitchen always had something that smelled awesome in the oven.

She had been battling dementia for a while now, unable to make new memories or remember what happened earlier in the day. Thankfully she never forgot my mother, a reminder that there are small blessings even amongst very difficult circumstances.

She’s probably one of the most introverted people I’ve ever met, but when it was necessary to make ends meet, she sold Avon products door-to-door. The image of my shy grandmother forcing herself to do that brings a smile to my face, not because of the discomfort it undoubtedly caused her, but because of the sacrifice necessary to go through that discomfort.

But that’s a small sacrifice compared to what it means to stay home with four kids. In a society that often shuns that choice or makes it financially impossible, she stood tall and illustrated the true value that sort of decision can provide. My mother made the same choice, and my wife has now made that same choice as well. It is not lost on me that those decisions set a foundation for my life that not many are lucky enough to have. That foundation has very little to do with money, and everything to do with sacrifice and love.

And that is Doris Sharp’s legacy. She sacrificed out of love to her kids and has helped build that quality into her daughter and hopefully into me.

That leaves me hoping for two things. First, that my wife and I can help take advantage of the foundation built for us and help build that into our own kids. And that when Grandma left the earth on Friday, Grandpa was there to meet her with a smile and a hug.