I pulled a novel’s worth of receipts on Florida AD Scott Stricklin. (Photo via Phelan Ebenhack, AP)
Scott Stricklin certainly is a lightning bolt of a conversation topic among Florida Gators fans.
Ask some fans, and they’ll tell you they outright hate him. Some others grant Stricklin’s time the “mixed bag” status, citing Todd Golden’s national title on the hardwood and the jury still ultimately being out on Billy Napier. And a few– either due to ignorance, indifference, or just plain stupidity– do like him.
Let’s forget the latter category, though, and focus on the middle two. Because frankly, it’s likely less than 5% of the fanbase that actually will defend the job Florida’s AD has done since arriving in November 2016.
And let’s start right off the bat by discrediting a very common talking point about Stricklin: that he was responsible for nothing but bad hires in men’s basketball and football, the two biggest sports. That argument didn’t have much credence two years ago, when Golden and Napier led Florida to losing seasons in their first years, because one year is never enough to judge a coach by. Following Golden’s national championship in San Antonio, and Napier’s (modest but still noticeable) improvement to 7-5 in his third year, it has even less.
Yes, believe it or not, the way to truly gauge the devastating– and possibly insurmountable– damage that Scott Stricklin has done to the Gators athletics program actually has nothing to do with his football or men’s basketball hires.
Dan Mullen went 34-15 in four years, including three New Year’s Six Bowls, two top ten finishes and an appearance in the SEC Championship Game. He then basically just stopped trying and had to be fired before the program completely came off the rails. Napier, for his part, is still in purgatory, and we’ll need a fourth year to truly judge him one way or another. He could end up being a colossal failure, or he could end up as a case study for why you don’t fire coaches in their first three seasons. We simply don’t have that data yet, so we can’t use it in this argument. And plus, both Napier and Mullen were lauded as great hires at the time– both by yours truly and nationally.
No, the far better reason Florida Gators fans should despise Scott Stricklin is because he is verifiably disconnected from reality. And he always has been. (Look at the date of that article.)
Let’s run through the things Scott Stricklin has done to tarnish the image of the once-proud Gators athletics program.
Scott Stricklin hired not one but two coaches who had to be fired for abusing their athletes
It’s amazing how time plus the fact that women’s basketball and soccer are not revenue sports can make people forget the grotesque details of why Scott Stricklin has gotten to make multiple hires in those sports. But not me. Because it shouldn’t be forgotten, ever.
Long story short, Stricklin’s first hire was a women’s basketball coach who not only led Florida to its worst four-year record in an already bleak program history, he crippled players’ mental health along the way. Thanks to a mixture of racist and homophobic comments, firing basketballs at ACL-torn legs, and driving record numbers of players to the transfer portal, Florida ultimately had no choice but to cut bait. This was the story of Cam Newbauer.
So alright, Stricklin made a huge mistake with that hire. But, fine, everyone makes mistakes. Surely he’d learn his lesson, due far more due diligence with future coaching hires, and make sure he never hired an abusive coach again, right?
No. Enter Tony Amato, a women’s soccer coach from Arizona. While perhaps not quite as over-the-top with his abuse as Newbauer, Amato put his own spin on driving players toward mental illnesses with a psychotic obsession about their weight that caused multiple players to develop eating disorders. Predictably, the results were horrendous, and to Stricklin’s credit, Amato was fired after one losing season.
Scott Stricklin tried to sweep Newbauer’s horrifying abuse under the rug
Personally, I do believe in forgiveness, and even more importantly, learning from mistakes. Nobody is perfect, and if we don’t get to grow and be better because of our missteps, then none of us would ever have careers or lives.
So, then, you may ask, why would I not apply that line of thinking to Scott Stricklin? Because it doesn’t seem to be a mistake. Receipts clearly show that Stricklin had knowledge of Cam Newbauer’s abuse well before he eventually fired him after four awful seasons. And by “knowledge,” I mean “quite a bit of detail” of the extent of the ugliness– dating back to January of 2019. That means that Newbauer was allowed to coach for an additional two full seasons after the first few complaints came to his desk.
Following his fourth season, Newbauer had a 46-71 overall record. So as the allegations kept coming and the losses piled up like autumn leaves, Scott Stricklin watched it all unfold and apparently decided, “Hmmm, you know what this Gator women’s basketball program needs? More of this. Let’s extend Newbauer’s contract.” So that’s what he did– and for good measure, he lied through his teeth to Gator fans about the status of the program.
“Cam is building his program the right way and making steady progress,” declared Stricklin about the coach with the worst record over a four-year stretch in program history. “It’s important that he have the time needed to continue that progress.” Six weeks later, Stricklin went back on his word and fired Newbauer. You know, the coach who was making steady progress and needed time to continue making that progress.
Even after dismissing Newbauer, Stricklin continued his efforts to hide what had been done. He allowed Newbauer to script his own exit with the pitiful “he’s leaving to focus on his family” routine. Had the student journalists at UF not broken the story, Cam Newbauer would have gotten to ride off into the sunset with the legacy of a good-hearted, family-first Christian.
But the Alligator’s bombshell story prevented that, forcing Stricklin to take accountability. You know what should have happened in Stricklin’s accepting of responsibility? Anybody should have been able to watch him do it, in a press conference, with a live-streamed video showing him answering questions from a large number of reporters.
That didn’t happen. Instead, the very outlet that broke the story was barred from any access to Stricklin as the man who allowed the abuse to go on for four years met with four handpicked media members– who have done the UAA’s bidding for a long time, I might add– and answered softballs that did the bare minimum necessary to even acknowledge that anything bad had taken place.
And don’t for a second think that Scott Stricklin just doesn’t like making public appearances, which in itself would be a red flag. He’s fine and dandy with getting camera time– when it’s convenient for him. He sure seemed happy to hog the spotlight when it came time to shake hands with a crop of Air Force pilots at a baseball game, and run down onto the floor in the AlamoDome to take credit for the national championship, and then of course to recognize the national championship basketball team in the Swamp.
“Alright, we get it,” say my critics. “He messed up with Newbauer, now move on.” Oh, am I harping on women’s basketball too much? OK, no problem. Let’s see how his other coaching hires at Florida have panned out…
The overall record of Stricklin’s coaching hires is pathetic
As mentioned above, Scott Stricklin has hired nine coaches at Florida in the decade that he’s been here. Of those nine, just three of them have winning records in SEC play: Todd Golden, Dan Mullen, and Adam Steinberg (men’s tennis). Of those three, one of them (Mullen) has already been fired for quitting on the program, and another one (Steinberg) clears the .500 mark by the skin of his teeth (14-12). So I’m not sure those really help Stricklin’s case that much.
Let’s look at the other six. And you know this is going to be a rough ride when you realize that Billy Napier– with a 10-14 SEC record– is actually the fourth best of the nine hires Stricklin has ever made at Florida, at least in terms of his record against his fellow SEC members. That 10-14 record comes out to be 41.67%.
Because never mind batting .50%; of Stricklin’s nine hires, the majority of them (5/9) have winning percentages of less than 40% in SEC play. Women’s basketball coach Kelly Rae Finley’s 25-39 SEC record comes out to 39.1%, then it really drops off. Women’s tennis coach Per Nilsson’s ugly record of 4-11 equates to 26.7%, soccer coach Sam Bohon’s paltry 3-20-7 SEC record translates to 21.7%, and then you have the previously mentioned two coaches who were fired for abuse: Cam Newbauer went 15-47 (24.2%) and Tony Amato went 3-6-1 in his lone season (35.0%).
Is that good, Scott? I don’t think it’s very good.
If Scott Stricklin got his way, Todd Golden would never be here
Never mind the fact that Billy Donovan handed Stricklin the Todd Golden hire on a silver platter. Forget the fact that Stricklin had the rarest and highest-value of jewels gift wrapped for him, and all he had to do was accept the recommendation from the greatest coach in Gator men’s basketball history. Seriously, toss that fact out the window, I’ll even be nice here and credit Stricklin with the hire of Golden outright.
How about the fact that Scott Stricklin never even wanted to hire Todd Golden– or anybody, for that matter– to begin with?
Remember that contract extension Stricklin handed his Mike Rice Jr. clone of a women’s hoops coach after the worst four-year stretch in program history? Well, maybe we can deploy the Occam’s Razor card here. Maybe Stricklin was just randomly tossing out contract extensions to everyone within a three-mile radius that day– because at the same time as he extended Newbauer, he also extended Mike White for additional two years (and also Mullen, but I won’t fault him for that as nobody could have realistically foreseen the crash that followed). That lengthened White’s contract from an expiration date of 2025 to 2027.
In other words, Stricklin sat and watched heavily favored Florida choke an 11-point lead with less than ten minutes to go against 15 seed Oral Roberts in the NCAA Tournament, and– as with Newbauer– said to himself, “You know what Gator basketball needs? More of this guy.”
How did Stricklin justify the extension, you might ask? With more whitewashing: “Though he’s still relatively young by coaching standards, Mike has already established himself as a successful head coach,” asserted Stricklin about the guy who advanced to the Sweet 16 only once and finished in the top four of the SEC standings just twice in six seasons. “Because of his work ethic, intelligence and competitiveness his career has such a high ceiling, and it’s going to be fun watching what his Gator teams accomplish for years to come.”
Guess what happened next? White’s Gators regressed further in his seventh year, and he bolted for Georgia not even ten months later. So the next time you demand I give Scott Stricklin credit for hiring Todd Golden, just remember: if it was up to Stricklin, he never would have been in a position to hire Golden at all.
Scott Stricklin repeatedly gaslights his own fans (with examples)
You might have been picking up on a pattern here. Between the statements he’s made about Mike White and Cam Newbauer and the fact that he only shows his face in public for feel-good photo-ops, you can probably figure out a few things about the most powerful employee at the University of Florida (since the school still doesn’t have a president.)
It’s a classic case of the passive-aggressive narcissist. Stricklin is nowhere to be found in the many instances where he has difficult questions to answer, and then emerges out of thin air and jumps for joy and leads the cheers in the rare instances when he can actually take credit for something good.
Yes, I know that H2 tag is more subjective than the others. So here are some examples to back up that title I gave him.
Stricklin tries to take credit for eleven national championships that he had nothing to do with
Let’s start with his bio on the Florida Gators’ website. Prior to Florida basketball winning the 2025 national title, it read as follows: “Eleven national championships have been added to the mantle during his tenure.” This English would make you think that Stricklin personally had something to do with each one of those titles… when in reality, they were won by coaches hired by Jeremy Foley.
Let’s go one by one: Roland Thornqvist, Women’s Tennis (hired in 2001, won in 2017); Mike Holloway, Men’s Outdoor Track & Field (hired in 2003, won in 2017, 2022, 2023, 2024) and Indoor Track & Field (2018, 2019) and both Women’s Indoor & Outdoor Track & Field 2022; Kevin O’Sullivan, Baseball, (hired in 2008, won in 2017); Bryan Shelton, Men’s Tennis (hired in 2013, won in 2021); and JD Deacon, Men’s Golf, (hired in 2014, won in 2023). Stricklin, of course, arrived in November 2016. All he had to do was not be dumb enough to fire highly successful coaches and stay out of their way. Those titles belong in Jeremy Foley’s legacy, not Stricklin’s.
After Gator basketball defeated Houston for its third national title, Stricklin’s bio got a slight update. While at least now Stricklin finally has something to show for his nine coaching hires, lumping in the one championship from a coach that he hired along with eleven more from coaches that he didn’t hire to inflate the number of titles he can claim to twelve is simply shameful.
Now, that’s not exactly lying, per se. It’s not nearly as blatantly false of a statement as what Stricklin said in announcing both Newbauer’s extension and his dismissal. But it’s intellectually dishonest and highly deceptive at best, and once you dig past the surface of that statement and realize that Stricklin had nothing to do with bringing those title-winning coaches to Gainesville, it looks more and more like he has something to hide. (Which as we’ve discussed before, he often does.)
He claimed “hot seat” was a “made-up term” when Billy Napier was 11-14 after two seasons
Though Stricklin has inflicted a whole bunch of damage to Gator athletics, he’s also gotten lucky in some ways. Because that damage could easily be even worse– and Stricklin has outright told us that his tune wouldn’t change a bit even if it was.
Back in January of 2024, Stricklin was asked about if Billy Napier would be on the hot seat with an 11-14 record. At the time, Napier sported the worst winning percentage of any Gator football coach since Raymond Wolf– who coached from 1946-1949. You know, the same decade in which Adolf Hitler ruled Germany and the United States eviscerated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with atomic bombs. That’s the last time a Florida football coach had a record that bad.
Stricklin’s response? “I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. It’s a made-up term,” he told The Orlando Sentinel. “People can put them on whatever list they want. It has nothing to do with reality.”
Since you love reality, here’s a healthy dose of it for you, Scott: when you have to fire your first football hire because he quits on the program and your second football hire has the worst winning percentage of any coach since the immediate aftermath of World War II two seasons into his tenure, he is under far more pressure to win than the average FBS coach. That is not up for debate; that is a fact. And you, as the guy who hired both of them, now have a vested interest in that second hire succeeding, which means you have ulterior motives to say that.
Now, nobody is going to suggest Stricklin just brazenly toss his guy under the bus, either. But since he’s clearly a devious politician, he of all people should be familiar with the power of the, “As always, we constantly evaluate the state of the program. Billy Napier is our football coach and we’re looking forward to seeing the results follow the progress this year…” type of statement. Instead, he reverted back to his instincts of passive-aggressively flipping double birdies to his own fanbase, shaming them for even coining the term “hot seat.”
Stricklin cowered behind a graphic to announce Napier’s return to Florida in 2025– at the worst possible time
Luckily for Stricklin, Napier pulled Florida out of the nosedive it was in in 2024 at the last possible moment. Such a triumphant second act could have been rewarded with a public vote of confidence at the end of the season. Stricklin could have even done his favorite thing ever– peacocking for the cameras when it suited him.
In classic Stricklin fashion, though, he managed to bungle even this. Because he jumped the gun on declaring Napier would return, and wound up making an even bigger jerk off of himself than he did with the “hot seat” nonsense.
Florida had started the year a very ugly 1-2, and managed to right the ship and get to 4-3. And the fact that they almost took down big bad Georgia? Hell, if DJ Lagway stayed healthy, they might have even beaten them. But hey, from 1-2 to 4-4 is great improvement, so let’s lock this guy down, right? And let’s do so in the most condescending way imaginable– behind a written statement that gives the world zero opportunity to ask him questions. Classic passive-aggressive narcissism: I’m right, you’re all wrong, and you don’t even get a voice or a platform to state your dissent.
Three days after Stricklin’s statement, Texas terminated Florida’s soul in a 49-17 mauling that could easily have been far, far worse than that score indicates. And sure, go ahead and blame the injury to DJ Lagway for the loss if you want, but Aidan Warner wasn’t responsible for the 562 yards of offense Texas hung on the Gators throughout the day. It was just a complete and absolute sledgehammering.
I think this screenshot says it all.
To Stricklin’s credit, it turned out that he was right to give Napier a fourth year. Following the Texas demolition, Florida ripped off four wins in a row– two of them over ranked opponents– to finish with an 8-5 record that demonstrates progress. But there was no conceivable way Stricklin knew how the season would finish, because there was nothing in Napier’s 15-19 record following the Texas game that said winning those last four games was possible. Stricklin took a gamble, and it worked out, but not in a way that a reasonable person could objectively give Stricklin praise for the move.
Stricklin repeatedly told big boosters not to donate to NIL, but to save that money for the Swamp renovation project
The definition of gaslighting is to use psychological manipulation, as opposed to cold, hard data and facts, in an attempt to convince someone that their beliefs and/or perception of reality is false.
So here’s perhaps the most infuriating example of Scott Stricklin doing just that.
For years now, Scott Stricklin has traveled across the southeast visiting Gator clubs and telling high-end boosters to not give funds to NIL, but donate their money to the stadium renovation project instead. Not one, not two, not five, but nine different Gator boosters have all told me that he more or less said the same thing to them: “NIL is nice, it’s a good thing, we should give a little to NIL here and there but we need the bulk of your money for this stadium modernization.”
In the name of full transparency, I have been told by a couple of these same boosters that Stricklin has changed his tune on this recently. But the damage is already done. Just imagine if the money that various boosters donated the last four years for stadium renovations went to NIL purposes instead.
Forget the fact that most Gator fans loathe the idea of doing this project at all. Let’s pretend that 95% of Gator fans wanted this renovation project.
Since the coronavirus wreaked havoc on our planet in 2020, Florida has gone 6-7 in 2021, 6-7 again in 2022, 5-7 in 2023, and 8-5 in 2024. What, exactly, about those records indicate that Gator football is performing to the best of its ability on a yearly basis?
College football is a performance-based business. If you win enough games to uphold your program’s standards, things are good. If you don’t, things are bad. Who, with any semblance of interest in seeing Florida win, gives a shred of a shit how comfy the stadium is if the team that plays in it can’t go any further than the Gasparilla Bowl?
Perhaps that’s because…
Scott Stricklin would rather things look nice and make money than win (with examples)
You think that H2 is subjective, huh? You think that’s just an opinion? You think I have an agenda?
Here are some things that Scott Stricklin did in the name of exactly that…
Stricklin announced details of the stadium renovation as Gator fans were actively incensed about something else
The day that running back Trevor Etienne transferred to arch rival Georgia, morale among Gator fans was at an all time low. How did Scott Stricklin think he could cheer Gator fans up? By announcing more details about renovations to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium that almost literally nobody wants. (Don’t you worry, that gets its own bullet point; I’m saving the best for last.)
It’s classic PR 101: people are mad about something bad happening, so distract them by announcing something else that will infuriate them. And the more whitewashing you do to make the second bad thing sound like a good thing, the better. Oh, and hey, let’s toss in another passive-aggressive call to action by nudging fans to donate for those renovations while we’re at it.
Stricklin routinely jacks up prices for everything by outrageous amounts
To be fair, he’s not the only one in the world to do that. But then you look at exactly how he’s raised rates on things, including tickets (somehow 2025 season tickets for 6 games cost about 20% more than 2024 season tickets for 7 games) and concessions (I mean this is just insulting). When pressed about the latter, deflects and says “oh we don’t set those prices, we outsource that.”
More gaslighting. Nice.
But the most outrageous price hike comes at the expense of the students, who are already paying a lot for tuition and room and board. Who cares about the fact that most of them will have student debt to pay off, right? Florida is now making students pay $268.75 to watch six home games. This is an increase from $20 per game as recently as 2019 to $45 per game for students.
By the way, what do you think happens to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium ticket prices when the capacity has shrunk? Anyone who’s ever taken an Econ class can tell you what happens to price when supply goes down.
Stricklin sold off student basketball tickets against top-ranked Tennessee, and kicked them out of their own section
There are a ton of superlatives you could use for the various styles of damage Stricklin has done. There are probably more enraging things that he’s done and is doing, at least to the majority of the fanbase. But this probably the most insulting thing he’s ever done.
With everything else we know about Stricklin, let’s deploy the inverse Occam’s razor card here. There’s no possible way Scott Stricklin was stupid enough to believe that the bulk of the UF students wouldn’t return to campus for a top-ten hoops showdown against a rival. No chance. We’ve run through countless examples of his bloodlust for pennies already, the benefit of the doubt is gone.
So we can chalk that up as yet another piece of gaslighting as he claimed that he didn’t think students would return from break for this game. Citing the fact that very few students were on campus for games against UNF and Stetson– because there’s no difference between those schools and No.1 Tennessee, right? Easy mistake, I get them mixed up all the time since none of them have ever made a Final Four– Stricklin evicted the majority of the students from their own cheering section close to the floor for this game, and promptly sold their now-vacated seats for more than triple what they’d paid for them.
Yes, he did “explain” and “give more detail” about it, but frankly, at this point, I simply don’t care what explanation Stricklin has. Because at some point, there’s nothing to explain.
If a kid keeps peeing in a pool, it’s just who he is and you can’t let him keep jumping into the water. If a bar regular keeps getting in fights with other patrons, it’s just who he is and you have to stop letting him into your bar. If an athletic director keeps doing things that draw the fanbase’s collective ire, it’s just who he is and you don’t give him the benefit of the doubt or the opportunity to whitewash it.
Scott Stricklin reduced Gator basketball’s national championship celebration to a halftime show of a spring game that wasn’t even televised
What kind of celebration would you think that a national championship hoops team deserves? How about no parade, no live stream, no media attention at all beyond what individual people in the building tweet about the event? Sound fair?
Now, by itself, this seems like a slight to the basketball players, but not particularly greedy. After all, the spring game is free to attend, right?
Except no it isn’t– because on a sweltering April day in Gainesville, what do you think is going to happen at the concession stands? I’ll give you a hint: it involves UF pocketing more money than a parade on the streets, where fans could bring their own drinks. And of course that’s going to happen anyway, because the spring game draws people by itself, but by luring in people who would not otherwise have cared to sit in the heat for a football scrimmage with the dangling carrot of celebrating the basketball team’s championship, Stricklin undeniably pilfered some extra coin out of his own fan base yet again.
Which leads us to the final– and most fury-inducing– part of all.
Do we trust Scott Stricklin with Florida’s Swamp renovation?
We’ll talk about this in no shortage of detail another day. But for now, let’s just look at all that data we’ve collected and summarize it.
Florida has an athletic director who is capable of standing in a driving monsoon and telling his weather channel audience that the sun is shining brightly. He did that with Cam Newbauer’s 15-47 record as he was actively torturing his own players, he did that with Mike White and his Final Four/SEC Title virginity, he did that with Billy Napier and his 15-18 record days before getting blown to kingdom come by Texas, he did that with the Swamp renovation details on the day a fan favorite player left for a rival, he did that for four whole years with NIL, and he does that to this very day with his biography on the Florida Gators website.
This man is a serial gaslighter. He has exponential preference for making fans believe that things are alright while pocketing their hard-earned money than he has in actually helping the Florida Gators win. I gave example after example of exactly that.
And I’ll end this piece with an answer for my critics who, ironically enough, complain that I complain too much.
Do I think I’m going to change anything by compiling all this data and writing this piece? No. I know I won’t.
So, then what am I trying to accomplish? Two things.
One, I want to make absolutely sure that everybody in this fanbase knows exactly who, and what, Scott Stricklin is. I want fans to not be blinded by the recent basketball title, and think that they ought to give Stricklin more time or more chances to do good things. Every blind squirrel finds a nut and every broken clock is right twice a day. And that’s even if you want to take the very generous step of forgetting the Billy Donovan handed Stricklin the recommendation to hire Golden on a silver platter. Go look at the other eight coaching hires Stricklin made, we covered that up above. We cannot allow ourselves to forget Stricklin’s abhorrent record of hiring coaches, and in particular his two different hires who wound up causing their athletes to develop mental illnesses.
And two– and related– that we learn how to decipher Stricklin’s words. I cited example after example where Stricklin says one thing and the reality proves to be another thing entirely. You think that Stricklin has any real intentions of maintaining the Swamp’s capacity, and thus, the home field advantage with new structures? Then you likely also think he meant what he said about Florida’s abusive 15-47 basketball coach deserving more time to continue making progress. We as a fanbase cannot do that to ourselves.
I genuinely hope Scott Stricklin reads this, so he can see someone explicitly call him out on every nugget or horseshit he’s ever flung at his own fanbase. I don’t know him personally, so I won’t say anything bad about him as a human being. I’m willing to assume he’s a perfectly decent family man in his private life. I sure hope he is, anyway.
But as an athletic director? As the man in charge of Florida’s athletics program? His desperation to turn his warped perceptions of reality into everyone else’s agreed reality has inflicted a colossal amount of damage on the Gators’ various sports– not just the moneymaking ones, but the so-called “smaller” sports, too.
And for an athletics program that touts itself as the “Everything School,” the Florida Gators deserve better.
