Oh, Scott Stricklin, why are you the way that you are? (Photo via Florida Gators)
In the wake of a third consecutive losing season for Gator football– and the second straight for new coach Billy Napier– one would think that the Florida athletic director would be interested in first identifying, and then addressing, any and all existential problems that led to those losses piling up like autumn leaves.
Some of those problems aren’t particularly difficult to identify. It spoke volumes, for example, when Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne went in front of a national television audience on the Paul Finebaum show sporting a quarter zip jacket for Yea Alabama, the Crimson Tide’s official NIL collective. On the other hand, since the day Florida Victorious launched, Florida AD Scott Stricklin has not so much as retweeted or otherwise shared a single social media post either from or about the Gators’ NIL collective.
Translation: Alabama takes NIL more seriously than Florida, which may have something to do with all the five-star signees that litter the Crimson Tide’s roster. It’s no secret anymore that the days of “love the logo” and “I only want guys who want to be Gators” are gone. Paying players, aka NIL, is the way the game is played, and whether you as an individual fan like that or not does nothing to change that reality. On July 1, 2021, NIL became signed into law, and each school faced an existential choice: get with it, or get left behind.
Unless, of course, you’re Scott Stricklin, a man who has held the title of Florida’s Director of Athletics since 2016 and somehow still has a job despite bringing embarrassment to the University of Florida in a variety of fashions– not the least of which was hiring not one but two separate coaches who abused their athletes at Florida.
To Scott Stricklin, reality and truth simply do not matter. He made that abundantly clear from his handling of the Cam Newbauer situation, and while it doesn’t really get any worse than that from a moral standpoint, he’s now showing the world just how proud he is of his ignorance. Because now it’s affecting football– the Gators’ biggest revenue sport.
The day after star running back Trevor Etienne transferred to rival Georgia, morale among Gator fans was at an all-time low. Stricklin’s idea of how to make the fans feel better? Put out a press release detailing the renovations to Ben Hill Griffin Stadium that will almost certainly see the removal of at least 10,000 seats, and that Gator fans have been collectively screaming to not happen ever since the mere idea was broached.
For those who speak in terms of memes, it’s almost like a hybrid of the Pawn Stars “Best I Can Do Is…” meme and the “Evil Hooded Kermit” meme. Fans expressed their frustration over the quality of the product both on the field and the recruiting trail, and Stricklin’s response was essentially to say, “Sorry, I’m not interested in improving the quality of the product, but what I will do is happily take your money to improve your comfort level– at the expense of thousands of other fans’ ability to even get into the building– as you watch this continually subpar product.”
Whether it’s a record-setting level of blissful ignorance or just a defiant, willful disregard of what Gator fans want, Stricklin continued skipping against the current earlier this week when asked about the potential “hot seat” status of football coach Billy Napier. “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.”
The good news is that the word “reality” at least exists in his vocabulary. The bad news is that his idea of reality certainly doesn’t match the reality– as in, the only reality, the one in which we all live. Because the reality is that Scott Stricklin no longer has any control over that kind of thing. If they so desired, Florida boosters could walk into the office of President Ben Sasse tomorrow with $32 million for Napier’s buyout, and that would be that. It’s ultimately not Stricklin’s call anymore– Florida’s booster base has usurped that power from him, and there’s reason to believe he knows that.
It’s the same reason, by the way, that explains why Stricklin is so dismissive of the idea of his handpicked coach being on the so-called hot seat. Stricklin likely knows that Florida has a precedent of firing coaches who win more than Billy Napier has, the same way he knows that he and Napier are conjoined at the hip. If Napier gets fired, Stricklin is going with him. Same with men’s basketball coach Todd Golden.
And now, yesterday, a very logical question was posed by beat writer Nick De La Torre: how can Florida feasibly fund its NIL with a stadium renovation project expected to exceed $400M? After all, the UAA needs fan donations to be able to pull such a facelift off, but the Gators’ NIL efforts also need fan support, and with fans only having so much money that they can allocate to the Gators in any form– and with the UAA clearly prioritizing the stadium renovation over NIL efforts– it’s clear beyond the point of debate that Florida’s NIL game, which is already well behind the eight-ball, is going to continue to suffer.
The answer is simple: it can’t, and Stricklin likely knows that.
This all crafts the portrait of a man with precisely zero vested interest in seeing the Florida Gators’ athletics teams succeed. That’s bad enough. Even worse, however, is the arrogance with which Scott Stricklin publishes every statement or message. It’s the arrogance of a man who sees the world in false color– which just so happens to portray everything he says and does as pure gold.
It would be one thing if Florida’s football and men’s basketball team– or for that matter, any coach he hired at Florida– were winning. That’s a pretense Scott Stricklin attempts to sell in his official UF bio, that he’s helping the Gators win. It should strike any reader of his bio, however, that of all the championships that “have been added to the mantle during his tenure,” not a single one was added by a coach that Stricklin himself hired. All eleven national titles won by the Florida Gators in various sports since Stricklin’s arrival have been won by coaches hired by Jeremy Foley*.
As for the coaches that Stricklin actually hired?
Well, two have been fired for various forms of abuse (Cam Newbauer and Tony Amato), one was fired for pretty brazenly failing to care about doing his job (Dan Mullen), three more have triggered serious questions about the directions of their programs (Billy Napier, Todd Golden, and new women’s soccer coach Sam Bohon, who is 8-19-7 in her first two years), and the remaining hire was a no-brainer that fell into his lap (women’s basketball coach Kelly Rae Finley).
To summarize: the coaches he hires that don’t end up abusing their athletes wind up losing more games than they win. It would be very easy to argue that the hires he actually made paint a far more accurate representation of Scott Stricklin as the Gators’ AD than the winning coaches he inherited, so now allow me to address you as a reader directly: from reading that, do you feel every bit as confident in his stewardship as you did from reading his actual bio on the Gators’ website? Or is the spell now somewhat broken?
So that is the current situation at the University of Florida. The Gators have a man in charge of their athletic department who is capable of standing in a torrential downpour and telling people that it’s a sunny day. One can imagine his delivery of the statement, “No, there’s no storm. I don’t care, it doesn’t matter. ‘Storm’ is a made-up term. It’s actually 71 degrees without a cloud in the sky.”
It’s not that Stricklin is a “clown,” or “incompetent,” or any of the other ad hominem insults fans throw out there on social media. The truth is far worse: every move is calculated for success, but in a different reality where success means something different than it means to everyone else. Because Scott Stricklin lives in a different reality than the rest of us. He might be a perfectly savvy businessman for this faux realiity that only he resides in, but his ideas of how to oversee the Gators’ athletic program do not work in the reality that the rest of us live in, one where NIL is king and he has not himself contributed to a single national championship.
There’s no use talking about a path forward for someone like that to succeed. There’s no turning things around on the NIL front under Scott Stricklin for the same reason that there’s no use asking him about one of his coaches being on the hot seat. Florida Victorious could be a real avenue for on-field and on-court success with the right AD pushing it hard enough (and please, don’t let your disdain for Stricklin stop you from joining!), but that’s not happening with Stricklin. The man has proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that he is not tethered to reality. He has no grasp on Florida’s values and no interest in sharing the values of 99% of Gator fans.
So for as long as he remains in power, get your umbrellas ready and prepare to hunker down, because Stricklin is more interested in getting you to believe that the weather is nice than he is in the weather actually being nice. And while the phrase In All Kinds Of Weather is always meant sincerely, Stricklin’s apparent insistence on testing fans’ commitment to that mantra is, in reality, more damaging than any of his moves are beneficial.
*The eleven national titles won by the Florida Gators since Scott Stricklin was hired on November 1, 2016, were won by the following coaches: Mike Holloway (track and field; hired for the men in 2002 and the women in 2007), Roland Thornqvist (women’s tennis, hired in 2007), Kevin O’Sullivan (baseball, hired in 2007), Bryan Shelton (men’s tennis, hired in 2012), and JC Deacon (men’s golf, hired in 2014).
