Scott Stricklin is persona non grata in Gainesville. (Photo credit: Doug Engle, Gainesville Sun)
Less than a year ago, I published this piece explaining how Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin continued to be disconnected from reality on UF’s dime.
That piece, I thought, did a fairly good job of walking through the various missteps of Scott Stricklin at the University of Florida. What it didn’t do was attempt to establish motive for Stricklin’s operations. I took the kindest possible approach in that article, gave him the benefit of the doubt, and assumed that he was just cosmically and comically out of touch with both the fanbase he purports to cater to, and with the very concept of reality itself.
But after the past week, there is no other way to spin it. There is no kind approach to take with Scott Stricklin. There is no respect due, there is no benefit of the doubt deserved, and there is no other conclusion to come to.
Scott Stricklin simply enjoys engaging Florida Gators fans in the art of deception. Another not totally inaccurate term is, “lying.”
There. I said it. The man is simply not interested in being truthful– and he enjoys being that way. We have reached the point where it simply is not reasonable to come to any other definitive opinion of him.
I realize that’s a strong claim to levy against someone, especially someone as powerful as the Florida Gators’ director of athletics. But if there was an argument against that claim, it vaporized last week with one of the most pathetic announcements in recent memory.
Two days before the Gator football team was walloped 49-17 by Texas, Scott Stricklin announced that Billy Napier would be back as the Gator football coach. He did not do this in a press conference, where reporters could ask him follow-up questions about what led to this decision. He simply deputized somebody in the Florida Gators creative department to put out a graphic on social media.
Never mind that Billy Napier’s 15-19 record is the worst winning percentage of any Gator coach since Raymond Wolf in the 1940’s. It’s actually, somehow, so much worse than that because of the you’re-all-morons-and-I-know-better-than-you type of tone Stricklin took in his statement.
Let’s just try to break it down, line by line.
The open letter begins with, “Gator Nation, I wanted to let you know that Billy Napier will continue as head football coach of the Florida Gators.”
My obvious instinctual reaction is: Scott, you are not part of Gator Nation. You are a one-man demolition crew that gets paid north of $1.7M a year to destroy what the actual Gator Nation has cherished for decades. But OK, I guess there wasn’t really a better way to get off your greeting, so go on.
The statement then continues with Stricklin veering off Reality Road and straight into the Forest of Gaslighting:
“As we’ve seen these past several weeks, the young men on this team represent what it means to be a Gator. Their resolve, effort, and execution are evident in their performance and growth each week– building a foundation that promises greater success next season and beyond.”
This is the juncture where I would inform Scott Stricklin that the reason Florida looked better in recent weeks was because of the competition dropping off– Mississippi State is 2-8, Kentucky is 3-6, Central Florida is 3-6 and 2-5 in the Big 12, Tennessee played an unusually terrible game against us, and Georgia is a shell of its former self under Kirby Smart– except at this point, I’m pretty sure he knows that. He was in the Swamp to watch both Miami and Texas A&M embarrass the Gators early in the year, and he was in Austin to watch the Longhorns go up by 42 before napping in the leisure cars.
Oh, and here’s another fun fact about the whole “fighting hard” bullet point. Before you give this team a participation trophy for fighting hard, you should probably know that Florida has been trailing in three different games this year by 26 points or more. Two of those games came at home in the first three weeks of the season, and the third one came a few days ago.
Anyway, here’s where the letter devolves into outright Satanic insanity:
“UF’s commitment to excellence and a championship-caliber program is unwavering.”
Of course it is. Plain as day. That’s why Scott Stricklin has never once retweeted a single Florida Victorious post to his 77,400 twitter followers since the day it launched, routinely tells boosters to not donate to FV (or any NIL endeavor, for that matter) and instead save that money for a stadium renovation that 95% of the fanbase doesn’t want, can’t even be bothered to sport Florida Victorious garb on the rare instances where he dares show his face in public, and in eight years at Florida, has not hired a single coach to win a national championship.
And nothing screams “commitment to excellence” like telling a fanbase, “See this coach we currently have who is 10-19 against Power Five schools, 1-10 against rival programs and is about to be the first coach to lead the Gators to three straight losing seasons since the 1930’s? That’s what this program needs. More of that.”
But it gets even worse: “In these times of change across college athletics, we are dedicated to a disciplined, stable approach that is focused on long-term, sustained success for Gator athletes, recruits and fans. I am confident that Billy will meet the challenges and opportunities ahead. We will work alongside him to support any changes needed to elevate Gator football. As college athletics evolves, UF is committed to embracing innovation and strategy, ensuring the Gators thrive in today’s competitive landscape.”
Translation: Florida football is ducked. Just do the same thing to that last word as Billy Napier has done to the caliber of this football program since he took over: take out the “D” and put in an “F”.
The only thing I agree with Scott Stricklin on here is that Florida’s football program needs stability in order to succeed. The problem is that the absolute last thing it needs is to build a stable foundation of losing– because that’s where fans across all socioeconomic backgrounds tune out and apathy seeps into the fanbase.
Stability for the sake of stability is a horrifying argument at any level of business. If you have a VP of a Fortune 500 company who costs the company millions of dollars with bad business decisions, you don’t keep him just for the sake of stability. If you have a fry cook at McDonald’s who likes flinging boiling hot oil across the kitchen at his coworkers more than he likes to cook actual food, you don’t keep him just for the sake of stability either. At some point, there crosses a threshold of damage done that doesn’t justify keeping someone.
Even more galling, however, is what came next. You’re confident that Billy will meet the challenges and opportunities ahead? Are you really? Based on what data, exactly? The fact that, again, he’s teetering on the edge of a third straight losing season, which no Gator coach has done since Josh Cody in the 1930’s? Is it the fact that Florida is looking at a third straight season with a defense to finish outside the top 60 in the FBS? Or is it the fact that Napier refused to hire a special teams or offensive coordinator despite various in-game deficiencies on those sides of the ball in each of the last two offseasons?
Oh, wait, never mind, you addressed it in the next sentence. Your word salad sandwich about supporting him with NIL funds and being “committed to embracing innovation and strategy” takes care of that. Well, that’s just jingles. I guess problem solved, right? So that’s what was missing all along (which is problematic enough in its own), but now you’re going to take that weakness and turn it into a strength?
I feel so much better now. The only hole that one could possibly poke in that argument would be if Florida had, say, a top 15 roster in the country from a talent standpoint according to the 247Sports talent composite in each of Napier’s three seasons and lost games to, I don’t know… Vanderbilt, or Arkansas, or Kentucky teams (multiple times) that came into those games with nowhere near as much talent as Florida. Or Florida didn’t have to survive a near-calamity against a South Florida team that went a perfect 0-11 against FBS competition that year. Or even not hand away a rivalry game to a Tennessee team ranked several spots below on that talent composite board. As long as nobody brings that kind of bullet point to the table, that logic is bulletproof.
As you probably know, literally each and every one of those things happened.
Even worse, however, is the notion that Florida needs to redirect that buyout money to be used for NIL purposes. Never mind that Florida should have that money invested for NIL purposes every single year, and doesn’t. The fact is that every other school Florida competes with already does, and that’s a constant fact– whether those schools are firing their coaches or not. So implicitly, what’s being peddled to the fanbase is the idea that if Florida does fire Napier, there will be little to no funds for NIL for years to come as the boosters’ money will instead be spent on paying Napier to go away plus a new coach and his staff.
And it’s made all the more galling that Stricklin has operated with this cavalier attitude towards NIL for three years now. When rubbing elbows with boosters, he admits he can’t stand NIL. The attitude is one of, “Well, you know, give a little to NIL here and there, it’s a nice thing to do, but we really need your money for that stadium renovation.” Four different boosters, each in different cities, have told me that Stricklin steered various questions about NIL over to a verdict of “save that money on NIL and give it to me for the stadium renovation.”
Which makes the final paragraph outright enraging: “Gator Nation has remained strong, showing up game after game to stand with our team. This loyalty created an incredible environment that inspires our players to compete with heart and determination. Now, I call on all of Gator Nation to continue standing behind Billy and his dedicated team while we work together to build a championship program.”
So let me get this straight, Scott. You’re calling on this fanbase to continue packing this stadium that you plan to wipe 10,000 seats out of to support a coach with the worst record in more than three-quarters of a century because he, despite not having a single winning season in three tries, is going to be the one to lead Florida to the championships this program strives for.
Stepping back from my Gator fandom and stepping into who I am as a person, I’m a lot of things in life. I’m a competitor, I’m a marketing major, I’m a drone pilot, I’m an adventurer, and I’m a small business owner.
One thing I’m not is a liar. I can deal with differences of opinion, and I can deal with people who comb through the same data as I do and come to differing conclusions. I cannot, and will not, engage in rational conversations with people who simply make up their own data, and attempt to pass it off as factual information.
Scott Stricklin is different. He doesn’t like the data that Billy Napier has compiled throughout his 2.75 years at Florida, but he also doesn’t like admitting he was wrong to hire him for the very same reason. So rather than acknowledge he’d made a big mistake– which, no shame, every AD makes a bad hire here and there– he prefers to just spin a bedtime story about how everything was A-OK and they all lived happily ever after.
This behavior, of course, is by no means an outlier. Stricklin did the same thing several years ago by covering up a mortifying scandal involving the women’s basketball coach that included racial taunts, throwing a basketball at the injured leg of a girl recovering from ACL surgery, and even driving one girl to the brink of suicide. His response was to privately dish out more word salads to the parents of the players involved while extending that coach because, in his words, “Cam is building his program the right way and making steady progress, and it’s important that he have the time needed to continue that progress.”
Never mind the abuse, which the public wasn’t aware of. The fact of the matter was that Cam Newbauer had the worst record of any coach in Gator women’s basketball history. Scott Stricklin took that data and told the world that the worst coach in program history was building the program the right way and making steady progress, and that needed more time to continue that progress.
That’s not even gaslighting. That was an outright lie. He made a bold, definitive statement when he had a wealth of information that contradicted it, and simply ignored that contradicting information.
So, too, was his similar vote of confidence for men’s basketball coach Mike White after a humiliating loss to Oral Roberts in the NCAA Tournament, declaring that White would be in Gainesville “for a very long time.” White would leave after the ensuing season after his team fell apart and couldn’t even reach the NCAA Tournament.
There’s no conceivable way for a man like Scott Stricklin, who has a degree in marketing from Mississippi State, to be this badly mistaken on this high-stakes of a declaration this many times. We’re all human, we all err from time to time and we are not made perfect. But there’s no logical argument that can be made to convince me or anyone else of sound mind that Scott Stricklin believed each and every one of these statements he tried to sell to the public.
At some point, it just becomes who he is, and we have to understand and accept who he is, and adjust our expectations of what he’s going to say and do accordingly. Any and every morsel of hope regarding the Gators improving to the point of being a serious football program has to start with Stricklin being evacuated from Alachua County. He has proven time and again that he is more interested in people believing that things are running smoothly than he is in making sure that things are actually running smoothly.
To do it this constantly tells me that there’s a level of enjoyment that he gains from it. Because that’s who he is.
And who he is is a man capable of holding a participation trophy in one hand, using his other hand to unzip his fly so he can urinate on your leg, and tell you that it’s raining– but not to worry, because it looks clear and sunny up ahead, so just hang in there until then.
And yet, as the motto goes, in all kinds of weather, we’ll all stick together– even in Man-Made Category Five Human Waste Storms.
