by Patrick Zier | Nov 26, 2024 |
The pressure to win is there. It is always there at Florida, where first Steve Spurrier and then Urban Meyer set a standard of excellence that is difficult to achieve and even more difficult to maintain. Winning is hard anywhere, but it is especially hard in the SEC.
You get some idea of the expectations at Florida when you remember that the Gators dumped Dan Mullen, who won a lot of games but no championships, for a relative unknown named Billy Napier. Napier was highly successful at Louisiana Lafayette, but Louisiana Lafayette is not Florida and the Sun Belt Conference is not the SEC.
And so it was that Napier came into 2024 on the back of two losing seasons, far below what Mullen had accomplished and no where near the championship teams he was supposed to mold.
And Gator Nation was edgy. This wasn’t what they had signed up for. So, despite what many felt was probably the toughest schedule in the nation, Napier needed to deliver.
Napier knew that, the players knew that, everybody knew that. But playing teams like Georgia, Texas and Tennessee is one thing, beating them is another. And the Gators didn’t beat them, and Gator Nation became more restless.
Then, just when Napier appeared to be halfway out the door, nationally ranked LSU came to town and suddenly, Florida rose up and knocked them down. Then came nationally ranked Ole Miss, and the same thing happened. And so it is that a season that had a disastrous start and a disastrous middle may now have a season saving finish.
Now, a team that had been written off by everybody as the year went along, is suddenly being given a second look, even getting votes in the AP top 25 poll.
“So obviously when you’re going through a struggle and you’ve had some setbacks keeping your enthusiasm is really important,” Napier said at his press conference following the Ole Miss game according to Florida’s website. “Okay, you’ve experienced some success. Can you handle that? Can you ignore the hype? Can you have the right mix of humility with that? I think that’s the key,” Napier commented.
“What are the buttons you push that motivate the players?” Napier asked.
“You’ve got to have good leadership at the player level,” he continued. “That’s where there’s collaboration. I always ask some of our guys where we’re at. They know more than I know or our staff knows.”
For Florida, what’s important now is that the team has no letdown. The Gators should beat the Seminoles easily this Saturday, but this is a bitter rivalry. “This is going to be a challenge,” Napier said. “You’ve got to go play at their place and we’ve been there before and they’ve beaten us the last two years and we know the records will be thrown out.
“So you put the ball down at 7 o’clock up there and we’ve got to be ready to go.”
For the Gators, this season has been one long climb. But they have endured and are almost to the top of the mountain. And there sits Florida State, just waiting to knock them off.
by Patrick Zier | Nov 21, 2024 |
Alex Golesh knows where he wants to go, knows where he wants to take South Florida’s football program. He is very clear on that. The question is can he – and South Florida – actually get there.
College football is presently going through a very rough period. It is in a constant state of flux with virtually no rules, except those that govern actual play on the field.
Building a program under these circumstances, especially at a Group of 5 level, is becoming more and more difficult with NIL money being thrown around like never before and the transfer portal essentially insuring free agency for all players.
In some ways, Golesh and USF officials seem almost oblivious to this. There are a lot of positive vibes reverberating around campus and the USF community right now with the upgrading of facilities including a new on-campus stadium that is expected to be ready in a few years.
Although they don’t talk openly about it, as USF has gained it’s football footing those in charge of the athletic department and others who provide financial support are working to shed USF’s Group of 5 identity in favor of joining a Power 4 conference.
That will center around the improved facilities and, hopefully, a consistently competitive football team. “We want to get this going in the direction everyone wants it to be going,” Golesh said recently on his coaches show posted on USF’s football website.
He added there were two ways to go about the rebuilding process. “You can try and put your very best team together in year one, but it’s really hard to sustain that.
“We came in here with the approach we’re going to build it from the ground up,” Golesh continued. “Yes, we’re going to use the transfer portal and fill holes as we need to, but more than anything, we’re going to recruit young guys that grew up in the Florida-Georgia region.
“We’re going to build with local guys and we’re going to bring them in and give them all the resources that we can possibly give them to develop on the field, in the weight room, socially and academically,” Golesh said, “and we’re going to build a sustainable program that’s got four classes that as you go you actually have sustainable success for years to come.”
But can you do that looking at today’s college landscape, especially at a Group of 5 level?
Already, Group of 5 teams are becoming a feeder system for the Power 4 schools, and this will likely become more pronounced in the future. Will quarterback Byrum Brown really stay at USF his entire career? And could anybody blame him if he left to maximize his potential, and how do you keep replacing players like that?
And if your best players continue to leave, how can you build or sustain anything? In his first two years at USF, Golesh has never beaten an FBS team with a winning record, and this includes teams in the AAC.
In theory, he has a good plan. Whether he can actually pull it off, though, is another question.
by Patrick Zier | Nov 12, 2024 |
It was not a good weekend for college football in Florida, but then, not many of them are.
Florida State lost. Again. This time to Notre Dame. That comes as no surprise, really, because FSU always loses. The wheels have come off and there’s no way to put them back on.
“Extremely disappointing,” Noles Coach Mike Norvell said afterwards according to the school’s website. “I do not question our players’ effort. I thought they played hard.”
Have you ever noticed that, when a team is playing poorly, the losing coach almost always says his players “played hard”?
Florida’s Billy Napier, his team staggering to the finish crushed by what might be the toughest schedule in the country and a ton of injuries, took a different approach after watching the Gators get annihilated by Texas.
Everybody wants to know what’s wrong with Florida and how it can be fixed, but Napier was not ready to go there. “I’m not ready to do that,” he said at a press conference posted on the team’s website. And since he has been given a vote of confidence by Florida Athletic Director Scott Stricklin, he probably doesn’t have to.
Then there’s Central Florida, just down the road from Gainesville and a team which has been yo-yoing up and down this season as it adjusts to big boy football. The Knights are coming off a beat down by Arizona State.
UCF Coach Gus Malzahn, speaking at a press conference on his school’s website, said that “Obviously, this was another disappointing loss. Our guys fought hard, but we didn’t play good enough to win,” he added. Maybe, if Malzahn wasn’t shuffling quarterbacks in and out the way some people shuffle cards, the Knights might have more continuity. And maybe that would help them eliminate the critical mistakes that are costing them games.
And finally there is Miami, the shining star of Florida’s Gold Coast and the only team in the state that can strike fear into its opponents. The Canes have the highest scoring offense in the country, the best passing game and are also first in total offense.
But against a pedestrian Georgia Tech team they should have whipped easily, the Canes slipped and fell, for the first time this year. Unlike the others, though, there was no crying. Winners don’t cry, even when they lose
Speaking at a post game press conference carried by the Miami website, Canes Coach Mario Cristobal took a different approach.
“The reality of it is you have to own it,” Cristobal commented. “You have to own every bit of it. All of us, in this profession, when you take one on the chin like that you have to be a grown man, you’ve got to own it.”
Miami has a bye this week before it finishes up with two very winnable games that could leave it 11-1 and a hot contender for the playoffs and, dare we say it, the national championship.
Florida continues to struggle for bowl eligibility with a murderous stretch run against nationally ranked LSU and Ole Miss before finally getting a breather against FSU.
And the Seminoles? They have two weeks to get ready for Charleston Southern before playing Florida. Charleston Southern. There’s no way FSU can lose that game, is there?
by Patrick Zier | Nov 9, 2024 |
Joey Logano is a good guy but he hasn’t had a good year and he doesn’t deserve to be competing for NASCAR’S Cup Series championship. Neither does his teammate, Ryan Blaney, although either of them could win it.
You can, however, make a case for Tyler Reddick and William Byron, the other two drivers left standing as we come to the end of NASAR’s convoluted playoff system. What you can’t make a case for is why, if NASCAR really wants to determine a true champion, it would even use this kind of format.
By almost any measure, the most dominant driver in NASCAR right now is Kyle Larson, yet because of this system, he has no shot at winning the title.
Old Guy Sport has it’s own way to measure competitiveness , relying on laps led under green and top five finishes, and heading into the last race at Phoenix, Larson has 680 points. That’s more than Logano, Blaney and Austin Cindric, the third member of Team Penske, have combined, and by a good margin. Combined, the three Penske drivers have 562 points.
When NASCAR put in this latest version of its playoffs, it was trying to create something similar to the NFL. That’s fine, except the NFL and NASCAR are totally different, and what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for the other.
The biggest problem is that in the NFL, teams control their own destiny. In NASCAR, they do not. If you do everything right in a football game and play better than the other guy, you will win.
But even if you do everything right in NASCAR, you can still lose. You can get caught up in a wreck not of your doing, get knocked into the wall because of somebody else’s mistake. And if that happens, you’re done.
Which brings up another handicap NASCAR drivers face that NFL players don’t. In NASCAR, you don’t get a second chance. An NFL quarterback can throw an interception in the first quarter and the winning touchdown pass in the fourth. But if something happens to you during a race, it’s over.
Still, it is what it is and one of the four – Logano, Blaney, Reddick or Byron – is going to be the champ when all is said and done. First off, let’s say none of them is likely going to win the race although Blaney has an outside shot. But Denny Hamlin, with 277 Old Guy Sport competition points on short tracks and Larson, with 275, would seem better poised to win.
The champion, then, will be the highest finisher among the four and pick here is Blaney. Blaney had a top five finish in the first race at Phoenix and, along with Byron, has done the best of the four on short tracks overall. Using the OGS competition index, Blaney has 102 short track points, Byron, 104.
But whoever wins, Blaney, Byron, Reddick or Logano, it will be a cheap championship. They may be competing against each other, and Byron and Reddick belong, but this should be about the best in NASCAR and the best in NASCAR this year are Larson, Hamlin, Christopher Bell, Reddick and Byron. No one else is even close.
