BUDDY MARTIN BLOG: An Ode To College Football: Remember When This Great Game Owned Our Hearts?

Gator fans are hoping what they see on the horizon isn't Fool's Gold. (Chris Spears photo)

“Billy Napier, you’d better be real. Because you’re already winning the hopes and affections of Dan Mullen refugees …”

By BUDDY MARTIN

GatorBaitMedia.com Editor

This ain’t Bear Bryant’s football anymore, in case you haven’t noticed. To a neurotic football fan, all this change feels risky, with egg-shell vulnerability, hanging by a thread to a trundled pickup truck lashed to a Rocky Mountain Boulder in a stiff chinook wind. Well, you get the idea in all that over-blown hyperbole.

It was a long way up, and it’s a long way down. Don’t look! It could go either way. Oh, the fragility of Florida football fortunes. Gaze only at blue skies, eye level.

This is for the despairing Gator fans who were often trapped by Covid, clinging to a shred of hope, sometimes almost broken in spirit, sitting at home in the pandemic stupor, watching Hallmark movies while eating from a gallon of butter pecan or cherry Garcia, appealing to their better angels in orange and blue. It ain’t easy.

Is that you? You have waited patiently. You all want better. You see a bright shiny thing on the horizon, hoping against hope it is not Fool’s Gold again.

Billy Napier, you’d better be real. Because you’re already winning the hopes and affections of Dan Mullen refugees, all the while seeking a lost treasure chest of Gator football.

There is an upside to this new regime called trust. And it’s starting to trend upward. Even Napier confessed to a group in Tampa the other day that he likes his new job more than when he arrived on Dec. 5 – a job that seems to change daily in the whirlwind of transfer portal/NIL horrors and opportunities.

Loyalty and long-term commitment are on the endangered species list these days. There’s a whole lot of tire-kicking by both athlete and school, over-the-table deals that once came under it in McDonald’s bags -- only the bags have gotten bigger. Publix-size.

I am confused, yet optimistic. Is this the bigger, better game we wanted, the Super Conference many people (like me) have envisioned as sort of a junior NFL? Did I miss the episodes or chapters where the good guys ride in on white stallions and assure us all is going to be well?

There is a truth about The Great Game that can only be settled out behind the barn on Saturday, in the trenches and the end zone. September 3, we need you to hurry up and get here.

I confess my sins. A long time ago, I yearned for that CFB Super Conference — wrote about it, campaigned for it, endorsed it, even predicted it. Now I am beginning to feel somewhat conflicted -- if not complicit -- in the abject confusion created by the growth and expansion of the game that I love.

Frankly, a lot of my football-apostle pals and I are starting to get nervous about the state of things. And I’m sorry I took for granted what our forefathers built -- the pure joy of the game that has elicited our loyalties, captured our hearts and inspired regions and communities all these years.

It was in a weak moment in the vast CFB wasteland of New York City that I began to dream up a way of perhaps making the game more relevant in The Big Apple: Something that would compete with the NFL.

This was in the early 1980s when the NFL was on the rise, when only Penn State, Syracuse and maybe Army on occasion were worthy of sending our reporter to cover them. The college football package needed more relevancy, which meant more eyeballs for TV, which meant more inter-conference games, which meant a better playoff system than the bowls had to offer.

When I was sports editor of the largest New York City newspaper and worked with my friend Larry Klein, a former NCAA publicist, we would sit and plot ways make CFB more attractive nationally in a manner that those old Notre Dame-Army games in Yankee Stadium did back in the day. In that 1946 Fighting Irish-Black Knight classic, tickets priced at $1 were being scalped for as much as $250 apiece on gameday.

We thought for a minute the BCS might become that. We almost made it.

Some days I now worry about the game imploding. Because the NCAA and CFB couldn’t get their acts together on how to share revenues with the players or assemble a competent body to govern a playoff system, we have this chaos – “four teams, six teams, 12 teams, a dollar, all for an expanded playoffs stand up and holler!”

To quote that Nike slogan, “JUST DO IT!”

Trey Dean with Napier, who's finding his new home very comfortable (Chris Spears Photo)

Back to Billy Napier. For weeks now I have challenged myself and my guests on The Buddy Martin Show to take off their Ray Bans and, just for a moment, look into the orange and blue prism of optimism and tell me if they can see beyond their impartiality any good news in the tea leaves. This may sound easy, but it’s not. It’s like challenging a physician to forgo his or her Oath of Hippocrates.

Fans are often not fond of fair and objective beat-writing journalists because they don’t raise their pom-poms and would prefer to see the bottle both half full and half empty. Objectivity is often viewed by fans as disloyalty, disrespect or even ignorance.

On our live streaming show, we often stretch the limits of inquiring about the journalists’ neutrality and, for the most part they play along. Some have gotten in trouble with their editors for what is perceived by them as over-the-top opinions, but we’re not trying to be Sixty Minutes, here, only create good dialogue and conversation.

This recent week we had Allan Taylor of The Athletic on, one of our favorite journalists with a high football IQ who studies every move of this Gator football program and offers keen insights.

The first bit of good news I’d seen for Gator fans lately was one of the early betting lines that has Napier’s team favored by 2.5 points in its opening game Sept. 3 vs. highly rated Utah, who right now sits in the lower half of the Top Ten pre-season projections.

“Since Napier came aboard, I think that’s the one upset pick I could make for Florida,” said Taylor. “Because no one will have seen what Napier and his staff are trying to do at Florida yet. Number two, I like the geographical advantage of Utah having to come down here and play in that steamy atmosphere of The Swamp.”

"AR-15, reporting for duty sir." Gator fans may be saluting him soon. (UAA Photo)

What Taylor also projected was that he could see Anthony Richardson’s potential favorably compared to that of Cam Newton’s pack mule-like antics of 2011 when he carried Auburn on his back to a 12-0 season and national championship. Not at the same level, of course.

“I could see Richardson having a breakout year -- not necessarily a Heisman year – but enough to win a couple of games and elevate their chances. But again, I’m just not sold on all the pieces around him.”

Some of those missing pieces are a speed burner wide receiver, another offensive lineman or two and some depth in the defensive line.

At the same time, it’s been a consensus that Patrick Toney’s defense will be smarter, less mistake-prone and more productive in takeaway turnovers. One reason is the acumen and teaching skills of cornerbacks guru Corey Raymond.

Meanwhile, Napier’s reputation as a brilliant planner, strategist and solid recruiter has been noticed among his peers and his name is often being mentioned as a rising star.

After interviewing about a dozen of Napier’s players personally, it feels to me like he has made a buy-in connection and his era has started off on the right foot. And he agrees.

“I’ve had a chance to live in the house a little bit, look around a little bit, ask a lot of questions, do a lot of listening and start solving some of these problems that we have,” he recently told a group of avid Gators in Tampa. “The University of Florida is a very capable place. It has done it before, and it has potential to do it again.”

“Capable” was just the right word, but it also fits their new coach. The only difference is that the school has already done it. Will Billy Napier do it, too?