Thoughts of the Day: June 30, 2026

A few thoughts to jump start your Tuesday morning:

The philosophy of William James, considered the father of American psychology, could be paraphrased like this: The decisions you make will form the foundation of your lasting legacy.

When it comes to Florida football, the legacy of the last 15 years is inconsistency that can be traced to bad decisions that probably seemed like a good idea at the moment. Whether it was bad decisions when it came to hiring head coaches or the bad decisions by the coaches themselves, Florida has gone from a consistent championship program into one treading water in a pool of mediocrity. Yogi Berra would have called this déjà vu all over again because the same thing keeps happening. It does seem like a college football version of the movie “Groundhog Day” where every day, or in this case season, seems to be a repeat of the last.

Administration can’t escape the legacy of hiring Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain, Dan Mullen and Billy Napier. Looking back, all four of them arrived promising better days ahead, but instead all four crashed and burned, departing Florida with large amounts of its been swell but now you have to go money in their bank accounts. So blame athletic directors Jeremy Foley and Scott Stricklin for the revolving door of head football coaches since Urban Meyer “retired” following the 2010 season. The buck does, after all, stop at the top of the food chain.

Bad decisions have a way of compounding. While true that Foley and Stricklin hired Muschamp, McElwain, Mullen and Napier, that was just the beginning. The end was brought about by bad decisions by the head coaches themselves. Put the blame where it belongs, on the people who hired them and on the coaches who chose the wrong fork on a road less traveled.

Muschamp had no head coaching experience when Foley hired him. It was like turning the keys to the Caddy to the cabana boy. Even though he was a hot property at the time of his hire, he didn’t have four seasons of head coaching experience to serve as his GPS as Urban Meyer before him. Like Muschamp, McElwain was a former Nick Saban assistant, offensive coordinator on two national championship teams. He did have three years of head coaching experience at Colorado State when hired by Foley. Mullen should have been hired after Urban Meyer retired but when Stricklin hired him in 2018 he had nine years of head coaching experience at Mississippi State. Napier was another former Saban assistant who was a hot name in coaching circles when Stricklin hired him after he spent four very successful seasons in which he turned Louisiana into a Sun Belt power.

On paper, all four were good decisions. Florida did go cheap when hiring them since more expensive coaches would have jumped at the chance to take over the UF program. But, what’s on paper doesn’t always translate into real time success. That’s because hiring the head coach sets off a chain reaction because the head coach then has to make assistant coach and support staff decisions that will impact winning.

In that regard, the legacies of Muschamp, McElwain, Mullen and Napier are tarnished because of bad decisions. There is no escaping the fact that all four were given the opportunity to lead a brand name football program that has a history of winning championships both at the Southeastern Conference and national levels. Much of their inability to produce consistent contenders has everything to do with bad decisions at the coordinator level.

Start with Muschamp’s first offensive coordinator. Charlie Weis was a lousy decision. Despite 16 skill people and seven offensive linemen that eventually spent at least one year in the NFL, the 2011 offense stunk and it carried over to the next three years, two of which saw Brent Pease take the offense to its lowest levels since 1979.

McElwain won 19 games in his first two seasons at UF, but when the NFL defense that Muschamp left behind moved on to the NFL, things went from bad to worse offensively. McElwain’s reputation was an offensive guru but with Doug Nussmeier calling the plays the Gators never averaged more than 27.3 points per game. When season three was flopping, McElwain tried to alleviate the pressure with a whopper of a lie – that he and his family were recipients of death threats. When confronted with the truth, McElwain doubled down on the lie. Another rotten decision, but one that might not have happened if McElwain had hired a competent offensive coordinator in the first place.

Mullen won 21 games his first two years and had the Gators on the verge of making the College Football Playoff in year three. Critics too easily point to Marco Wilson’s shoe toss as the beginning of the end for Mullen, but a look at Todd Grantham’s defense throughout the 2020 season and it’s easy to see his sell-by date had already expired prior to the Wilson incident. Despite encouragement to make changes, Mullen stuck with Grantham, just as he also stuck with offensive line coach Jon Hevesy, two decisions that helped lead to the undoing of the head coach.

Napier was a former Dabo and Saban assistant who won 41 games in four years as a head coach at Louisiana. At Florida where there was far more responsibility for the head coach, Napier was given a blank check that among other things sent players on extended field trips to places like Paris and Tokyo. He should have used some of the money to hire the best possible offensive and defensive coordinators. He decided he was the best play caller on the offensive side and his revolving door of defensive coordinators brought in Austin Armstrong, too young and too inexperienced to get the job done properly.

Four head coaches, all of them who came to Florida with so much promise and each of them gone before their contracts expired. Hindsight says all four were bad decisions but all four made matters worse with their own bad decisions.

This exercise brings us to Jon Sumrall, who has hired Buster Faulkner as his offensive coordinator and Brad White as his defensive coordinator. Based on track records – Sumrall’s plus those of Faulkner and White – this seems to point the Gators in the direction of long term success. Most experts believe Faulkner will be somebody’s Division I head coach within a couple of years. White won’t be on nearly the same fast track as Faulkner, but given the talent he will coach at Florida is vastly superior to what he coached at Kentucky, head coaching opportunities should follow.

If Faulkner and White produce, then Sumrall is going to win. If, as expected, Faulker and White depart for head coaching jobs somewhere else in two or three more years, Sumrall will have to decide who’s next. If the Gators are winning there should be no shortage of outstanding coordinator candidates to take over and keep things going. If the Gators aren't winning big in three or four years, then Sumrall will be gone and the “Groundhog Day” legacy will live on.

It will all come down to making good decisions.

ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT: When the United States faces Bosnia-Herzegovina in the knockout round of the World Cup tomorrow, it could go down as the single most important day for soccer in the history of the country. A win, even though it’s just the next step of an arduous journey toward the impossible dream of winning the championship, could very well have a similar impact as the US hockey team that beat the Russians in the 1980 Winter Olympics at Lake Placid.

That 1980 team of college hockey players upset the world’s greatest hockey power in the semifinals, then went on to win the gold medal, awakening hockey like never before in the United States. In the years since, the US has won two more Olympic Gold Medals and the 2025 US team won the world championship. The US national women’s hockey team has won three Olympic Gold Medals. NHL championships have been won by the Florida Panthers and Tampa Bay Lightning. Florida, a hockey mecca. Who would have thought it?

It all started with the miracle on ice. Do you remember Al Michaels’ famous declaration: “Do you believe in miracles? Yes!”?

It may take a miracle for the US national soccer team to advance much further than the first knockout round game tomorrow, but a win will certainly fuel an unprecedented surge in soccer popularity. If the US team somehow advances to the quarterfinals (eight teams left standing) the television ratings will go through the roof and names like Christian Pulisic will have a chance for true stardom in the eyes of the entire country.

Besides winning at the highest levels on the international stage, producing homegrown talent recognized for stardom around the world is a necessity for soccer in the United States. Ask nearly anyone to name the greatest baseball players in history and you probably hear names like Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Ted Williams mentioned. Football you hear Joe Montana, Roger Staubach and Jerry Rice. Basketball Michael Jordan, Bill Russell and Wilt Chamberlain. All of them American born and American developed.

Soccer? Very few can even name one American produced superstar who has proven it on the international stage.

It’s different on the women’s side. Superstars such as Abby Wambach, Mia Hamm, Michelle Akers and Carli Lloyd have led the US National team to five Olympic Gold Medals and four World Cup championships. Why the US women have had such success and the men have hardly made a dent has to do with the fact soccer is the one sport that American women are never compared to men. This is their sport and they have the great athletes, success, trophies and championships from the highest levels to back them up.

The men are still looking for that breakthrough. Americans will support a winner, which is why tomorrow’s game is so important. Win and it has a crescendo effect that reverberates across the country. Win and the round of 16 game becomes the most watched US men’s team game in history. Get to the quarterfinals and perceptions change like never before.

We saw the miracle of 1980 and what it did for hockey’s popularity across the nation. That it happened in the United States on the biggest international stage created momentum that has continued for 46 years. There is no international stage bigger than the World Cup where the fate of the US team will play itself out in American stadiums with the whole country watching.

For soccer to experience explosive growth in America, the US team has to take advantage of the opportunity to make a statement on American soil. Failure to do so might be like a sighting of Halley’s Comet. The last time Halley’s Comet was seen was 1986. The next appearance will be 2061.