Time to switch again; maybe this time we'll get lucky

By Carlton Reese

GatorBait Media

Well, we’ve tried the nickel slots and the penny slots and not much luck there. I suppose it’s time to move to a new machine, perhaps the quarter slots this time and hope we hit the jackpot. So it seems with college football programs all trying to hit on the perfect coach that will lead their team the promised land of championship glory.

No one knows which candidate will be the next “Michealangelo” as Dick Vitale used to call any coach at the top of his profession, and it all seems just a stroke of luck as to which school lands the right person for the job. So now, with Florida handing Billy Napier his pink slip, it’s time for the University of Florida to start pumping coins into another one-armed bandit and hope three bars land on that center line.

That’s exactly what it feels like: pulling the lever and hoping for those bars, hitting on a soft 17 and hoping a 4 is dealt, or letting it all ride on black 33. Ron Zook was young and energetic, a great recruiter who was loved by his players – let’s play that machine! Must have been a cold one, so let’s try this Urban Meyer fellow. Jackpot! Two national titles. Will Muschamp looks like a promising game – just busted. Jim McElwain, the “quarterback whisperer” – now that’s playing with house money! Busted. Dan Mullen has some nice pretty lights flashing – a few good payouts, but that machine went cold so let’s go to another.

Enter Billy Napier, who won’t dress up as Darth Vader and whose wife won’t make out with the players – seems like a safe bet. Well, as far as slot machines go, Napier never produced a payout, so now we’re looking for a new game.

That’s’ all this is, an exercise in playing enough hands until we’re finally dealt a straight flush. A pair of 5s? Fold. New hand, please. Three queens? Not bad, but let’s go for the really big score shall we? New hand, please. It will never end.

Why are some programs great and others not? It could be money, especially these days where great recruiting is simply offering a big check – facilities schmilities, culture schmulture, tradition schmadition – show me the money. What makes a great program generally boils down to two things and all the pieces seem to fall in place soon after: the right coach and the right quarterback, and no one knows for certain who fits the bill until it has already happened.

Remember Chip Kelly? He guided Oregon in its best days and was the next “evil genius” of college football. When he returned to the college ranks from an embarrassing stint in the NFL, the team that landed Kelly was certain to have won the lottery. That was UCLA and Kelly set that program back to the dark ages.

Remember Kirby Smart? He’d never been a head coach in his life and Georgia took him mainly because he was one of their own. Did anyone believe he would be the next Nick Saban? Well, here we are nine years later and they’re about to carve his image on the side of Stone Mountain.

How about Clark Lea? He’d never been a head coach in his life before Vanderbilt handed the keys to its jalopy over to him.  No one unrelated to Lea ever considered he would be anything more than the next batch of sausage ground up in that graveyard of coaches, and for three years he seemed poised to be another in a line of nameless former Vandy head coaches. Today, his name is on everyone's lips as the next rising star, which may have as much to do with his quarterback, Diego Pavia, as anything else.

Remember a guy named Todd Golden? He was no one’s fair-haired boy when he came to UF, but now he’s bagged a natty. We hoped it would work and, son of gun, it has. We pulled the Golden lever and the tokens came flying out non-stop. It looks like a smart hire, but really, wasn’t it as much luck that he has turned out to be so good?

So where does this leave the University of Florida? In the present time, it leaves the Gators conceding its most important game of the year, which comes in two weeks against Georgia. Georgia is not dominant and certainly beatable against the talent Florida will put on the field, but does anyone think the Bulldogs could ever lose in a million years to a team that is trotting out an interim coach to manage his first game?

Firing a coach midseason is akin to a baseball team dealing its star pitcher for three top prospects at the trading deadline. It means the team is not trying to win any more games and hoping there is a long-term payoff. That’s right, a gamble.

Some might argue that Florida’s best chance of beating Georgia, or anyone else for that matter, was actually to fire Napier right now. With someone else calling the plays, maybe the Florida offense will rise from the dead and perform feats of fancy we all believed it could all along!

All metaphors aside, the Napier experiment was a bust. We were all rooting for him simply because we want the Florida Gators to be the big, bad boy of the SEC it once was. Under Napier, this was never going to happen, not because he is a bad coach, but because his style just did not fit.

The last two coaches that won championships at the University of Florida were both braggadocios, some might even say arrogant and pompous, and that might be just what it takes to win here. Florida has to beat Georgia, LSU and Florida State every year in addition to being better and more relevant than Miami. That is a tall order and not meant for a “gee willigers, aww shucks” kind of guy. It takes a “You can’t spell Citrus without UT” kind of guy.

When the powers that be choose their next head coach for the University of Florida football team, it should probably look for that unlikeable curmudgeon that draws the ire of opposing fans and enjoys triggering them in the process. Consider it to be the Thermidorean Reaction of the coaching carousel. The defensive guy didn’t work out, so next go with the quarterback whisperer. The weird genius didn’t work out, so next go with the simple man of faith who is quick to turn the other cheek. That didn’t work out, so next go with Gordon Gekko.

No matter what Florida does at this point, it’s all quite literally a crap shoot or another game of cards. We folded on the Napier hand, now let’s hope we are dealt that flush. We just rolled a 7, hand the dice over to someone else for that hard 8. Either way, it all seems so very random – spin the wheel and hope your guy works out; if not, fold him and try again.

There are many who will claim to have knowledge on who is the right hire, but not me. I’m not so foolish as to think I can tell what ping pong balls are going to come through the chute and that’s what the next hire will be: another series of numbers on the keno card we hope spells future fortune. Just remember, in this game, the house always wins.