This guy has been held up and hailed as one of the greatest athletic directors college sports has ever seen. Is that true though? Sure, overall UF athletics excelled while he was there. But what is his legacy with regard to the UF football program?

Spurrier was already there when he was hired and many accounts have him as being one of the reasons that Spurrier ultimately left. He felt like he didn’t have Foley’s full support. At the time he left I would wager that he had ten to twelve seasons worth of great college teams left in him had he stayed in Gainesville.

On the heels of Spurrier leaving Foley made a dog of a hire with Ron Zook. A hire so bad he had to fire him in the middle of his third season. At least Zook could recruit though, leaving a good roster for the start of the Meyer era.

Speaking of Meyer, of course Foley gets the credit for hiring him, and it’s easy for people like some dumbass Jacksonville afternoon radio Gator homer/Foley friend to state such. But does anybody really believe that that hire was not largely due to Bernie Machen? I know damn sure I don’t.

So once Meyer finally flames out he takes a gamble on Will Muschamp. Muschamp may still wind up being a pretty good coach, but a lot of heads were being scratched over UF hiring an assistant with no head coaching experience. As is well documented, the results were awful. At least he was a pretty good recruiter too, although that manifest itself pretty much on the defense only. Muschamp ushered in an era of offensive misery in Gainesville that is still going strong and he coached the team to perhaps the most galling loss in the history of the program, to Georgia Southern, in 2013.

So, once Foley finally wised up and fired Muschamp, he pulled his most disastrous stunt yet of his reign, Jim McElwain. And by stunt, I’m talking about the fact the he actually camped out in that loser’s home, determined not to leave until he agreed to become the new Gator coach. We’re not talking about Nick Saban here. Jim McElwain??? This is the guy this genius decided he could not do without? To the point of embarrasing himself to get him to agree to come to Gainesville? Well, one would think that McElwain must be the next Spurrier or Meyer with the way Foley conducted himself. Instead, he turned out to be the biggest disaster of Foley’s tenure. Sure, he won the East by default his first two years but holy crap what a horrific coach. And not only is he a terrible coach, he couldn’t recruit worth a damn, which makes UF’s current dearth of talent his, and Foley’s fault. Now people are recognizing that and are saying that this is a two or three year rebuild for Florida, which would’ve seemed unthinkable even just two or three years ago.

And lastly, UF’s current football problem isn’t relegated to just Foley’s disastrous hires, but also in large part to his insufferable arrogance and refusal to believe that he had to keep up with the arms race with regard to facilities. The result of this arrogance is a pretty stunning lack of modern football facilities like you’ll find at most football power schools. Let’s say you have a recruit who has narrowed his choices down to UF and Clemson or UF and Alabama. Once that kid sees the facilities at UF and compares them to the other school’s facilities UF doesn’t stand a chance to land him. And this stunning failure to plan and lack of foresight is largely the fault of one man... Jeremy Foley.

So, in light of his neglect of the true cash cow of Florida athletics, can Jeremy Foley really be considered one of the greatest athletic directors college sports has seen? I think not.