re: 2024 Recruiting Class

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2024 Recruiting Class
Will Lagway sign?

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4:30 per his schedule.

It was probably Baugh.

That’s disappointing

I believe they thought that Smith was going to flip from OSU. Of course, that didn't happen.

By the end of the day we will have a good insight into Napier's future at UF.

Or lack thereof

Texas went through this in the 10s. There were some boosters that wanted to get back to competing for championships and doing what needed to be done. More saw the program was still making a lot of money and didn't really care for the headache. Took them until this year to finally get back out of the hole they started digging in Mack's final years.

Florida lead the SEC in attendance this year despite being worse than average. From what I have read from various places, there are still penny pinchers in the UAA who are still doing things like not letting Napier fire Hocke outright because they don't want to pay the buyout.

I'm not defending Napier entirely - boosters don't make those shitty game-day calls - but if that is true, you have to wonder where else the UAA's parsimoniousness is getting in the way.

Where I think theCAW is wrong is that Florida doesn't have to choose between being an academic powerhouse and a football powerhouse. I work in academia, and those are not zero sum games. If anything, Florida's academic requirements for athletes has loosened in the past several years from what I understand, and the UAA isn't kicking any more of those profits back to the the academic side of the house than they ever were.

Coincidentally, you can look at Texas for an example. They have a lower acceptance rate than UF and WAY more money on the academic side of the house than we do. Forget all of that US News and WSJ BS about rankings. Texas is an academic powerhouse with far more funding to chase the Ivies and Stanford, yet they are also in the playoffs this year. Why? Because starting with hiring Tom Herman, they decided they wanted to win again, despite his not working out.

You can prioritize winning or you can prioritize profit maximization, two things which don't necessarily align with one another. My fear is that the UAA has prioritized profit, and as long as these mediocre efforts are delivering, nothing will change. So we either need fresh blood in the UAA who is willing to spend what it takes to win, or we need to affect the equation as fans enough that the UAA feels it needs to win to make the most money it can. Brand merchandise revenue dips and attendance drops do have an affect. Watching attendance drop over the Strong era at Texas certainly woke them the frick up in their athletics wing of the university.

Florida's prominence on the academic side really doesn't matter either way. It has its own big time donors who don't seem very interested in athletics anyway. This notion that some of you seem to have that academic boosters like Chris Malachowsky would have just given that $25 million to athletics were it not for the eggheads talking him into spending it on academics is just wrong. Those donors aren't interested in funding football, plain and simple. I know this might sound crazy to some of you, but there are a lot of successful people who graduated from Florida who love the university but are also completely ambivalent about athletics there.

My questions for our donors who do drop money on the program would be what do they want? Do they just want athletics to be lucrative? Do they want get to act like minor league Jerry Joneses? Do they want to actually spend what it is going to take to field a playoff caliber program? Have they even accepted what it takes to be a playoff caliber program? Are we just going to remain mediocre because you resent the realities of NIL and just want to pretend you just need the right coach drawing up plays in the dust to win games these days?

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Better get your paper bags ready next year.

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Just reposting this.

Good pickup

Him n Mertz had good chemistry