What? The media loved Muschamp as Florida head coach. Most folks were rooting for him to succeed at coaching the team he rooted for as a kid. The positive media support helped keep him around after the loss to Georgia Southern. I detailed Muschamp's downfall in the Driskel thread.
To sum up what I said in that thread, Muschamp or any other young coach was doomed to fail at Florida ever since Meyer's coaching staff fell apart in 2009.
The media will support him as Auburn DC as well, because he will fix that defense before he decides to leave and become a head coach.
(Later) Mmmm...One more thought (as the Rose Bowl kicks off here...don't know bout y'all, but just can't bring myself to do anything BUT root against FSU in a game like this one...I'm a "Florida boy", born'n'bred--but I'm a "FLORIDA boy", a GATOR forever, thru'n'thru, and just cannot fight the gut-level sour attitude towards everyone and everything 'Nole-related...Still, interestingly enough I feel similar hostility even more strongly with respect to Meyer's OSU squad: Despite the fact that it's against Saban and the Tide, of all people, I may be a lot more into watching that one):
With respect to E-'s main point above, that ANY incoming coach was bound to fail post-Meyer, I understand and even somewhat agree and accept the basic premises upon which his conclusion is based--I just am not so sure it is the case, that there was NO way to "recover, re-establish, build and win" here then. Would have been difficult, harder than we understood at the time (most of us knew and said "the cupboard was bare" at the time, for eg., but how badly and the circumstances of that "bareness", among them and especially that neither the highly-touted QBs we had nor the "future sure-stars" we recruited right after would pan out, not ONE), but it is certainly the case that in ways we didn't, maybe COULDN'T recognize at the time, Muschamp was definitely the wrong guy at the wrong time. Maybe he COULD have been the "RIGHT guy" later, after both he AND us had been through all of that and more, each with other people, in other places. Who knows? But this is exactly why I don't generally dwell on or examine things that way: It doesn't MATTER now. Everyone made the decisions they did, what happened happened, and we all go on from here.
If there's an important "lesson" that we can learn from all of that, one that could help us now and in the future, it is the same one that everyone should ALWAYS either be learning or remembering once more, a group of lessons, really: "Be cold, hard, clear-eyed honest with yourselves, understand your goals and the main things standing in your way from the start, and no matter how strongly you feel about ANY of it, be ready, willing and able to be flexible, adapt and change any and/or all of it as conditions and your understanding of them evolve."