I'M not thinking or SAYING anything of the sort. Perhaps it wasn't aimed at me, per se, but if so it strikes me as ridiculous to find myself even having to answer such a charge: There is only you and I commenting on it here, after all, and I neither said nor implied ANYTHING LIKE what you have argued against above. In fact, I understand and agree with most of what you say--if am a little less trusting of the aims of all involved.
Of COURSE neither the coaching staff nor the administrative executive at UF are to blame for this. But in this particular instance it appears that there was at least "confusion" among the disparate group of individuals supposedly "running" our NIL program in "organized and responsible fashion" (and yes, there is much back-channel, off-the-record hand-wringing concerning certain individuals having over-stepped their actual authority there, not to mention an ongoing "he said/she said" disagreement concerning who promised what, misunderstood or misrepresented what kind of numbers WHEN, etc...).
There is still much of all this that remains unclear, and may well remain so no matter HOW this Rashada thing is resolved. At this point, though, it is hard to imagine it ends well for us, anyway.
Like a lot of us who just love our Gators and have long loved college football, at a certain point I don't CARE about the rarified financial details involved. I'd hoped to see a more level playing field somehow--but I'm not naive. There will have to be SOME (albeit belated) effort here to rein this all in--but as others have already noted, the NCAA SHOULD have foreseen and gotten out ahead of all this maybe ten YEARS ago, rather than just waking up to it now--but THEY were too busy rolling in the huge TV money suddenly flooding their members' coffers to even consider sharing it with the kids who were laying the golden eggs...and if we are waiting for and counting on CONGRESS to somehow fix this, we are in even worse shape than we thought!
Yesterday's comments by Gator Dave on Gator Breakdown I think well-express how a lot of us gage and feel about the whole thing as it relates to us...It was bound to happen to SOMEBODY, not surprising in the least that it would be in Florida (especially that UM would somehow be involved in SOME way), but given all that, call it bad luck, poor planning, or whatever, DAMNIT, it hit us first.
I don't claim nor care to be an expert in the behind-the-scenes rules for and/or machinations required in order to run a proper NIL program, nor its wider, larger context in the cut throat recruiting process. Neither do I intend become one, even for a moment. I don't KNOW what the COACH and his staff will do to somehow deal with all the additional complication and complexity this current mess now adds to an already difficult road ahead.
All I really said about it here amounts to the one obvious truth: Someone messed up SOMEHOW, and here we are: The numbers seem out of wack--and it should NEVER have gone down THIS way no matter WHAT.
The rest is just supposition, frustration and reaction. If I have somehow further clouded the issue, I apologize; none of us are happy about this.
Billy himself characterized it all as "a talent acquisition game". We all know that is true--more so than ever. If we wanna get back to "Elite" status, find ourselves annually competing for National Championships, whatever the particular actual form that takes, we will need our whole program to be run efficiently with that end firmly in view. We NEEDED all that building, etc--we had begun to fall behind some of these OTHER "Top Programs" in that regard. But we must all now recognize that this "brave new world" of NIL, and its relationship to recruiting and the transport portal and everything else is ALSO part of the whole package...we were among the first to recognize that, but it seems we somehow fell behind there, and it bit us on the butt.
I, we, ALL of us just want to see the signs that our whole program is being competently run, everyone pulling together in coordinated fashion, so that this Coach and staff can build a program we can all be proud of, on its way to greatness.
Done right, the journey ITSELF is "the fun part"!
