Finally, the sources and flight tracking are over. The Gators have their head man.
To me there’s nothing particularly earth shattering about the hiring process Jeremy Foley went through to get Jim McElwain.
It seems he took the band out to Fort Collins, Colorado, with the idea that the whole deal would be resolved fairly quickly and he’d be returning home with his guy Tuesday or Wednesday. That didn’t happen, so Foley came home and the college football universe waited the agonizingly long time period of little more than 12 hours for word that the deed was officially done.
We don’t have a sarcasm font in this newspaper, but if we did, the last sentence would have been in bold face 36 point. It’s partially my fault, I know, because I cover the team. I have a Twitter account that you probably follow and we live in a 24/7 news cycle but everything seemed like business as usual. What struck me as rather mundane became very sensationalized, but that’s the world we live in.
So what did we learn about the negotiation process from all the access and as heavily as it was covered? For me, not much of anything.
That’s not to say there isn’t merit to covering it like it was, but let’s just take stock of what happened. Foley got on a plane with his people to negotiate. The negotiations met an impasse, one that many of us assumed would come to thanks to the albatross buyout McElwain agreed to. They got over it and everyone moved on.
Florida got its payout number down to a $3 million share to Colorado State over six years and they got McElwain on the hook for a $2 million, "holy crap I really just wanted this deal to get done" fee. UF will also play CSU sometime between 2017-20, with a guaranteed fee of $2 million to be payed to the Rams.
There was fretting Wednesday night, but for my money all parties had come way too far to walk that thing back at that point. Everyone knew Foley wanted McElwain, and everyone knew McElwain wanted Florida. Imagine McElwain then having to go see CSU boosters in the future and his former players with the elephant in the room being that in early December he was one foot out the door.
For Florida, if you missed on this guy it’s not exactly fantastic PR for a fanbase that’s not exactly happy with the optics of the program right now. To miss on its first choice and have to hire the second fiddle would not have been a great look, rebuffed by the little guy CSU. I don’t think that’s a Foley problem, I think that’s a fan problem, but it is still a problem.
But that fretting to me was premature, because everyone had just come too far. It seemed like things needed to be negotiated, so the negotiators went back to the table and negotiated and boom, deal.
"Well why didn’t Florida pay the buyout Tuesday, they could afford it," let me ask you something: you can probably afford to give someone $40, but does that mean you’ll do that if you think you can get the same service for $20? That doesn’t make any sense. In the end, they did work around it and they aren’t on the hook for the full $7.5 million, they’ll pay the lesser amount and they aren’t paying it in a lump sum either.
I’m sorry Jeremy Foley made you wait, I apologize for the inconvenience. But he, McElwain’s camp and CSU had jobs to do in this thing, and they did them. That takes time, and in less than 48 hours, you got your new head coach.
Follow Richard Johnson on Twitter @RagjUF
Athletics director Jeremy Foley speaks to media on Nov. 17.
