Ad Disclosure
Blackmon: On field and off, these are the darkest days for Florida Gators fans of all sports
Published:
If it’s always darkest before the dawn, morning is nigh in Gainesville, Florida.
We know this because it can’t possibly get any worse for the University of Florida’s athletic program than it was this week.
Saturday’s 49-17 lambs to the slaughter defeat at No. 5 Texas was merely the icing on a cake baked with shock, scandal and more than a dash of despair.
The Gators, missing 8 starters and several key backups, were helpless from the outset, unable to move against Texas’ outstanding defense and unable to make critical stops on third down against Quinn Ewers and the Longhorns’ offense. The game was settled when Texas scored 3 times in the final 6 minutes of the first half to lead 35-0 at halftime and it was 42-0 before the Gators finally found the scoreboard in the third quarter to extend the nation’s longest streak of games without being shut out to 457 games.
Florida’s ineptitude in Austin, however, was hardly the biggest story in Gator Nation this week.
An alligator is a natural predator to a big steer, but sport doesn’t always imitate life, and this week in Florida athletics was stranger than fiction.
Just one week ago, the Gators led archrival No. 2 Georgia 10-3, with the ball and in position to add to the lead. For the first time since 2020, the Gators were in control of the Cocktail Party, fighting the more talented Dawgs to a stalemate on the line of scrimmage and moving the ball behind an effective run game and their freshman phenom quarterback, DJ Lagway.
Lost in the wilderness for much of the past decade, there was light across the St. John’s River. Florida appeared poised to turn the corner.
All the joy came crashing down in an instant when Lagway was carted off the field after injuring his hamstring on a seemingly innocuous non-contact play late in the second quarter.
Faster than the rolling darkness of an emerging Florida thunderstorm, fate and fortune once again turned on the Gators.
Georgia won the Cocktail Party 34-20, scoring 2 late touchdowns against an exhausted Florida defense, stuck squirming upstream against the current for too long thanks to an offense that struggled to move under third-string quarterback Aidan Warner.
Hope briefly teased a return Monday, when word came that Lagway’s hamstring injury may not be as “significant” as coach Billy Napier originally believed.
But such hope was short lived, as it often is at a program that feels star-crossed at best and cursed, somehow still paying down the ledger of the sins left behind by Urban Meyer’s lawless but fast, furious, prolific reign over the SEC and sport, which delivered Florida 2 national championships and a Heisman Trophy winner in a 3-year span from 2006-2008.
Lagways don’t come around often, though.
Perhaps Lagway could reverse the curse. Surely the voodoo oozing from and enveloping The Swamp like a cloud could be stopped. All it takes is one magnificent quarterback to wake the echoes, no?
“Maybe once a decade you get a player that ready and that talented,” a Georgia assistant texted last Sunday, a day after the Dawgs escaped the Gators after Lagway’s injury. “They will win big if they keep him there. That’s all I know. If I am them, I don’t care what it costs.”
Perhaps thinking the same way, Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin sent notice to the Florida fan base on Thursday that the much-maligned Napier would return to Florida as head coach in 2025.
A message from Scott Stricklin pic.twitter.com/NpLD6ktrHj
— Florida Gators (@FloridaGators) November 7, 2024
Stricklin’s decision came accompanied by news SDS broke that Florida would ratchet up its NIL investments, presumably to help build a team around DJ Lagway that could truly compete for championships.
Rural central Florida basement dwellers were still pondering this decision by Florida when Friday happened.
That’s when news broke that Florida’s young, talented men’s basketball coach, Todd Golden, was the subject of a Title IX investigation for sexual misconduct.
The allegations are gruesome and will certainly spell the 39-year-old Golden’s doom, if true.
According to excellent reporting by the Independent Florida Alligator, Golden is alleged to have engaged in sexual misconduct, including claims that Golden sent photos of his genitalia to various women while traveling for UF. It is also alleged that Golden engaged in a series of unwanted sexual advances on Instagram against former and current UF students, requested sexual favors, and engaged in various types of stalking behaviors.
The Title IX complaint was dated September 27, 2024, but allegations about potential impropriety by Golden date back months. In any event, Golden has coached the Gators for at least 6 weeks while Stricklin and UF have been aware of the Title IX investigation.
Federal law prohibits institutions like UF from commenting on sexual misconduct investigations, largely to protect the privacy of claimants and the due process rights of respondents like Golden. The last thing you want is a repeat of the flawed FSU Title IX investigation into the Jameis Winston rape allegations, where Jimbo Fisher was able to repeatedly make statements such as “there is no victim,” which matriculated in the media and on social media, openly creating animosity in public toward Winston’s accuser and creating a risk of bias in the investigation itself.
Florida is abiding by federal law in not commenting. That’s true. But it’s also fair to argue that Florida’s decision to allow Golden to continue coaching during the pending investigation is a statement in its own right, and one that will be tested when the Gators return to action against Grambling State on Monday night.
The news swirling around Golden, by some measure Stricklin’s most successful coaching hire to date, is the latest blow to the Florida athletic director who has increasingly come under fire and scrutiny from the Florida fan base as his second football hire continues to struggle.
Golden’s scandal is also the 3rd time in 4 years that a Florida head coach hired by Stricklin has come under intense scrutiny or investigation for abusive conduct toward women. The other coaches, Tony Amato (women’s soccer) and Cam Newbauer (women’s basketball) were dismissed or forced to resign.
A third such fiasco at Florida, which for years prided itself on Jeremy Foley’s mantra of a “championship experience with integrity,” might be too large a storm for even Stricklin to weather, even though he remains well-liked by Florida administrators.
It’s assumed, at this point, that Stricklin’s fate is tied to Napier, even with a leadership power vacuum at Florida that includes an interim university president and interim law school and medical school deans. When you spend $84 million per annum on football, as Florida does, per Sportico, you can’t afford to keep failing.
Stricklin’s fate could be decided sooner though if he can’t help navigate the University of Florida out of the current maelstrom engulfing the athletic program in almost every nook and cranny.
A championship experience with integrity is a bold vision. It’s also a reasonable expectation at a university with more athletic national championships than any other SEC institution.
Another blowout loss on the football field and repeated black eyes off the field?
That’s a much darker vision.
Unfortunately for Florida, it can’t get any grimmer than it’s been this week.
Or can it?
Neil Blackmon covers Florida football and the SEC for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
