Gators hope McElwain the right elixir
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — At first glance Jim McElwain may not come off as such a flashy hire for the Florida Gators. He’s 52, just one year younger than Miami Dolphins Coach Joe Philbin, and he’s worked the last three years at Colorado State, which to the hottest high school recruits on this side of the country must sound like Siberia.
Take a look at the 10-2 Mountain West team he has built basically from scratch. There’s a brilliant wide receiver on that roster, Rashard Higgins, who grabs attention, not only because he leads major college football in touchdown catches with 17, but because he sports a stylish flat-top fade with a blond streak.
McElwain liked this guy, spotlight personality and all, when nobody else but Louisiana Tech was chasing him. He went to Texas to get the kid. He plugged Higgins into his pro-style offense and the two of them have conjured up some magic together, in combination with quarterback Garrett Grayson, a finalist for the Manning Award.
The point is that hidden inside that basic 29-year coach’s profile is an edgy innovator. We’ll call him Jimmy Mac. We’ll expect him to get better athletes than these, too, once he’s got the cachet of an SEC head coach to carry around through the lush recruiting fields of Florida and the rest of the Southeast.
For that reason, and many others, ESPN’s Paul Finebaum, the grand poobah of SEC talk, instantly tweeted, “I think Jeremy Foley just hired the next Urban Meyer at Florida,” when the word came that the Gators and McElwain had reached an agreement.
I don’t know about putting that kind of pressure on the new man. Meyer, who came to Florida from Utah, won two national titles with the Gators and parlayed that into his dream job at Ohio State.
McElwain can’t help but get more out of the Florida program than Will Muschamp did, however. McElwain will try to get the same high-quality offensive stars that he recruited as Alabama’s offensive coordinator, and come close to doing it. He’ll bring balance to the Gators attack, developing and trusting his quarterbacks to be more than props.
That’s the recipe for filling the Swamp again with fans who aren’t waiting for the worst to happen but instead are hoping for the best.
As for defense, the Gators would do well to hang on to coordinator D.J. Durkin, who already was chosen to run the show in the run-up to a bowl game. If that doesn’t happen, McElwain will have some ideas of his own. He’s connected to all the people who matter in the SEC, from Nick Saban on down.
If this works as well as imagined, it shouldn’t be that tough of a trick to get past Missouri and Georgia and South Carolina in the SEC East. That gets you to Atlanta for the conference championship game and opens the door to every other possibility.
Foley doesn’t have time to worry about what happens if this doesn’t work. He made an aggressive play for McElwain and, despite the foot dragging over the coach’s $7.5 million buyout clause, the Gators got their prime candidate in the space of just five days. That’s picking ‘em up and putting ‘em down, especially when other athletic directors are still stuck in the blocks.
How much Florida paid or didn’t pay to remove that buyout obstacle doesn’t really matter to fans. That’s why Foley gets the big bucks, because he’s always been pretty good about finding more big bucks when necessary to expand the stadium and keep basketball Coach Billy Donovan happy and run the rest of an athletic program that regularly turns up national titles on the women’s and the men’s side.
The next step for McElwain is making a good first impression in front of the microphones at his introductory news conference. Ron Zook and Muschamp talked 10 miles a minute, like they were ready to charge the field and start chasing referees up and down the sidelines.
Jimmy Mac will probably play it cooler than that. He’s been a head coach, just long enough to know what it means.
From everything his former bosses and players say, he’s got a good way of relating to people. The discipline side, Muschamp’s specialty, will be a challenge. It always is at Florida. Everything else we can know about at this point looks good.
Compared to coming up empty on McElwain and then possibly seeing Nebraska rustle up the dough to get him, this is a major relief.
Now it’s up to Jimmy Mac to make a celebrity of himself, and to do it the hard way, one gritty SEC victory at a time.