I’m glad you don’t actually believe that. They’re firing him Sunday because of the bye week. I think this decision was made before they beat Texas and before Penn St fired Franklin too. Should have just done it last year. And yeah Stricklin has bungled this pretty badly.
He has, but I'm not sure how much of the last couple of weeks are his fault. He completely 17ed up firing Mullen without having a good backup plan. Too bad he didn't have experience from earlier in his career, possibly in a different sport like basketball, where he could have learned the dangers of firing a solid if not great coach without having good candidates ready. Give a good AD a learning experience like that, and he won't 17 it up the same way again but I guess loafers never had the opportunity to learn a very painful lesson like that.
Then, because he 17ed up firing Mullen without a plan, he let Sunbelt Billy's agent bend him over a barrel and gave him a 7 year, $50M+ deal with a stout buyout.
Then, because he got bent over a barrel by Billy's agent, he didn't want to pull the trigger after year 3 because of the buyout, so he convinced boosters to put that money to NIL instead. In fairness, Florida has had some brutal schedules, and there were signs Billy was going in the right direction last year, beating a ranked Ole Miss and LSU, at the end of the season before beating up on a terrible FSU team and then Tulane in a bowl game. On the other hand, the margin of victories in the losses to good teams probably shouldn't have been outweighed by beating Ole Miss and LSU teams that had some solid wins but just weren't top tier teams.
The rumors getting out this week may realistically not be in his control. He's got to get commitments from boosters, and it's hard to hammer the people ponying up millions for your mistakes for having loose lips. If I was being asked to donate 7 figures because Scotty was over his head, I'd probably be bitching and moaning about it to people too.
So I get trying to line everything up to transition during the bye week to save what they can of the rest of the season, and I get those rumors getting out publicly before they should. But that bed was probably made by his prior decisions, not anything he 17ed up in the last week. Hell, the boosters may be blabbing because they are pissed at him and want him to look bad so there is pressure to get somebody else in charge of the firing process.
