Paul Finebaum pulls back the curtain on Florida coaching search

As if the coaching carousel wasn’t crazy enough, Florida threw another opening into the mix when it fired Dan Mullen this week. That leaves plenty of names on the table — and ESPN personality Paul Finebaum shared some insight on the process.

Some names thrown around include Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin and Louisiana coach Billy Napier. Finebaum said Napier looks like “the flavor of the month,” but talked about how these names have come up.

He attributed some of the smoke to sports agent Jimmy Sexton, the head of coaching for the Creative Artist Agency.

“Listen, we’ve watched this before,” Finebaum told Matt Barrie on The ESPN College Football Podcast. “James Franklin was the absolute choice at [USC] and Mel Tucker was the guy at LSU and things change with time. What you’re hearing and reading today, I am telling you, is being fed by Jimmy Sexton. I just know how that game is played. Don’t ask me how I know.

“I don’t know who the right choice is yet, but I have a feeling Scott Stricklin has a pretty good idea who it was. I don’t think he would’ve walked in today and pulled this trigger to start a coaching search. I think he’s been thinking about it for a couple weeks. It’s a feeling that he has one or two guys well-established in his head.”

Paul Finebaum: Florida ‘is not an easy job’

Barrie and Finebaum also discussed why Florida is making this move now. Considering the amount of FBS openings and the high profile of the SEC, Barrie argued Florida couldn’t have made this move unless athletic director Scott Stricklin had someone in mind.

“Those are your three stars: Kirby [Smart], Nick [Sabam], Jimbo [Fisher],” Barrie said. “Now you’re going to bring in a new guy that’s probably not going to have any SEC experience, and you’re going to expect of him to go toe-to-toe with three of the biggest names in the sport and say, ‘Hey, [the] last guy had the third-highest winning percentage behind Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer, but good luck. Go get ’em.'”

Finebaum agreed, and called Florida one of the tougher coaching jobs in college football given the recent struggles.

“This is not an easy job,” Finebaum said. “And I think the difficulty of this job is there is a lot of championships on the trophy case and there’s a lot of tradition, but there’s not much present.

“This is a program that has lost to a bad LSU program two years in a row. This is a program that’s lost to Kentucky two out of the last four years. This is a program that has just lost to South Carolina and Missouri with a coach, by the way … [that] got an extension in this calendar year.”