Midday beer drinking isn’t the norm among University of Florida athletic administrators.
But these weren’t normal times.
This was a major college football coaching search. In fact, in this particular year (2017), it was major college football coaching search. The Florida head coaching job offered the trappings of an elite gig in the industry—bountiful resources, a fertile recruiting ground, a history of winning—and it began before all other searches, a month before the regular season ended, when Jim McElwain was shown the door.
However, on day 23 of the search, it hit a snag, one bad enough to send search committee members to a local watering hole to drown their sorrows.
There they were, the people responsible for one of the most important jobs in the Sunshine State—hiring the Gators head football coach—sipping on an adult beverage at a Gainesville bar on a random Tuesday, two days before Thanksgiving, more than three weeks into this pressurized hunt and hours after that snag arose.
The candidate that university officials most courted for the job—including taking two flights to see him and even hosting his girlfriend in Gainesville—had removed his name from consideration. In a phone call, Chip Kelly told athletic director Scott Stricklin that he couldn’t do it.
“We were high on him,” says Laird Veatch, then a Florida administrator and one of the key members of Stricklin’s small search committee. “Sometimes there’s nothing left to do but go and drink.”
