Gator Country brings you a new podcast to get you updated on everything Florida Gators football and recruiting heading into the bowl game.

Andrew Spivey and Nick de la Torre break down the news of Geoff Collins leaving Florida for the Temple, plus talk about who can take his spot.

Andrew and Nick also talk about the mood around the program and why the Gators are struggling in recruiting.

TRANSCRIPT:

 

Andrew:                 What’s up, Gator Country? Your man, Andrew Spivey, here with Nicholas de la Torre. Nicholas, little bit of a break, but we’re alive. We’re back. Let’s go.

Nick:                         Ready to go. Bowl game is inching closer, and crazy to think that the football season only has one game left.

Andrew:                 Yeah. I started thinking about that the other day, but your man over here got excited too, because you know what that means? It is less than 60 days before pitchers and catchers report to spring training, which means life’s fine for me.

Nick:                         We need to talk about your obsession with the Braves. Probably not in this podcast, but we need to have a talk about that, a serious sit down.

Andrew:                 It’s all good. It’s all good. Definitely fine. When it comes to the end of the season, means the normal. Coaching changes, recruiting gets hot. This, that, and the other. It’s all comes about when championship’s over with. Florida got a taste of it on Tuesday when Geoff Collins leaves to go to Temple. I think you and I can agree, no surprise. We thought Collins was going somewhere. Last year it was UCF last year was the hot one. We had heard that Georgia Tech opened, he was going to go to Georgia Tech possibly. So it was just a lot of things, and I think it was one of those things where Collins was ready to go. Temple came about, and he went.

Nick:                         Listen, Geoff Collins, Dan Mullin calls it a lateral move. Geoff Collins is a smart man. He probably had, as most of Florida’s coaches do, aspirations of being a head coach. “Hey, I’m a defensive coordinator. Shoot. Look what Florida has on defense. I might be able to go in there for a couple years and end up with that head coaching job.”

Andrew:                 Yeah. I think that’s, here’s the deal. A lot of people were criticizing Collins because he played a lot of zone. It didn’t matter what he played. That was good. He ran a good defense, in my opinion.

Nick:                         It was an aggressive defense.

Andrew:                 Yeah.

Nick:                         You play some zone to free up being able to bring an extra guy blitzing, and there’s give and take.

Andrew:                 That’s what I was going to say, and then people were, “Well, they should blitz more.” That kind of stuff. Everyone can be criticized. Hell, people get on Nick Saban all the time because he plays too much man, and you’re going to get beat. That’s just part of the nature of the business. I think that it was a good move for him, for sure, and, you know, everyone’s like, “Well, it has to be Randy Shannon get the job.” No, not necessarily. I do think he probably ends up getting the play calling duties. He didn’t call plays, and we’ve heard that he’s wanted to call plays, so I do think that he probably gets the play calling duty, but it opens up a situation where you can be creative with what you do.

Do you go out and hire a safety coach that Geoff Collins was, or do you go out and hire a guy to help Randy with the linebackers? Do you go find a guy to help Rumph with the defensive line? You can be creative there, because Gray can coach all the positions. He did that at Virginia Tech, just doesn’t do it here. Shannon’s done lin