Florida football, hot seat coaches and traditions: A Blitz Podcast

It’s been a rough week and a half for Florida football with transfers and de-commitments. The Saturday Blitz Podcast weighs in on the state of the Gators.

With all momentum pointing in the right direction after a breakthrough first season, Dan Mullen and Florida football have seen their offseason turn rocky in recent weeks. The sexual assault allegations, which have since been dropped, against quarterback Jalon Jones led to his departure, as well as the departure by its prized recruit from the 2019 recruiting cycle: Chris Steele.

Steele and Jones were roommates during the spring at Florida, and Steele lodge complaints against Jones to the coaching staff, hoping to be moved to a different dorm. The allegations against Jones seemingly had a traumatizing affect on the young Steele, enough so that he elected to transfer just a few short months after signing with the Gators.

We discuss the fallout surrounding the situation, and how it has already had an adverse impact on Florida’s future recruiting classes as well. While it shouldn’t be too big of a hindrance on the 2019 Gators, with Kirby Smart and Jeremy Pruitt recruiting so well at rival Eastern division schools, Mullen needs to pick up the pace on the recruiting trail if he wants Florida to be legitimate SEC contenders for the foreseeable future.

We discuss a little bit of where Steele might end up on the podcast, and since the recording he has elected to join Mario Cristobal’s sterling recruiting class at Oregon, which is a place we mentioned as a possibility, though we both figured USC might have made the most sense.

After a lengthy discussion about the goings on in Gainesville, Zach and I moved on to begin some early prognosticating on the 2019 college football season. We both provided early lists of the coaching hot seat, and discussed the coaches we felt were most likely to be fired at some point during, or after, the season. We also talked about what it might take for each coach to maintain his post past 2019.

In our final topic, Zach and I discussed our favorite fan traditions around college football. From the waving to the children’s hospital at Iowa to the rolling of Toomer’s Oaks at Auburn, we run down a list of cherished traditions and discuss how they too can have formative impacts on young fans, as well as some of their meanings beyond the scope of sports.

The college football season is still over three months away from its beginning, but we’ll continue to have interesting topics to discuss each week on the podcast as we try our best to continuously ignore baseball season.

The Saturday Blitz Podcast is part of the FanSided Radio Network on Spreaker. The show goes live every Wednesday morning. You can reach John Mitchell at @jlmitchell93 and Zach Bigalke at @zbigalke on Twitter.