I am not a fan of obscurantism, the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or the full details about something becoming known or realized. I have found that ignoring critical facts or pretending like they do not exist usually serves to further some sort of selfish interest- typically, in its most innocuous form, it’s to win and argument. In its most nefarious forms, it can lead to genocide or prevent necessary progress for civilization.

Over the past four seasons, watching the Gators on Saturdays felt like a labor. Many times, even after a win, the game wrenched every emotion out of me. I know many Gator fans felt the same way. I am not a football guru; I don’t know the intricacies of the spread offense or the merits of a 4-3 defense versus a 3-4 defense. However, no one needed to know any one of those things to see that something was not right with our football team.

Even at this late date, I am still not sure where the failure occurred. I cannot sit here and say that I think our previous coach was a bad coach at the Xs and Os of the game. I know that he wanted to succeed, so it wasn’t an issue of effort or will, pardon the pun.

I am not an insider to the Gator program, so I am not sure what occurred behind the scenes. However, I have my own set of theories, mostly they revolve around the idea that the previous steward of our program simply focused too much on one aspect of our program – the defense, which admittedly, was the strength of this program during his tenure.

Mr. Muschamp knows defense and has landed at Auburn to try to fix their sagging defense, which seems to be the only thing holding them back from toppling Alabama as the dominant team in the West. I wish him well.

However, as a result of the past four years, our athletic director, Jeremy Foley, has become the latest target for some members of the Gator Nation. The chorus shouting against Mr. Foley laments the hiring of Mr. Muschamp to the dilapidated conditions of our antiquated facilities. Moreover, what has transpired over the past couple months with Mr. Muschamp walking away with an approximately $6 million buy out and new job at Auburn and the ability to recruit kids he had been recruiting at Florida has done nothing to quell the criticism.

However, obscurantism and 20/20 hindsight happens to the best of people even Florida Gators. Perhaps a history lesson is order.

So let’s hop in the Wayback Machine and visit 2010. The Florida Gators needed a coach. In 2010, Mr. Muschamp was the head coach-in-waiting at Texas. The University of Texas, thought highly enough of Mr. Muschamp to make him the heir apparent to Mack Brown.

Let’s not pretend that Mr. Muschamp was not a highly regarded assistant coach nationally; it’s simply disingenuous. One of the biggest programs in the country was grooming him to be their head coach. It may not have been a sexy hire like Urban Meyer, but it’s simply not the reach that so many people claim. Mr. Muschamp also grew up in Gainesville; on paper he looked like an extremely viable candidate to coach Florida for decades.

Mr. Muschamp did not need to accept any restrictions on his contract with Florida regarding buy-outs, non-competes (which, may or may not upheld, if vigorously litigated), non-disparagement clauses, or recruiting restrictions. At this point in time, Mr. Muschamp was a valued commodity and had a superior negotiating position.

In all actuality, Mr. Foley probably asked for some form of all of those and Mr. Muschamp simply told him, “No.” At that point, it’s simply a question of what you can live with or not if you want that person to come and coach your program. Painting someone with as much experience as Mr. Foley as some kind of rube that got his lunch money taken by Mr, Muschamp is simply ridiculous.

Moreover, let’s not act like the Gator program was a juggernaut when Mr. Muschamp took over.

Mr. Meyer’s final season was not a banner year and many people had already come to the conclusion that a change in leadership was only a matter of time in Gainesville. Few coaches can come back from the bizarre drama of what happened after the 2009 SEC Championship Game and during the 2010 Sugar Bowl with Mr. Meyer resigning for his health and then coming back. The 2010 football season under Mr. Meyer was no less of a disappointment than any of the last four seasons under Mr. Muschamp. The program was an absolute mess when Mr. Meyer left.

Mr. Muschamp came into the Gator program with a lot of work to do. The dysfunction that he presided over the first season involved cleaning up discipline and the locker room. He kicked off Janoris Jenkins, probably the best player on the team. He had to make the hard choices that his predecessor avoided. Granted he had a bit of a leash to clean up these issues, Mr. Muschamp’s first season saw the Gators struggle to a 7-6 record; however, we lost several close games. Firing him Mr. Muschamp at this point was out of the question because the sample size was not big enough; typically, athletic directors don’t fire coaches after one year.

This is where things get fuzzy for most critics of Foley.

In February 2012, Mr. Foley gave Mr. Muschamp an extension through 2016. Additionally, in August of 2012, before the 2012 season, Mr. Foley gave Mr. Muschamp his final extension through the 2017 season.

So let’s move to the close of the 2012 football season. The Gators finished 11-2. The Gators were a couple of plays from playing for a National Championship that season. Granted, we played a brand of football that not even I could even describe as exciting. However, the Gator program seemed to be on the rise. We had a true sophomore starting quarterback. Mr. Muschamp had brought in a highly regarded recruiting class with lots of skill players that many people believed would help the anemic offense that we saw in 2012. Firing Mr. Muschamp at this point would have caused many people to question Mr. Foley’s sanity.

Thus, the extension that most people complain about was done before Mr. Muschamp’s “one good season”. The last time that the parties addressed any contractual issue before the firing of Mr. Muschamp was in August 2012. At that point the parties were happy with their arrangement. Muschamp and Foley both talked publicly about building something long-term at Florida. In fact, the extension looked downright prescient after National Signing Day in 2013.

You don’t go in and negotiate terms at that point. Why would you mess with a good thing? Besides the Gators looked like a team on the rise.

Optimism abounded in Gator Nation before the 2013 season. I am not going to relive that season, but 4-8 was not what anyone expected. Who knows why Mr. Foley didn’t fire Mr. Muschamp after 2013. I am sure that he considered it, how could he have not? However, there were mitigating factors that probably played a role in his decision. Injuries involving the first and second-string quarterback and our best defensive player in Dominique Easley, probably played a factor. Additionally, we played in a slew of close games despite all the injuries. Finally, that 2012 season was still out there for Mr. Foley to consider. There were arguments for and against retaining Mr. Muschamp; retaining Muschamp after the 2013 season was a judgment call.

At this point, Mr. Muschamp had absolutely no incentive to renegotiate his contract with Florida. No one in Mr. Muschamp’s position would have agreed to the terms that many of Mr. Foley’s critics claim he should have pushed for against Mr. Muschamp.

Sure, after the Missouri game this past season it looked like a bad decision; but those are the risks inherent in negotiating contracts. Neither party can anticipate every possible permutation of risk. Moreover, you face the risk of turning off the other side by pushing too hard on certain issues.

In retrospect, it is simple to see what happened with Mr. Muschamp and think that all of it could have been avoided if Mr. Foley had simply stuck to his guns. It is easy to forget that at some point in time prior to his termination that Mr. Foley and a great many fans, myself included, wanted Mr. Muschamp to coach football at the University of Florida.

Currently, it’s en vogue to question Mr. Foley because of his failure with Mr, Muschamp. Moreover, besides the hiring, many have leveled criticism of his handling of Mr. Muschamp’s contract. Now, it seems that his critics have upped the ante criticizing Mr. Foley for the state of Florida’s football facilities. However, it’s important to keep things in perspective and to look at all the information available, not just the information that supports an argument.

I am not saying that Florida didn’t need an indoor practice facility, to upgrade the athletic dorms, or other upgrades to the football offices; we do. However, to assert that Mr. Foley had allowed our facilities to fall into such a state of disrepair that Florida can’t compete with other schools in the SEC doesn’t really capture the whole issue.

Our athletic department runs in the black. It is one of the few athletic departments that in the country that do. A lot of the criticism regarding the facilities is that our competitors like Bama have built majestic cathedrals to their football demi-gods. What most people fail to mention is that the price tag attached to this largesse. Not rushing head long into a facilities arms race should be something we commend Mr. Foley. All of those shiny new things cost money and most needed to be financed; I commend Mr. Foley for taking a measured approach.

The Florida Gators are now ready to take on additional debt to make upgrades, but its not simply because of the chorus, it’s because the time is right. The economy is slowly improving and Mr. Foley’s slow and steady approach may pay longer-term dividends because our athletic department is not mired in debt like some others in the SEC. This will allow the Gators to be more nimble than other programs. We could be saddled with over $200,000,000.00 in debt like Tennessee because of this economy and reckless spending.

Additionally, the most stinky red herring in all of this is to think that somehow Mr. Foley’s new football coach has suddenly corrected his flawed thinking; that’s the red herring. The facility improvements occurring for Florida’s football program do not happen over the course of two months. They take years to budget for and plan. They do not magically happen because Mr. Jim McElwain suddenly takes over the program.

Claiming that Mr. Foley, who manages an athletic program that many experts consider one of the best in the country, is asleep at the wheel just does not reflect all the facts or, simply, reality. While I do not believe that anyone is above reproach, I think that the stinging accusations leveled against Mr. Foley just do not stand up under rational criticism. Moreover, I have not even rebutted his critics with the extensive string of success in multiple sports over multiple decades that the University of Florida has enjoyed under Mr. Foley. At this point in his tenure, he deserves a little more deference and benefit of doubt.

This is not to say that every decision Mr. Foley makes will pan out. He will have failures; however, if critics take a step back, they will realize that Mr. Foley’s decisions and courses of action were all reasonable under the circumstances, they just did not lead to the desired results. Sometimes bad results happen despite your best intentions. That does not make him a bad athletic director, it only makes him an athletic director that is not perfect – and that athletic director does not exist. So I will take my chances with this one.