In what has become an annual Gator Bait Magazine tradition, Editor Marty Cohen sat down with Florida athletic director Jeremy Foley for an exclusive interview that touched a lot of bases, at home, in the SEC and on a national scope of college athletics. The focus was on the Gator football program, the changing landscape of college athletics, the O’Connell Center, life in the SEC and more. The following is part two of a two-part story featuring choice excerpts from that interview which took place in late June:

Some more global football issues, certainly attendance is a major issue for everybody, on all levels, and it seems like you’ve gone out and tried to look at things from every angle possible, is this just going to be an on-going concern?

“I don’t know, concern may be too strong of a word, it’s an on-going real issue for everybody. One of the reasons the Atlanta Braves are building a new stadium is for the fan experience. One of the reasons the city of Jacksonville put whatever money they did into the stadium in Jacksonville is the fan experience, swimming pools, cabanas. My point is, ask Major League Baseball, ask the NFL, and you’ve got college football, same thing. There are other avenues for our fans to watch the games and we’re respectful of that. We’re not just going to sit here, open the doors and they’re all going to come. You’ve got to make sure of the fan experience, and I don’t think that’s going to change.

“You’ve got the SEC Network coming on and it’ll have three football games on in a day, but like I told someone the other day, the one thing that’s different about this place and a lot of college places is you’ve got people who have been coming to these games since they were 4 or 5 years old. You also have a group of people that are interested in the Gators when they’re winning, and when they’re not, they drop off by the wayside – every fan base has that. So you take the low point of last year, and there were a lot of low points, but Georgia Southern, there were still 80,000-plus people out there and at the end of the game when we were driving, they were loud, engaged. We’ve got great fans but it’s a bigger challenge to keep them because of the other avenues, not so much because they just like the Gators.

“Certainly 4-8 does not help you, so we’ve got to turn that around. There are a lot of successful schools who are fighting the same thing. Not when they’re facing their archrivals or when they’re playing the Gators, but when they have a certain team coming in there, the students aren’t coming – so it’s an on-going issue and all you can do is continue to review it, analyze it, be pro-active, be creative, be innovative, get fan input, not just say, ‘Well that’s just the way it is, people watch the games on TV.’ We’re not going to do that, we’re not going to throw up our hands, we’re going to fight like heck to keep our fans. We’ve got great fans.”

You mentioned the students, and when addressing the attendance issue, this is almost a separate factor. I just read a story about Michigan, school with the highest attendance, and its student attendance has been falling appreciably. This is a group that needs to be cultivated because they’re the season ticket holders of the future, different in a sense than some of the older alumni and segments of the fan base. Is that being looked at from a different angle?

“Oh yeah. We have done some surveys of our students and they have recommended some things that we’re certainly going to attack. We’re not going to take our students for granted either. They are a huge factor in creating the environment here. The Swamp when it’s rocking, the students are a big part of that, The O’Connell Center when it’s rocking, the Rowdy Reptiles are a huge part of that. We’re going to cultivate and pay attention to every facet of our fan base.”

You and I have had this discussion numerous times before, so you know I’m disappointed the league decided to stay with eight conference games and I understand all sides of the equation, but was there a thought process from the SEC to let the playoff system play out a bit and then evaluate what’s best for the league, because it would seem you could always go to nine games, at least after a season or two, but you couldn’t exactly go back to eight games if you added the ninth game now?

“Not really, the bottom line is this league is very difficult, very competitive, a very, very strong league and people were happy playing eight games. Obviously they put the mandate you have to play a ninth game against a major conference opponent, which is what we do anyway. I just think more than anything else, the league has been very successful doing what it’s doing, in terms of the number of teams playing for it all, the number of teams in bowl games, the perception of the league, the rankings, what have you, so there was a little sentiment to not change what’s working. I think that’s the reason it ended where it did.”

We touched on this last year, but I’d like to address it again because football scheduling is always a hot topic of conversation. There are some folks who just don’t buy the stated fact that Florida needs seven home football games to run its athletic program, that the Gators are swimming in dough, etc. Explain why the schedule is constructed like it is and when Florida does play six home games, like it did last season, why it has to be planned for financially for a couple of years prior.

“There’s an impression . . . let’s just call it like it is, the Florida Athletic Association is a well-run business, meaning we balance our budget, we don’t have too much debt service, we try and pay our employees (well) – we’re responsible for everything we spend here, we don’t get any money from the state and we have our own retirement (fund), our own health care, we pay the university every time we utilize their services, and I’m not complaining about that, that’s just the way it is. We have adequate reserves, if we had a rainy day we’d be fine.

“But I think there’s an impression that Florida can just stroke a check, and that’s not accurate. We just went through our budget process, and it was not easy to balance it. You’re looking at no (football) ticket price increase this year, no booster fee increase this year, the SEC Network, where nobody’s projecting any money because we don’t know what that money is going to mean, so you have to balance that budget and when you take a home game out of here, you are taking dollars right off the table.

“When we played in Miami, for three or four consecutive years, we set aside six or seven hundred thousand dollars out of that year’s budget to put toward last year’s budget to make it look like we still had seven home games. If you have debt service covenants, they expect you to have X amount of revenue coming in every year. So that’s not being defensive, that’s just reality.

“Anybody who knows the budget the way we do, can see that, so it is real. And it’s also real to the community. You sit there and take games out, there is an economic impact whenever a football game is in Gainesville, this is where we live. You just cavalierly say, ‘Well too bad for those folks.’ And when we take it off, it doesn’t help them. We will only do that in extraordinary circumstances. We did it in Miami and obviously we’re doing that with Michigan (in a season-opening game in Arlington, Texas in 2017), but the amount of money we’re getting paid to play that game, we can deal with it that year and hopefully the local community can see that. But we’re not going to do that on a regular basis.

“The fact of the matter is when you’re running an entire program, 21 sports with a comprehensive commitment, obviously a sports program that finishes second in the country, it takes dollars to do that, and having seven home games is a huge part of that.”

Along those lines, let’s just say, I’m “receptive” to buying a Porsche. I couldn’t afford it for more than an hour, but I’m still receptive to it. You were quoted as being “receptive” to a game with Miami down the road, and all of a sudden it’s a story and cities are lining up to host the game. Was this receptively blown way, way, way out of proportion?

“That thing did get blown up a bit and I don’t think I had any responsibility in that but if I did, I apologize to anyone about that. That was a 20-second conversation between (Miami athletic director) Blake James and I in California at the AD’s meeting – ‘Would I be receptive?’ ‘Yeah but it would have to be at a neutral site. I’m not going back home-and-home, not doing that again.’ And that’s where it ended. And I’ve had a couple of people like from the city of Orlando, ‘Would you be interested when that day comes?’ Sure we’ll talk to those cities when and if that day comes.

“But when I spoke to Blake James, we didn’t even have a league schedule at that point, I didn’t know if we were playing eight or nine (SEC) games. It was some time in May, and just nothing has happened in that avenue. Would there be an interest at some point in time? Would we be receptive? Yes, it would depend on the dollars, depend on who else we’re playing that year, the open dates we have, all those type of things. Does it work? Time will tell.”