Dan Wolken

USA TODAY Sports

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Will Muschamp is going to save you from your arguments, your analysis, your criticism or your rationalization, depending on which side you fall. There's no need for any of it.

Whether he's the guy to fix Florida football – never mind that he fixed it once, only to watch all that good work crumble almost instantly – will be apparent soon enough.

If you believe he's the supreme motivator who got the Gators within a breath of national championship game in 2012, that's fine. And if you believe he should have been fired for last year's injury-filled 4-8 debacle, well, he's not going to waste a second of time trying to convince you otherwise.

"I totally embrace it," Muschamp told USA TODAY Sports. "It's the expectation every year to go to (the SEC championship game), and if you don't, to me, at Florida, you haven't accomplished what you wanted to accomplish. We've been here three years at Florida and we haven't done that. But I've been an underdog my whole life, so this isn't anything new to me."

Named Texas' head coach in waiting at age 37, hired instead to replace Urban Meyer at 39 and then given a $3 million contract after his first sniff of success, the former Georgia walk-on turned coaching Boy Wonder has reached the crossroads of his career.

Only Muschamp's fight to keep his job at Florida – a topic with enough legitimacy that athletics director Jeremy Foley had to publicly back his coach multiple times, even after announcing last October that Muschamp wouldn't be fired – is not following the usual script.

Coaches on the so-called hot seat are notoriously defensive. They close ranks, make excuses, privately grouse about the outside expectations of their fan base. Then they hope the unpaid 18-to-22 year olds responsible for their livelihoods perform well enough to either keep their job another year or make them attractive enough to land a new five-year contract somewhere else.

Muschamp, however, is not hiding from the scrutiny or rationalizing the arc of his career at Florida, even if there are plenty of excuses for the 7-6 and 4-8 seasons sandwiching that magical 11-2.

Heading into his fourth season, Muschamp knows it's time to win, and pointing to bad luck or injuries for last season's freefall won't change the reality he's facing this fall when the Gators line up against a schedule that includes Alabama, LSU, Missouri, South Carolina and defending national champion Florida State.

"It's not acceptable to go 4-8 at Florida regardless of the circumstances," Muschamp said. "There were some things that occurred within our team that were hard to overcome, and we didn't do a good enough job of managing that. And that's my fault, nobody else's. I need to do a better job."

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It would be easier in some ways for Muschamp to spend this spring trying to rewrite the narrative of last season when the Gators lost key player after key player, including starting quarterback Jeff Driskel to a broken ankle and star defensive tackle Dominique Easley to a torn ACL in September.

Those injuries alone would be enough to derail practically any team, but it was only a fraction of what the Gators had to deal with. Already down a starting receiver and offensive tackle from preseason camp, Florida then lost tailback Matt Jones and linebacker/special teams stud Jeremi Powell during a two-week stretch against LSU and Missouri, not to mention a shoulder injury that severely limited backup quarterback Tyler Murphy before he had to shut it down a few weeks later.

After that, the season came unraveled: seven consecutive losses, a total of 10 season-ending injuries and even stretches where backups to backups weren't available.

Even more frustrating, there was no pattern to the injuries, no training or nutritional issues to point to and easily fix. Although Florida has seen a decrease in soft-tissue injuries like pulled hamstrings and groins, they led the nation in freak accidents like Driskel breaking a bone under the weight of a Tennessee defensive lineman or offensive tackle Tyler Moore breaking his arm in a November scooter accident.

But Muschamp, to his credit, recognized the problems were deeper than just his injury report.

"The worst thing you can do in my opinion is create the band-aid mentality of that's the reason, it's OK," Muschamp said. "To me that creates relief syndrome of (believing) everything's fine when it's not fine."

If it wasn't apparent before that the Gators' offense (even at full strength) was stale and ineffective, it became quite clear on Nov. 23 when Florida suffered its most embarrassing loss of the modern era to Football Championship Subdivision member Georgia Southern, 26-20.

A few days after the season ended, offensive coordinator Brent Pease and offensive line coach Tim Davis were let go and the process of trying to reinvent themselves on that side of the ball began. Muschamp lured Kurt Roper from Duke to help increase the Gators' tempo, play a more exciting brand of offense and utilize the shotgun formation, where Driskel has statistically been more effective over the course of his career.

"Everything is year to year," Roper said when asked about whether Muschamp's status factored into his decision to take the job. "You got to the Sugar Bowl and one game away from competing for the national championship (in 2012), well, what did that mean for him? The next year you have four wins and everybody's on the hot seat. It's year to year. I think it's a great opportunity to go win a lot of football games and coach good players that are hungry to play the game."

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If Florida flops again, hunger certainly won't be the issue. Neither will talent. Though Driskel hasn't been an elite passer, he's experienced and was good enough to beat everybody but Georgia and Louisville in 2012. Perimeter speed should be abundant, and all the injuries on defense last season allowed younger players to get more snaps than expected. The Gators' past three recruiting classes have all been ranked in the top-10. Defensive coordinator D.J. Durkin said the locker room was "the best its been" in terms of commitment and character.

That leaves Muschamp to either weather the storm or, quite fairly, get the blame. Either way, his approach doesn't smack of a desperate coach trying to spin his situation.

"He's been phenomenal," Durkin said. "Just unflappable. He hasn't changed, hasn't freaked out. Yes we've made adjustments in how we do things and taken a critical look at everything, as you should always do, but it's never been a matter of panicking or abandoning what the plan was and that's been great for our coaching staff and our players. There's consistency and stability to what the message is in our program."

Time will tell whether Muschamp has found the right answers or whether the Gators will struggle to get back atop the SEC East and the calls for him to be replaced become more vicious and realistic.

Either way, Muschamp is going to handle with full understanding of the job he has and that only one thing can make the noise go away.

"There's no one in that stadium or in this building who's going to put more pressure on Will Muschamp than Will Muschamp is going to put on himself," he said. "At the end of the day I'm a good football coach, I know that. We've got an outstanding staff and we've got a good football team sitting in our locker room. We need to go produce, and that's no different than last year or the year before. It's all the same to me."