Florida's facilities have been pointed to as one of the areas that the Gators have fallen behind a bit in the SEC of late. While the Gators are in the process of potentially adding an indoor facility, many other programs in the SEC have invested major dollars in facility upgrades in recent years.

It didn't take Will Muschamp long to take a thinly veiled shot at Florida's facilities after taking the defensive coordinator job at Auburn, mentioning Auburn's top-notch facilities in his opening statement.

"All the facility changes and all the nice things that have happened within this campus is awesome to see," Muschamp said. "I've seen the Wellness Center and I know the student-athlete housing. On the recruiting trail, all the kids that would come to Florida would come to Auburn and tell me how nice the housing was here, so it's good to be on that side of it now. I'm excited about that."

Florida's University Athletics Association doesn't have control over the student dorms that many football players stay in, but they're yet another factor contributing to the growing narrative that the Gators are falling behind in the facilities arms race. Muschamp's comments certainly won't help the Gators any in that regard.

Athletics director Jeremy Foley was pretty blunt when facilities were brought up on Nov. 17 when Muschamp was fired, saying he didn't believe they're an issue for the Gators.

"I wear orange and blue goggles a lot and I'm open to have wide-open eyes, but I don't agree that our facilities have fallen behind," Foley said. "We judge our facilities based on can they help our programs be successful? Do they make an impact on their ability to be successful, whether that's a weight room for football, gymnastics practice studio, what have you. As you look around our facilities, we're not into bell and whistles.

"We're putting a major expansion into our academic center. We're designing that right now. I think when you bring young men and women on campus with their parents, I think their commitment to their to academic success and personal development as human beings is really important, all right? So we're always looking to upgrade our facilities, but we're not getting into an arms race and our facilities aren't any issue, in my opinion, affecting our success. A new coach will come in here, every coach that comes in needs something new, I don't think this meeting room looked like this until Will got here, all right? But that's the way it works. On a major scale that's not impacting our success at all."

Muschamp says recruits would always tell him how nice housing was at Auburn. "It's nice to be on this side of it." — WarEagleExtra (@wareagleextra) December 13, 2014



