Early Saturday morning, Florida alum and South Florida sports agent Darren Heitner reported the school was negotiating a buyout with the agent for head football coach Jim McElwain.
Why Florida just had to deny it’s negotiating Jim McElwain’s exit
A report earlier Saturday said the Gators were plotting McElwain’s departure and negotiating with his agent.
Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports
The report said that athletic director Scott Stricklin had a statement on McElwain ready to go out after Saturday’s game against Georgia, no matter the outcome.
Boosters, the report said, were already being called to pool their money ahead of a potentially expensive search for McElwain’s successor.
Before that UGA game, the Gators felt compelled to deny the report:
Stricklin explicitly denied any buyout negotiations, but he didn’t deny that Florida was calling boosters or had written up some sort of postgame statement on its coach. It expressed no support for the coach, not that those expressions are meaningful.
McElwain’s 22-11 in three seasons at Florida, with two SEC East championships. But the Gators are a disappointing 3-3 this year. McElwain came under some fire this week after appearing to suggest he’d faced death threats this season, but not producing any explanation to media members or his bosses about those threats.
Gators blog Alligator Army says:
McElwain and Florida would not, on the face, seem likely to part: McElwain just agreed to a contract extension earlier in 2017, and USA TODAY research published just this week suggests his buyout is a shade under $13 million. And while all of the steps outlined here are plausible — boosters routinely pool money to help athletic associations with major personnel moves, athletic directors draft statements and prepare for all manner of possibilities, and agents and schools definitely speak about coaches — they also seem somewhat less plausible in the light of the morning of the Florida-Georgia game.
Even if McElwain’s revelations about death threats and the subsequent weirdness of Florida’s statement on them and McElwain’s not-quite-forthright explanation of them brought the rumor kettle to full boil this week, it would certainly seem to benefit no party involved for news of negotiations to broker McElwain’s departure from Florida to break just hours before kickoff of one of Florida’s biggest games of the year — no party other than Heitner, at least, whose conspicuously-timed tweets could well be featured on College GameDay much like plenty of overheated Sunday morning speculation fills an assortment of NFL studio shows.
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