- Nov 9, 2015
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https://www.seccountry.com/auburn/jay-jacobs-resign-retire-auburn-athletics-director
Jacobs left Auburn after serving as AD for 13 years and before that I believe he was at Auburn for a long time in other capacities. He was born in Auburn, Alabama but his family moved to Jacksonville where he attended and graduated from Wolfson High School. He went back to Auburn for college.
So Jacobs is an Auburn man through and through just like Scott Stricklin is a Mississippi State man. What does this mean for Florida? I don't know. Jacobs left Auburn apparently because of several scandals in the athletic department. He knows the SEC and the facilities game/arms race that is played in our conference. But though Florida is a charter member of the SEC, the Gators are somewhat of an outsider in that we are in a more cosmopolitan state (year I know Mayo is not cosmopolitan) and we have traditionally tried to put a little bit more emphasis on academics and avoiding scandal (yeah I know Charley Pell was here} than a lot of the other SEC state schools (Vanderbilt being the obvious exception as a private school). The three other schools that were in the SEC that tried to operate above board (the University of the South aka Sewanee, Tulane, Georgia Tech) all left the SEC. But I also know your loyalty is to which school is writing your paycheck and UF will be writing his checks not Auburn.
The question I have is will Jacobs get frustrated with the administration at UF when he finds out that it may operate a little bit differently than Auburn? Or is that a concern? Also is Jacobs a more experienced athletic administrator and a stronger personality than Stricklin? How will that play out? It just seems with Mullen, Stricklin, and now Jacobs we are shifting gears a little bit and going in a different direction and it may mean we are going to get into the SEC arms race but at what cost? I know changes have to be made from what Foley was trying to do. We have to change the direction of the football program. Nick Saban laughs at All Sports Trophies.
The situation we are in in some ways reminds me of the Doug Dickey - Charley Pell regime change. We hit bottom with Dickey. Our facilities were rock bottom. Then we hired Charley Pell from Clemson a former Alabama player under Bear Bryant and a Bear Bryant prodigy. Pell built us a very powerful football team in 1984 -- one of the best ever at UF, but look what happened. I am not saying anything of the sort is going to take place now. This is a different time. I think Scott Stricklin is a good man, a nice man. He did a good job in Starkville. Sometimes it seems like we don't take care of things and things get so bad that it call for drastic action and we over-correct. But as is obvious, history doesn't always repeat itself. Sometimes it just unfolds.
I hope and expect that at UF we have a standard and our employees will work to meet that standard, not impose their own ideas. We had an idiotic coach that tried that and eventually he was fired for not being a team member and behaving inappropriately (in addition to losing games).
This new hire will be watched, I hope it will work and if not another change will happen.