Jim McElwain's tenure at Florida had plenty of highs and more than enough lows by the time it ended after the Georgia game. However, Sports Illustrated writer and Gainesville native Andy Staples recently detailed exactly how his time there got cut short and why he was not as good a coach as people hoped.
He specifically mentioned the organizational style of McElwain and how he tried to emulate his former boss in Nick Saban, but wasn't quite equipped to do so. And that actually led to several players going off on their own for a strength coach.
"McElwain talked about having a similar organizational structure to Saban's, but he didn't inherent Saban's attention to detail. During McElwain's final year at Florida, some Gators were paying their own way to be trained elsewhere in Gainesville by former Olympian Tim Montgomery. That should have been a glaring red flag with regard to the Gators' strength program, but nothing was done to correct the issues that caused the players to seek help outside the program."
New head coach Dan Mullen already stated that the strength and conditioning program is going to look drastically different next year and now we know why. Staples also mentioned that some of McElwain's assistant coaches were not good recruiters either and couldn't compete with some of the other powerhouses flooding into the state to steal away talent.
