UF's Jim McElwain calmly rebuilding Gators’ program from the ground up

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – For a guy caught in the midst of a recruiting maelstrom, Jim McElwain looked quite relaxed Thursday morning.

The eternally sockless new football coach of the Florida Gators drank coffee from a Styrofoam cup and talked college basketball – “I’m a frustrated basketball player,” he said, reminiscing about his youth in Montana, when he had a key to the high school gym and spent countless hours there shooting hoops.

If he was stressed over the National Letter of Intent melodrama roaring outside his office, McElwain artfully concealed it.

Wednesday morning, No. 1 national recruit Byron Cowart committed to Auburn over the Gators on national TV. Then he didn’t send in his Letter of Intent, sparking several hours of confusion and speculation and general hysteria. Finally, by late afternoon, Cowart got the letter to Auburn. Florida had come in second.

Thursday it was five-star defensive end CeCe Jefferson’s turn to take a ride on the recruiting crazy train. He committed to Florida on Wednesday but a signed letter never followed. The athletic director at Jefferson’s high school described the delay to Yahoo Sports as “a family situation,” and the most popular explanation of the situation was that the player’s father, Leo, would not sign the letter. Leo Jefferson later told Rivals.com’s Mike Farrell that it was his son who was having doubts about the Gators, not him – although the dad went on to fire off several rounds of criticism at McElwain and his staff and said the biggest holdup was the just-announced news that defensive line coach Terrell Williams was leaving Florida. (That assertion about the coaching change being a factor was widely challenged as a convenient excuse.)

Against that tumultuous backdrop, Jim McElwain placidly quoted British economist John Maynard Keynes while discussing the big-picture undertaking of rebuilding a dilapidated blueblood.

“The difficulty lies not in the new ideas,” McElwain said, “but in escaping the old ones.”

There aren’t many football coaches who will go Keynesian in an interview, but Mac went there. Beneath the surface his mind might have been on CeCe Jefferson, but the questions were about a job that is bigger than one player in one recruiting class.

McElwain’s new gig comes with a six-year contract for a reason – there is more modernizing to do at Florida than you might expect.

“Reworking the infrastructure is where we’re at right now,” McElwain said. “We fell behind a little bit, facility-wise. Not that they aren’t nice, but they’re tired.”

What was state of the art in the Spurrier Era now is overdue for an update. The bells and whistles that help sway recruits may carry the whiff of Roman Empire excess, but if everyone else in the Southeastern Conference has them and you don’t, guess who loses out?

One of Florida’s strengths also has been something of a weakness – administrative continuity. Stability and school loyalty flow from athletic director Jeremy Foley, who has been in charge since 1992, throughout the athletic department. But it took the failed Will Muschamp Era to shake some elements of Gator Nation out of its stasis, realizing that doing things the same way they’ve always been done eventually is a ticket to obsolescence.

Thus, construction on Florida’s first indoor practice facility is underway. And there are plans to modernize some of the dorms athletes live in. McElwain wants to change the floor plan of the football offices, too, making them more inviting for players to drop by and visit the coaching staff.

“Jeremy and the administration are behind us 100 percent to get us back to where we should be from that standpoint,” McElwain said. “Those were some of the chinks in our armor that people were using against us. It’s going to be hard for them to do that now.

“Obviously, we’ve been very successful, so there’s a recipe here for that. There’s three national championship trophies over there. There’s three Heisman Trophy statues out there. This is a pretty good place, all right? And yet, staying on the cutting edge is the challenge. … Sometimes when you haven’t been out there and seen some of the things we’re dealing with, it’s hard. But the people that have been here recognize it and say, ‘You know what? We’ve got to get going here.’ That’s a credit to how they see things.”

The way McElwain sees things is through a Nick Saban lens – he used the Saban trigger words “process” and “organization” in the same sentence. But so did the last guy, and that didn’t work out so well.

McElwain is not just a former Saban assistant; he’s closer to a Saban clone in terms of structuring a program. Which is another part of what the former Alabama assistant wants to change at Florida.

“We’ve totally exploded [the organizational chart],” McElwain said. “It’s going to be totally different.”

Much of the emphasis will be on what McElwain terms “player personnel.” Basically, he wants a refurbished support staff that deals with every aspect of a player’s life at Florida – all aimed at enhancing the playing experience, which will in turn enhance recruiting.

“Recruiting is a broad term,” he said. “Basically, everything you do has to be zeroed toward that.”

The first people McElwain had to recruit were the players already at Florida. After largely laying back and observing bowl practices, the new coach stepped forward in January. Among the first assignments he gave the players was to visit the coaches’ offices regularly “to see how I’m doing.”

“It was unbelievable the amount of them who had only been up here to go to the principal’s office,” McElwain said. “That’s not what we want. We’re trying to build a culture of family. I said, ‘There’s going to be days when things aren’t going good, and I need you to pick me up, just the way I’m going to pick you up.’

“I’ve been over-the-top pleased with how they’ve embraced us. They’re hungry.”

Seven years past its last national championship and six years past its last appearance in the SEC title game, there is plenty of hunger at Florida. There is an urgency to pump new life into an outdated blueblood. But Jim McElwain knows the long-term state of the program will be affected by more than the melodrama of a single signing day.

“We’re in an instant gratification society,” he said. “We get mad if we don’t get our hamburger in 45 seconds. You grab your phone every two seconds, right? And yet, to do it right, to build a foundation so it doesn’t crumble – the ones that are consistent build it one brick at a time. That’s what we have to do.”