Midday beer drinking isn’t the norm among University of Florida athletic administrators.
But these weren’t normal times.
This was a major college football coaching search. In fact, in this particular year (2017), it was the major college football coaching search. The Florida head coaching job offered the trappings of an elite gig in the industry—bountiful resources, a fertile recruiting ground, a history of winning—and it began before all other searches, a month before the regular season ended, when Jim McElwain was shown the door.
However, on Day 23 of the search, it hit a snag, one bad enough to send search committee members to a local watering hole to drown their sorrows.