The Alligator Army Weekly Open Thread, Vol. CXLV

This is supposed to be one of the most exciting times to run a college football website.

A coach gets fired, and you swap out the negativity, doom-saying, and arguments of a bad season or a poor stretch for the positivity, hope, and arguments about what could be. This is a time to sell subscriptions or sunshine, one in which a lot of words about things that will not come to pass are easy to write and profitable to publish.

I’ll be honest: I’m tired, man.

This is my third time covering the end of a Florida football coach’s tenure culminating in a firing at Alligator Army, and none of them have been fun or exciting for me, even if all have been justified. I take no pleasure in seeing even people I don’t like — Dan Mullen does not fit this category — lose jobs and have dreams dashed, even if those people are millionaires who will ultimately be just fine; I feel plenty of heartache for the scores of players and support staffers and so on and so forth who have their lives more meaningfully changed by the firing of the millionaire responsible for bringing them to a school or a football program.

And I’m physically tired, too, with sleeping through the night being a relatively rare occurrence of late. Taking this job as seriously as I do has something to do with that, I’m convinced, and I was really, really hoping this season could be fun and light and allow me to relax at least a little. A tailspin into a coaching search is just about the opposite of that.

Florida will play on. I’ll write more words. Mullen will find other work.

But this stop-and-start cycle wears on a man. Or on me, anyway.