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gatormarc

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Posts posted by gatormarc

  1. On 2/27/2024 at 1:18 PM, thunderlounge said:


    I agree on credibility, but this also is not the first time it’s been mentioned in the past month or so. Granted it may have been through the same source.

     

    They’d get recruits that aren’t getting love from the top half of the SEC, but don’t want b12 either.

    NU 2.0

    Yes. It was Swaim both times. Not even sure if this is an additional claim by him or if this other Twitter account just brought it back from the dead 6 weeks later for clicks. 

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  2. 1 hour ago, Vertuzzi said:

    3.5 minutes of my fucking life I’ll never get back. None of these SEC skits are funny. These people enjoy the same humour as a midwestern stay-at-home mom. Fucking brutal. Not looking forward to mingling with these Waffle House cunts, excluding Vanderbilt fans. 

    I bet you're fun at tailgates.

  3. Back to the original question to see if I can add anything.

    Gainesville's geographic location within the state is great.

    It's a college city in that the campus does dominate the culture but it also has some actual real-city amenities like museums, regional theater, etc. since UF is the flagship. There's a significant amount of the population there connected to Shands, UF's Teaching Hospital and a large grad student population so it's both a UF connection and also a big demographic separate from an 18 year old underclass student.

    It's also about 2-2.5 hours from Orlando, Tampa, and major beaches on both the gulf and Atlantic, and also about an hour from Jacksonville. So it's never far from a "big city" or touristy things.

    Plenty of in-state kids who couldn't get to UF end up at FSU, UCF, or USF, so it's not unusual for UF students to be traveling to Tally/Orlando/Tampa to party or hang out with old-friends or hosting friends from those other schools. Your nephew would soon enough have friends/roommates with connections to one or all of those cities and an excuse to roadtrip.

    --

    If your nephew is into outdoorsy stuff, Gainesville is basically in the heart of Florida's natural springs. Lots of state parks in the area. Activities like tubing the Itchitucknee and walking down the Devil's Millhopper are part of the student experience.

    --

    If your nephew likes sports, UF is an "everything school" like Texas. A lot of students latch on to something other than just football or basketball. It's a great way to spend time on the cheap. My friends and I went to lots of soccer, volleyball, and baseball games.

    --

    Weather wise, summer is hot and humid. Gainesville gets both Florida extremes. It's interior enough that it doesn't get the coastal breezes. I swear that Orlando has less humidity in August. In the winter, it's usually the edge of the frost/freeze belt.

    --

    Like any big school, UF can be intimidating for a Freshman away from home for the first time, but there's no shortage of activities and things to do. Some kids do better closer to home or on a smaller campus. That's really up to the kid and what they want and need.

     

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  4. 7 minutes ago, locodos said:

    Perhaps, but wasted freshmen will never know the joy of hopping on an old school bus and getting carted off to a 24hr diner that has a 30min wait at 2AM.  Then you get seated and there is a band playing kids songs and the whole restaurant is singing Puff the Magic Dragon.

    That does not exist and it's a tragedy.  

    Also the student ghetto looks very corporate now.

    RIP

    • Burrito Brothers
    • Leonardos
    • Skeeters
    • Balls
    • Copper Monkey
    • Joe's Deli
    • Iveys
    • Rocky Rococco (Chain)
    • CJ's

    Losing the ghetto sucked. So much of my regular schoolday activity was there. I worked in the Dean of Students office so regularly walked over to the Black Student Union or Institute of Hispanic Culture since they were only connected to the campus network by modem. I'd usually grab lunch around there and check out Schoolkids or Hyde n Zeeks to see if they had any new used CDs.

    I've heard that the Mexican place that took over at CJ's is decent but I haven't tried it yet.

    Kids today have The Top, Mojo, Dragonfly, plus they've got access to Blackadder, Swamphead, and First Magnatude. We thought we were cool because we sprung for Killians Irish Red.

    I think the other Leonardo's location is still open.

    I hear that Maui Teriyaki is back too.

     

  5. Agree with what I have seen here.

    It's always fun talking to current and former students. Everyone really has their own experience. The city changes a lot.

    There are definitely more chains now but there's frankly more of everything than when I was at school. The unique local options are still there but they aren't the same as they were before.

  6. https://www.tampabay.com/sports/2024/02/06/florida-state-private-equity-fsu-football-conference-realignment-acc/?fsu

    Inside Project Osceola: Florida State sports’ 9-figure private equity plan
    An ACC exit by 2026? Naming rights to Doak? They’re all mentioned in the 2,500 pages of records we received.

    Spoiler

    By Matt Baker
    Published Yesterday

    The first known mention of the two-word phrase that could revolutionize Florida State sports sits on the top of the third page of a cash projections spreadsheet from September 2022.

    Project Osceola.

    The name is a nod to the Seminoles’ spear-planting symbol. The project is a potential nine-figure private equity investment into FSU sports that could accelerate conference realignment and touch everything from the Tampa Bay Lightning to Minor League Baseball.

    After the sports business website Sportico first reported FSU’s private equity talks in August, the Tampa Bay Times requested public records from the Seminoles. The Times received more than 2,500 pages last week.

    The resulting picture is riddled with redactions and tantalizingly incomplete. Some of the most interesting tidbits are only semi-related — like a potential date for FSU to leave the ACC and a naming sponsor for Doak Campbell Stadium. It’s possible nothing ever materializes beyond due-diligence checklists and presentations labeled “strictly private and confidential.”

    But the emails, PDFs and spreadsheets still provide the deepest, albeit preliminary, glimpse of the complex legal theories, detailed financial discussions and groundbreaking possibilities of Project Osceola.

    The best explanation comes in a September 2022 email from Ken Artin, a public finance attorney at the firm Bryant Miller Olive. State agencies, he wrote, generally can’t become a “joint venture partner, equity partner and anything that looks like that” with a for-profit company. But there’s a workaround, which he called a “super license agreement.”

    FSU can move its intellectual property (like logos and names) to a new university entity. That new entity could license the intellectual property to someone else (a private-equity firm). The firm would then try to profit off that licensed material by using it better, more efficiently or in new ways.

    Within six months, that proposed non-profit entity had a name: FSU NewCo. The specific intellectual property available from FSU NewCo is redacted.

    The companies involved

    In August 2022, FSU and J.P. Morgan signed a non-disclosure agreement to work on a deal with outside investors. At least two private-equity firms were interested.

    One was Arctos, whose sports portfolio includes a share of the Lightning and Red Sox. The other was Sixth Street, which has a stake in the San Antonio Spurs and the sports entertainment company Legends Hospitality.

    FSU signed an exclusivity deal with Sixth Street over the summer.

    Financial terms

    In November 2022, at least two scenarios had $250 million in private equity.

    A second set of figures comes from an “ACC Upside” model in January 2023. It lists a $75 million initial investment plus a $50 million “follow-up equity investment” four years later. By 2032, it projects FSU’s 2032 cash flow to be $197 million — $46 million more than the “No Investment” scenario.

    An email from an attorney at Davis Polk & Wardwell outlines FSU’s proposals in June: $25 million upfront, another $125 million under redacted circumstances plus up to $200 million in future debt “without consent and without additional limitations.”

    Beyond the cash injection, FSU’s goals (as laid out in an October 2022 presentation) included maximizing revenue opportunities to stay nationally competitive, modernizing management structure, ensuring flexibility in any deal and conducting the process in a way that protects FSU “from negative reaction from important constituents.”

    How FSU would use the money

    It’s unclear. Arctos and Sixth Street both wanted “a more concrete answer” in March.

    As FSU considered $250 million scenarios, athletic director Michael Alford and a school financial administrator, Michael Williams, wanted the money upfront for capital projects. J.P. Morgan’s Todd L. Smith responded that FSU “will ‘owe’ investors a return on that,” so “collecting it all up front if we don’t have immediate need or use will ‘cost’ something.”

    Paying off debt would make it easier to divvy up revenue between investors and FSU, according to discussion materials from September 2022. FSU has since approved $265 million in additional debt to renovate Doak Campbell Stadium.

    Additional operating expenses were also mentioned, and a June discussion included an initial purchase and “General Basket” of money FSU could use on anything.

    Could private equity fund FSU’s ACC exit?

    FSU redacted or withheld records as the school and conference litigate the Seminoles’ potential half-billion-dollar exit from the league. But FSU’s ACC future pops out of bars of black; one review featured a “General Basket” and unexplained “Conference Basket.”

    One of the “next steps” listed in October 2022: “Determine use of proceeds, especially in a ‘no realignment’ scenario.” By January 2023, there was a “Leave ACC” budget model. Its commentary is partially redacted, but conference payouts spike from $43 million in 2025 to $96.4 million the next year.

    Football ticket revenue for home games jumps, too. Its 2026 projections are $18.6 million — $3.2 million more than the “Base Case” — in part because of “post-ACC-exit ticket prices in-line with peers.”

    Sixth Street’s due diligence tracker had a March request for conference payout details in the “base case and conference change case.”

    Naming rights to Doak

    Projections for 2026 include naming rights to FSU’s football home, formally called Bobby Bowden Field at Doak S. Campbell Stadium. FSU’s Year 1 revenue ranges from $1.5 million to $5 million, depending on the document and its assumptions. Sponsorship for the basketball arena, the Donald L. Tucker Civic Center, adds another $800,000-$2.6 million.

    USF (Yuengling Center), Florida (Exactech Arena) and UCF (FBC Mortgage Stadium) are among the state teams with corporate names on their buildings. Last season, Georgia Tech tacked on Hyundai Field to the name of its century-old Bobby Dodd Stadium.

    Multiple budgets add a concert series at Doak (four shows with 50,000 spectators each, according to an August model). FSU eventually expects these two revenue streams to top $10 million per year.

    Minor League Baseball in Tallahassee?

    That’s a possibility, according to a 10-year projection the sports consulting firm Navigate presented in 2022. The document lists a $75 million expense for FSU in the 2027 fiscal year for a new baseball stadium; the Seminoles’ Dick Howser Stadium is four decades old. FSU’s baseball revenue nearly doubles to $2.75 million.

    A new revenue source also appears in ’27: “Minor League Baseball Team.” It initially adds a combined $4.1 million in tickets, sponsorship/licensing and facilities. The idea is cited in at least one other document but never detailed.

    Multiple documents cite $8 million in name, image and likeness (NIL) contributions for the ’24 fiscal year. One scenario ups that figure by 2-3% each year. In another, donations spike to $11.1 million in ‘25 and $13.6 million by ‘32.

    These numbers are notable because they’re an official snapshot in a murky marketplace filled with unverifiable, third-party claims. They’re also relevant to Project Osceola; Sixth Street asked about FSU’s NIL partnerships and “plan moving forward” in July.

     

  7. 2 hours ago, LTtxfan said:

    The now: Florida AD Scott Stricklin points to Napier’s recruiting, but the 2024 class (ranked No. 15 by 247Sports composite) was the program’s worst ranking since Napier’s 1st class in 2022 (No. 18).

    I'm not sure what Hayes is going for here. That's only 3 classes, one of which isn't done yet, and also ignores any nuance like transfers including players like Grimsley that spent all of a week at Bama before enrolling at UF but he's not including in this signing class.

  8. 23 hours ago, Juicy said:

    Signing day already happened. Once they moved it to two signing days, the February 1 became no big deal. 

    Last year he interviewed with the Vikings ON the Feb Signing day. It worked out alright. 

    Also, now the rules are different now.

    Anyone who has signed an NLI can request a release without penalty and anyone on campus has 30 days to enter the portal once a head coach leaves.

  9. 6 hours ago, gmr548 said:

    Kentucky and Florida both scream trap game with where they are on the schedule. I'm not particularly worried about either team in a vacuum but given where they fall a slip up would not surprise me. Glad both are at home.

    Texas is sandwiched between rivalry games against Georgia and LSU on Florida's schedule, the game is at DKR, and Texas has a bye week before the game.

    None of that screams trap.

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