Like a brutal history class that forces you to experience the despair and horror of the past on a personal level, so has this football season "progressed". Last week I entered Ben Hill Griffin Stadium only to witness a vivid re-enactment of Waterloo. This was mere prelude as last night I was privy to a historically accurate recreation of the 7^th Calvary at Little Big Horn forever more to be known as Muschamp's Last Stand. All that remains to be played out over the next two weeks is a sad and horrific mash up of the French Reign of Terror enacted on the Killing Fields of Cambodia.

I am deeply saddened by the minor foibles and impossible to overlook flaws, the humbling defeats and crushing embarrassments that the last 21 months have inflicted on us all.

I am sad for Will Muschamp and his family as some call not merely for his ouster, but vilify him in the most demeaning and crude ways. No one feels his failure to bring the Gators into championship contention more deeply than he does. People don't typically try with serious intent to do a bad job and this is certainly not one of those instances. But he is paid and paid quite well to lead this team to victory and success. He is accountable for the results and they are sorely lacking by any scale of measurement. He has been given ample chance and the current situation demands a change and this is the nature of the profession he has chosen.

I am sad for the assistants, most if not all who will also be uprooting their families and scrambling for another job. Again, uncertainty and mobility are a fact of life in their careers, but it is a fact that stings and causes stress to their spouses and children while branding them with the stigma of failure.

I am sad for the players who have worked and sweated in an effort to create a winning team. Booed by their own fans, doubtless to be all but abandoned in Jacksonville and left to wonder about the credo of "in all kinds of weather". They know they have failed to live up to expectations and that this failure will result in the firing of the men who brought them to campus and tried to mold them into a team we could appreciate.

I am sad for Jeremy Foley who is partially accountable for this dark stretch and will have to make the unpleasant call to fire Will Muschamp all while listening to the continued sturm und drang of an unforgiving fanbase.

I am sad for the fans who spend their hard earned money, spend many hours traveling, watching and discussing their team, and who cheer their hearts and lungs out trying to will that team to win only to watch a horrifying spectacle of ineptitude as was presented last night.

UF will move on. If not the next coach then another coach will bring back autumns filled with glory and football joy. The resources and commitment are too great not to come together and again forge a program worthy of accolades. We will make our guesses and predictions on who is next, when it will occur, who the assistants will be, what the offense will look like, who is likely to accept this challenge and who is probably just a pipe dream or bad choice. We will have hope for an unknown future, for glories yet to come and successful teams of which we can once again be proud and boastful. That is for the future, one that I hope will be bright. But we can only actually live in the now. And now, right now, sadness is our lot.