You're walking into a very good situation. Relatively. Here's what you'll need to know.
Hi. You're our new coach? Good. You've got some cool stuff to mess with around here.
Your roster, despite the record, is pretty good on paper. From 2012 forward, Florida had top-10 recruiting classes stocked with the hyper-agile freaks the state is known for producing. These are mostly on the defensive side of the ball, but more on that in a bit. Just know that there's produce in the fridge, and your shopping list isn't as long as it might have been other places.
It's a good spot for talent shopping, by the way. The Gators can pull from a slew of great recruiting grounds in a talent-stuffed state, and thanks to brand, reach, and budget can often pull recruits from territories well beyond the usual haunts. You'll have to compete with Florida State and Miami for that talent, but that's part of the deal. By the way, you're starting off losing to Jimbo Fisher on that front, and losing badly. Might want to do something about it, like, yesterday.
There are plenty of other perks and niceties, too. It's an SEC job, so you'll be on TV all the time whether you like it or not. (Hell, you've got your own network with ESPN now.) There's money, something you already know. If there weren't, Florida couldn't have worked out your massive buyout at Colorado State.
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There's an expectation of success, but that's a good thing. You wouldn't want to be anywhere where they didn't want to win, and thus didn't go to the trouble of paying you all that money you're about to earn. And you are about to earn that money, aren't you?
You're also walking into a real-life situation, meaning it's never as simple as it sounds. Your boosters? They want results now because the loudest and least satisfied wing of the Florida booster community happens to be the newest, youngest group, the ones who started writing checks after the 2006 and 2008 championships. They're not real patient and would have happily canned Will Muschamp after the 2013 season were it not for the intervention of the athletics director and old-money boosters. They won't be patient with you, either, or with the aging AD who hired you, Ron Zook, and Muschamp.
Oh, about that AD, Jeremy Foley. He's loyal if he likes you, so much so he got Muschamp a fourth year and probably could have kept him if Florida had beaten South Carolina. He may also have some -- suggestions about your staff. He definitely has an office very close to yours, and likes to pop into the film room from time to time. He's your boss, and you'll have to consider how to deal with him, too.
Those facilities, by the wy, are fine and recently upgraded. You'll hear people say how they're inferior, but that's not really the right word. They're adequate, but the recent flood of SEC TV money allowed for some truly palatial facilities to bloom in expected places like Alabama and less-anticipated spots like Starkville. Foley's not wrong. Florida's facilities are good. They are also not the airplane hangar-sized behemoths you see at Michigan, Oklahoma State, Florida State, or pretty much any other power-conference school on the planet or in the SEC. Again: someone recruiting against you will point this out, fair or not.*
*You getting these facilities might be even more remote a possibility after that large buyout goes onto the books, and that's before looking at the real estate available around campus.
There are attendance problems, meaning you'll have to win and be exciting. The school is one of two in the SEC to be a member of the AAU, along with Vanderbilt, so you'll have slightly higher academic strictures than you had at, say, Alabama [Correction:Mizzou and Texas A&M are also AAU member institutions. Blame ignorance and persistent refusal to remember they're in the SEC now for the error.]. The fans will hate it if you don't win by double digits, and you'll have to try to do that with LSU locked in as your permanent cross-divisional rival out of the SEC West.
Oh, and FSU is your out-of-conference rival every year, too. If you try to buffer any of that by scheduling cake-y FCS teams, everyone will justifiably leap down your throat for wasting home games on meaningless scrimmages-for-cash.Try to push your luck and schedule a few hard out-of-conference games, and your athletic director will object. If Florida is the king of anything besides the balanced budget, it's the blatant stuffing of schedules with teams like Eastern Kentucky. (The last time Florida went north? A game at Syracuse in 1991 that Florida lost, 38-21.)
And if you get through that schedule unscathed after somehow inventing a quarterback and an offense around that newly conjured quarterback, you'll still have to play a championship game against an SEC West team. That division's been better than the East for the better part of six years now. If that team is Alabama, you stand a good chance of being pasted to the ceiling of the Georgia Dome as an example for others.
That's if you get there. There's so much that could happen along the way: a long tradition of players being arrested for the misdemeanor-grade recreations of Alachua County, fans moaning about you not beating teams by 20 points, the large subsection of Gator fans who will never love you because you are not this former coach or that one -- it's all there, all the time. Gainesville is just small enough to invite all the intrusions of small-town life, and yet big enough as a program to bring the pressures of a professional team to bear on the shoulders of you, the wealthy-but-soon-to-be-miserable bastard who takes this paycheck.
The last three coach departures from Florida went, in order: got into an altercation with a fraternity and lost to Mississippi State; burnout/breakdown; and fired after ignominious loss at home to program legend.
It's an all-consuming, highly lucrative, and soul-destroying timesuck of a college football head coaching position. It'll come close to destroying your mind in exchange for a degree of success no one will ever be happy with, and all for just a few million a year after taxes.
And here's the funniest part: this is one of the best jobs around. Good luck.