"Richt had a three hour meeting with Blake James on Saturday afternoon, during the course of which he agreed to overhaul the offense. Sunday morning, Richt called James and indicated that he wasn’t comfortable firing his staff, and that he’d prefer to retire instead (this saved the school 20m).
At this point, Rudy Fernandez (chief of staff to the President of UM, also SVP communications), who’s very close to Diaz Jr., started telling the board and James that UM had to retain Diaz.
Simultaneously, David Epstein and Manny Kadre, who are also the BoT for UM (and are also very close with Manny Diaz Sr., former mayor of Miami) started pressuring James to interview Diaz ASAP.
While this was all happening, Jeff Soffer (whose mother is the namesake of the indoor practice facility—among a family of billionaires) was reportedly ready to pony up 10m for the buyout of Mario Cristobal. Adding to this, Cristobal’s wife was interested in the move, however I haven’t seen texts about Mario’s personal interest.
On Sunday night, James interviewed Diaz, who expressed his interest in the UM job, but also mentioned that he couldn’t keep stringing Temple along, as he was in the midst of assembling a staff, on top of recruiting starting next week. Diaz Jr. informed James that he was leaving for Philadelphia within the next few days (Monday/Tuesday) and they would have to make an immediate decision.
The rest is history, as Diaz was offered the job on Sunday evening."
Let's re-visit this narration of what went down when Jr was hired. I need someone to explain this to me like I'm in elementary school.... Where is the outrage over the abundant conflict of interests that seem to be at play here?? Nowhere in all of this is there any indication that anyone is doing anything worth a **** for the betterment of the program. Holy **** does the UM board need a massive fumigation. I got to get off this board for a bit because my health is deteriorating from watching this **** show
