You can find plenty of self-help books out there talking about the many stages of various mental plagues.
In certain cases, you’ll read about the stages of fear , sadness, guilt, anger, acceptance, etc. And some talk about the healing aspect of forgiveness.
In one of those old classics you never read, there was a story of Demophoön and the doomed Phyllis, who blossomed as the Tree of Forgiveness — the late, great John Prine sang about it, too.
If there is such a tree in Gainesville — a water oak, I’m guessing — you might find Billy Napier standing in its cooling shade, greeting each apologist with a humble smile and maybe a reassuring “Go Gators .”
Maybe someone can find a similar, whiplash-inducing series of events in the modern era, but frankly, this Florida football turnaround has defied what we thought we knew about these situations: Once the spiral starts, if it’s not stopped quickly, it black-holes everything within reach and sucks the life out of the program until a clean break isn’t just warranted, but necessary.