BATON ROUGE, LA — Jalen Tabor walked out of the visiting locker room with a smile on his face.
“Away game? Death Valley,” he jokingly asked the media. “I feel like I’m at the crib.”
The Florida Gators lost two home games to Hurricane Matthew, but if you ask them, they only lost one home game.
“It was this was actually supposed to be a home game, so the way we talked about it was, we’ll end the season undefeated in The Swamp,” Jim McElwain said. “We’re 6-0 in The Swamp this year. That’s pretty cool.”
This wasn’t a home game for Florida. After weeks of posturing on the behalf of LSU, and uncharacteristic verbal jabs thrown between LSU AD Joe Alleva and Florida AD Jeremy Foley Florida settled on making the trip to Baton Rouge to protect the integrity of the Southeastern Conference. Still, despite giving up a home game and agreeing to travel to Baton Rouge for the game, they were still labeled as scared.
Media got in on it, the fans jumped on it and even LSU players took to social media to pile on. The Gators heard and read it all. Jim McElwain told the team that their manhood was being called out and Quincy Wilson took matters into his own hands. As the two teams were on the field warming up, Wilson dipped a shoulder into a LSU player.
“One of their guys was in my way so I bumped into him on purpose,” Wilson said. “We ain’t going out like that.”
Dwayne Thomas was that player and freshman cornerback Chauncey Gardner took exception to it. Gardner That set the two teams off and Leonard Fournette was seen on video shoving Florida defensive backs coach Torrian Gray twice. It was a weird way to start a game that had already seen weird twists and turns over the last 45 days.
LSU, for whatever reason, continued talking this week. Derrius Guice told LSU reporters this week that “they can’t run (from us) anymore.” Arden Key told the same reporters that Florida was scared to come down to Baton Rouge because of the injuries that they had. The Gators kept a running list. They noted everything that was said about them and made sure to remember it when kickoff came.
“They said a lot of things, put targets on their head,” offensive tackle David Sharpe said.” We wanted to whoop their ass today.”
Vegas made Florida a double-digit underdog. The Gators officially closed as a 13.5-point underdog, making this win the biggest upset Florida has had in 40 years.
The box score doesn’t favor the Gators. LSU had 23 first downs to 17 for Florida. The Tigers had more rushing yards, passing yards, held on to the ball for more than 34 minutes and averaged six yards per play. They didn’t, however, score more points than Florida.
“We said that it’s us against the world. We’re all we’ve got, and we’re all we need. To come into a place like this and turn it into The Swamp,” quarterback Austin Appleby said. “I’m so proud of the way our fans came out and I’m so proud of the energy that we brought from the first snap to last snap. We truly were fighting for each other.”
They were called scared and they took offense to that. You didn’t belive them and they took notice. The Florida Gators are SEC East Champions and going back to Atlanta for the second season in a row for the first time since 2008-09.
“It just shocks me that somebody would question the Gators,” McElwain said.
“The way I look at it, they got what they deserved. And it should have been worse.”