Jim McElwain needs Gators to focus on the now

The scene on Saturday night in the visitor’s locker room at Neyland Stadium might have been what you would expect, maybe more than you would.

“It just wasn’t a loss. It looked like we lost the national championship,” Austin Appleby said. “That’s what it felt like. It hurt.”

Jim McElwain has lost five games at Florida, including last Saturday to Tennessee, but he’s never seen a locker room like that at Florida.

“The mood in the locker room, there were a lot, a lot, of hurt guys. I’m not sure a couple of the losses last year I could feel that sense of hurt,” he said. “As I told them, it should hurt. Because if it doesn’t, then something is wrong. It means you really don’t care.”

The Gators didn’t lose the National Championship on Saturday. They lost a game. It was an important game, one of Florida’s three traditional rivalry games, but it doesn’t change the goals for Florida. To a man, all six players that spoke with the media immediately following the game reminded that no Florida team has won a National Championship without suffering a loss. It wasn’t a message that McElwain delivered in the locker room that prompted the script from the players.

“I wasn’t even aware of it, I guess now that I think about it,” McElwain said when told about his player’s uniform message. “That’s kind of cool. Maybe I will sleep better, I don’t know.”

McElwain did offer a warning though. There is no time to overlook any opponent, not even for 30 minutes like the Gators did against Tennessee. Florida doesn’t necessarily control their own fate but the Volunteers will travel to Georgia and Texas A&M the next two weeks and finish with Alabama at home for what is the toughest four-game stretch (starting with Florida) of any team in the country. The Gators can still make it to Atlanta, which means they could very well, mathematically speaking, find itself in the College Football Playoff talk at season’s end, but not if they overlook Vanderbilt.

“Unless we take care of this, it’s never going to matter,” said McElwain. “There’s still a lot ahead of us.”

The Gators will be back in the Volunteer State this Saturday. They will take on divisional for Vanderbilt and another opponent, one that hasn’t been too kind to the Gators in the past — a noon kickoff.

“When you look at our track record,” McElwain began. “I don’t know what it is with noon starts a year ago, we were FAU, Vanderbilt and the bowl game, which none of those results were very good. So I think let’s talk about the obvious.”

“Where I came from we played at noon a lot,” Austin Appleby joked about his time at Purdue. “So you wake up early and you get going.”

Saturday the Gators publically expressed their earnest belief that they are a National Championship contender. If they’re going to get there they must stop thinking about a national title and start worrying about winning the now.

“The key is you learn from the past. You learn from history. The future is determined by what you do right now,” McElwain said. “It’s that simple, so what’s our approach moving forward from each individual, from each position group and then ultimately our team is going to really tell how we come out this week.”

Nick de la Torre
A South Florida native, Nick developed a passion for all things sports at a very young age. His love for baseball was solidified when he saw Al Leiter’s no-hitter for the Marlins live in May of 1996. He was able to play baseball in college but quickly realized there isn’t much of a market for short, slow outfielders that hit around the Mendoza line. Wanting to continue with sports in some capacity he studied journalism at the University of Central Florida. Nick got his first start in the business as an intern for a website covering all things related to the NFL draft before spending two seasons covering the Florida football team at Bleacher Report. That job led him to GatorCountry. When he isn’t covering Gator sports, Nick enjoys hitting way too many shots on the golf course, attempting to keep up with his favorite t.v. shows and watching the Heat, Dolphins and Marlins. Follow him on twitter @NickdelatorreGC