On the banks of the St. John’s river Dan Mullen and the Florida Gators proved their place in the SEC.
Dan Mullen and the Florida Gators spotted Georgia 14-points with a 75-yard rush on the first offensive play of the game and a busted coverage on the second drive. Then the Gators’ defense settled down and the Florida offense did what they’ve been doing all year long.
Georgia, admittedly, limped into the game with several starters missing on the defensive side of the ball but that, possibly, even put more pressure on Florida to win the game.
There were no excuses available to Mullen and his team. He has a Heisman contender quarterback, two receivers with seven touchdowns, an offense with more firepower than even Steve Spurrier’s offenses in the nineties, and the best kicker in the country to boot. Mullen was 0-2 against Georgia and even worse against Kirby Smart if you go back and look at the games they faced each other when Mullen was at Mississippi State and Smart was Alabama’s defensive coordinator.
Florida needed to get over the hump and they needed to make a statement.
Consider it sent.
“‘Bout time, (it’s) about time,” redshirt junior Kemore Gamble, who was 0-3 vs Georgia said after the game. “It means a lot.
Florida beat the breaks off of Georgia, who most considered to be the second-best team in the SEC behind Alabama, in the first half. After falling behind 14-0 due to two miscues the Gators scored twice on the next two drives. Kyle Trask threw a pick six to give Georgia the lead right back but the redshirt senior led Florida on scoring drives the next five times the offense got the ball.
Trask continues to set records. His four passing touchdowns in the first half gave him five consecutive games with four or more touchdowns, the first SEC quarterback to ever accomplish the feat. Trask’s 474yards are the. Most a Florida quarterback has ever thrown against Georgia in the rivalry, and the second-most in a single game. It was also a career-high for the Texas gunslinger.
The three most prolific stars to a season for a Gator quarterback belong to:
1996: Danny Wuerffel – 920 yards, 10 TD
2007: Tim Tebow – 1454 yards, 17 TD
2020: Kyle Trask – 1416, 18 touchdowns
The difference? Trask’s first four games were against SEC opponents, Wuerffel got to feat on Louisiana Lafayette and Georgia Southern the first two weeks of that season. Tebow got Western Kentucky and Troy to beat up on to start the 2007 season. Trask had to go on the road to Ole Miss and Texas A&M, while playing South Carolina and Missouri also. What Kyle Trask is doing is incredible.
Florida threw wheel route after wheel route and Georgia was either unable to cover it or didn’t expect it. The only player that defended it was Kemore Gamble, who intercepted a pass intended for Nay’Quan Wright in the third quarter — Gamble picked up the first down on his own.
In total, the Gators’ running backs hauled in 10 passes for 212 yards.
“We go to what works. If we, if Coach sees a matchup that he likes, he’s going to attack it,” Trevon Grimes said. “And that’s what he does with all the players, he puts them in a position. So early in the game, we’ve seen that the wheel routes and all this stuff was working, and we just kept executing it and it was a big role in gaining huge chunk yards plays so that helped us out a lot.”
Now, the Florida Gators have the keys to the car. They will play Arkansas, Vanderbilt, Kentucky, Tennessee, and LSU. They will be favored in all five of those games. They would need to lose two of those games to not win the SEC East, so don’t book your hotel rooms in Atlanta just yet, but start looking at prices.
That’s what Florida wants to be with Dan Mullen. For the first two years, the teams were good but faltered in Jacksonville. Saturday’s game, at least in the first half showed the potential and the trajectory of the program.
Dan Mullen wasn’t ready to say this game is a changing of the guard in the SEC East but his quarterback knows how big of a win this was.
“This is all part of the plan, you know. We’ve got to get this big-time win in Jacksonville and we did that, so we’re just getting started now,” Trask said. “We’ve just got to take it one game at a time. We have the power in our hands and we’ve just got to execute and do our job.”