Florida football’s highly anticipated 2025 season is almost here. The No.15 Florida Gators will take on the Long Island University Sharks on August 30th at 7:00 p.m. ET inside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. Saturday’s season opener represents Florida’s 13th-straight sellout and 17th overall under Napier. The week one contest will air on SEC Network+.
Ranked inside the Preseason AP Top 25 for the first time since 2021, Florida plays LIU for the first time in history. Florida’s only prior game vs. a current Northeast Conference team was a 27-14 win over Duquesne in Gainesville on Sept. 30, 1950.
LIU is led by Ron Cooper, who is entering his fourth season as head coach of the Sharks and holds a 12-22 (11-9 NEC) record. In 2024, the Sharks posted a 4-8 (3-3 NEC) record and finished 4th in the NEC.
To learn more about Long Island ahead of their matchup with Florida, I spoke to NEC Blitz’s AJ Mayowski, a comprehensive reporter who covers every team in the NEC.
Here’s our Q&A where we discuss the history of LIU, playing styles, strengths and weaknesses, and head coach Ron Cooper.
Q. On history of LIU against P4 opponents:
“LIU’s only been playing D1 football since 2019- the two branches with athletic departments merged and the D2 LIU-Post football team became the D1 LIU Sharks. Since that time, LIU has never won a game against an FBS opponent, going 0-8. The bright side of this is that the NEC as a conference has only won two FBS games to date (both against MAC teams), so this isn’t really an outlier.
The Sharks have played just three power conference opponents previously, all in the Big 12. In these games, they have been outscored 7-141. It’s not a great statline for the Sharks in these kind of matchups. An NEC team has never before played an SEC team.”
Q. On Scheme and Playing Style of LIU, Strengths, Weaknesses:
“The LIU offense is really fun to watch when it’s clicking. The Sharks are imaginative and very atypical. I’ve spoken to defensive coordinators who have confirmed what you kind of think when you watch them- this is a difficult team to prepare for in our league.
The quarterback is Ethan Greenwood, who was a 3rd team All-American from Stats Perform last season, but what’s most fascinating is that he did this as an all-purpose player. The Sharks are not an option team like you used to see at Georgia Tech, yet Greenwood ran for 913 yars and threw for 921. These are gaudy rushing numbers, but take into account that Greenwood effectively only started the last half of the year and you’ll get some perspective on the type of athlete coming into Gainesville- the Gators will certainly be treating him like a 1,000 yard rusher in the backfield. In all likelihood, he could have ran for 1,500 last season. Greenwood passes the “laugh test” – as in, he’s one of those rare players that is so good that you laugh watching him.
To do that, the Sharks will run zone read and your expected speed option plays, but they’re not a wildcat or option team. One thing that Greenwood excels at is playing sandlot football- the Sharks are the only team I’ve ever seen successfully just have everyone go deep and eventually have the quarterback scramble to get chunk plays. I’m not sure it’ll work as well in The Swamp, though. Another thing the Sharks like to do is play two quarterbacks, so Luca Stanzani will probably see some time, too, and he’s capable and able to win games for LIU just as Greenwood is. They’ll play them both at the same time occasionally, too- each one is an athlete. Last season, the Sharks had an excellent offensive line but got gutted in the portal and lost 4 players to the FBS on the offensive line. OL coach Ian Pace does a tremendous job, though, so you have to trust the offensive line until they give you a reason not to.
Their weakness offensively is just in the amount of players they lost. They had a lot of bad luck early last season and were certainly well beyond their record (4-8) in terms of talent, but many of those skill players are gone now. WR Cory Nicholls caught 21 passes and can block, and Kam Ingram and OJ Ross transferred in from UCF and Arkansas Pine-Bluff respectively to play tailback, but there’s a lot to figure out in the skill depth chart.
Defensively, the Sharks were also sellers in the portal, losing Elijah St. John to Purdue on the defensive line and Etham McCormick to the transfer portal. They like to bring DQ Watkins off of the edge and he’s a good player, but Florida should have an experienced offensive line so he may not get his name called too much this Saturday. Ja’Nyus Morgan is the other edge rusher and he had a sack last year. In the secondary, they’re a strong unit with Todd Bowles Jr. (yes, that Todd Bowles) at safety and the leader of the group. They’ll get Jalen Bell back at the other safety spot, and he was having a very strong freshman season prior to injury midway through the year.
The punter, Will Lynch, is the NEC’s best.”
Q. On Ron Cooper as a Coach
“When I talk to recruits about Coach Cooper, the first thing they tell me is that he was with Nick Saban at Alabama. It’s a big selling point, but there’s a lot more to his past. For one thing, he’s pretty much objectively one of the three best coaches in Eastern Michigan history, having been there in the early 90s before becoming the head coach at Louisville. A little further south from Gainesville, he was the interim at FIU for most of 2016. Gators fans will probably love that he spent time with Coach Spurrier at South Carolina where he coached from 2004-2008 in a variety of roles on the defensive side of the ball. He was brought on initially under Lou Holtz for his final season but kept on staff until he departed for LSU.
Coach Cooper is a Jackson State grad but has been an assistant at South Carolina, Texas A&M, LSU, Arkansas, and Alabama, so he’s definitely familiar with the SEC. The LIU role was something of a geographic outlier for him, but the team recruits Florida along with the northeast, so it does make a lot of sense to have someone with a lot of southeastern ties. He’s won 4 games each season at LIU, but finished tied for 2nd in the NEC in 2023. Historically, NEC out of conference records are not strong and so you’re usually better off looking at how our schools perform in conference to get an idea of how good of a job a coach is doing in our league. By that measure, he’s had a winning record in league play and led in the 4th quarter in two of his 3 league losses last season.”
For more information on LIU, make sure to check out necblitz.com and follow them on X @NecBlitz.