The Gators had every opportunity to take down a Top 10 Georgia Bulldogs team on Saturday, but in a game that came down to execution, Florida fell short.
Georgia showed its weaknesses all game long, but the Gators never found a way to take advantage. When the offense can’t take care of the ball and the defense can’t get a stop on third down, it digs a hole too deep to climb out of.
Florida turned it over three times—twice inside its own territory and once on what looked to be a nicely developing drive. Meanwhile, Georgia converted on eight of 14 third down plays, and four of those were for touchdowns.
Following the game, head coach Dan Mullen said it was the first time all season that he didn’t feel his team took a step forward. And that’s including the week of the Kentucky loss.
Despite such poor execution, the Gators were still in the game in the fourth quarter, which says something. But against a good team on such a big stage, the mishaps weigh so much more.
“You just see some frustration out there,” Mullen said. “I think the guys wanted to win so bad that they let that frustration get to them, and that can lead to other mistakes. If you take the comparisons between this week and last week, there were a lot of things to be frustrated about last week, but we didn’t get frustrated. We just kept executing and playing. This week, there was a bunch of things to get frustrated about, and yet, we got frustrated. And I don’t want to say we didn’t want to win last week. These guys know you come to Florida to play in a big game. They’re out there and they want to win, and when something doesn’t go right, the game’s not hanging on any one play.”
Mullen said he expects every single player to be disappointed when they go back and watch the film this week and see the many opportunities that were missed.
This one hurts. But while everyone is hurting, the focus is still ahead.
“As a group, that locker room is a tight unit,” Mullen said. “That’s what great teams do. They all stick together and they work together and they’re looking at the guy next to them and saying, ‘Hey, I hope there’s a lot of guys in the locker room that can’t wait to get back out on the practice field on Monday because I want to fix the couple of things I did wrong. OK, I want to do that, I want to be a little bit better.’ … We’re the Florida Gators. That’s what the standard is here, is greatness. That’s what we want from these guys. I think that’s what these guys in the locker room are learning about.”
That quote may fully encapsulate the difference between last year’s team and this year’s team. Last season, the disappointment in losing was evident, but the drive to move on and do something about it was not.
This team may no longer be playing for a spot in the SEC Championship or the College Football Playoff, but it wasn’t expected to be. There is no consolation for missed opportunities, but Florida’s only two losses are to the teams that will battle it out for the division title next week.
With just four games remaining on the regular season schedule against average or below average teams, the possibility for a 10-2 record in 2018 is very real.
Three of those final four games are in The Swamp, starting with Missouri. The performance in that game will be a good indicator of how close Florida is to where it wants to be and how far it’s come in the last year.
“You definitely want to just keep that Gator standard and try to uphold that,” said junior linebacker David Reese. “Last year, we let Missouri run through us. It was kind of a downhill type of time. We let the rope slip. We just gave up on that season early. So, we just want to show that we’re not the same program.”
I disagree with the hyperbolic headline, that was certainly not a “ beat down”. That was a group of young men that that are becoming a team, a pretty good one. What fswho suffered was a beat down, this was a really close game decided by mistakes, not a beat down!