It’s a common college football trope that a team firing its head coach ends up a bit like Wile E. Coyote running off of a cliff. They can defy gravity for some short period of time, but then they inevitably look down and plunge into the ravine.
It happened the last time Florida fired a coach. The Gators beat a similarly mediocre FSU team right after Dan Mullen was fired but face planted in a 29-17 loss to UCF in the Gasparilla Bowl. Elsewhere this very year, UCLA got a three-game boost a week after new management took over but then got demolished 56-6 by a pitiless Indiana team and fell to Nebraska after that.
It appears to have happened again to the Gators. They were a play or two away from upsetting Georgia in a game where they legitimately were in it the whole way. There was nothing fluky or misleading about the near-miss. However a week later, they went on the road to chilly Lexington, Kentucky and got their clocks cleaned by a Wildcat team that had only one other win over a power conference team in 2025.
It’s disappointing, though hardly the worst possible outcome. Sometimes there is no floating at all but an immediate fall after a coach was fired, or maybe even after it became clear that the coach was on his way to the unemployment line. I am thinking here of when the Gators went down 42-7 to Georgia when everyone knew Jim McElwain was about to be canned and then largely sputtered the rest of the way.
But then other times, a team can turn things around after a firing. A famous example is when USC went 6-2 under Ed Orgeron’s interim watch after Lane Kiffin was fired. Or, think about the Gators after Ron Zook was fired. Zook was allowed to coach out the season, and the team rallied around him. They didn’t quite have enough to beat a 10-2 Georgia team right after, but they won three straight after including the famous Ron Zook Field game over FSU. They did eventually find the bottom of the ravine, though, in a 27-10 Peach Bowl loss to Miami where everyone in orange and blue from the players to the fans realized very quickly after kickoff they’d rather have not been there.
This weekend’s Florida game against Ole Miss is not short of storylines, from Lane Kiffin to Lane Kiffin to even Lane Kiffin. However, it also is the pivot point to see how the story of this season ends. It’s still important because every season matters, even lost ones where the administration realizes the program has no future unless it makes a leadership change.
It still is entirely possible that the team will be just as up-and-down the rest of the way as it has been so far. This team that beat Texas and pushed Georgia also lost to USF and was blown out by Kentucky.
It also is possible that things fizzle out and they end up 3-9. If DJ Lagway doesn’t take his benching well and Florida has to lean on a true freshman behind center, that’ll certainly up the level of difficulty. Plus, UF likely will be an underdog the rest of the way. They’re already an 11.5-point underdog this weekend according to the ESPN Bet line for the game. Looking at the present SP+ ratings, which can be used to predict score margins on a neutral field, the Gators should be about a 15-point dog to Ole Miss, ten-point underdog to Tennessee, and even a five-point underdog to Florida State. You could adjust those UT and FSU lines for home field advantage if you want, and certainly the latter game will be affected by whether the Seminoles will have an interim coach of their own in that one.
But then again, they could climb back out of the ravine and get it together for the final three. It’s going to be difficult with both Wilsons Tre and Dallas out for the year plus a lot of missing defensive backs, but Caleb Banks moved from out to doubtful on the availability report this week. Even getting a 70% Banks back for the final two could be a real factor between winning and losing.
The tea leaves simply aren’t clear yet. To take a prominent example, I don’t take Tank Hawkins’s choice to redshirt as a sign of quit in the team. He’s barely played and probably will go pro in something other than sports, but he’s fast enough that he could have a major role on a lower tier P4 or upper tier G5 team, so preserving eligibility matters to him. I also didn’t see any obvious loafing in the loss to UK, though it doesn’t take much of a drop in mental effort to make everyone a hair too slow on everything and lead to a bad loss against an SEC team.
No one is auditioning for a potential future coach; Kiffin spent more time watching these guys play while preparing for last year’s matchup as well as this week’s game than he’ll see in the 60 minutes of game clock on Saturday. Same goes for anyone eyeing the portal, as no program out there is evaluating solely on the post-firing matchups. That said, there is all the incentive in the world for the players to keep trying hard whether because they’re looking to the draft, hoping to impress the next staff, or wanting to build leverage for transferring.
I hope to see a replay of last year where UF surprises the world and beats a very good Ole Miss team. However, I expect to see something similar to this year’s Miami game, where Florida goes full-out for the whole four quarters but simply is too limited to keep it close the whole way. I fear a repeat of last week where the game plan just doesn’t have enough and the interim staff doesn’t have the coaching chops to make adjustments, leading to a blowout loss.
Any of those are still on the table, and which of them happens is probably a strong indication of what we’ll see the two weeks after as well.