When I attended Florida in the years that spanned the end of the Ron Zook era and beginning of the Urban Meyer era, UF was still able to win most games over Georgia one way or another. They weren’t always pretty, but they were still Ws.
UGA did get to pick off the Gators after Zook was fired in ’04, but even that required the Bulldogs scoring points in the fourth quarter to hang onto the lead. One of the stranger games in the series happened the following year in ’05, which ended up Florida’s 14th win in 16 games. The Gators scored touchdowns on their first two drives and then rode them to a 14-10 win. It was torture enough that, while leaving the stadium, a despondent Bulldog attempted to taunt me and the rest of the Gator Band by shouting “you should’ve won by more!” at us.
During that long stretch of Gator dominance and even for a while after, the Florida-Georgia game wasn’t always about that day’s particular Florida-Georgia game for the partisans in red and black. They had to worry about if it was time to fire Ray Goff. Or Jim Donnan. Or Mark Richt, or at least one of his coordinators like Willie Martinez (yes) or Mike Bobo (no).
The tables turned after Meyer left Gainesville. Starting in 2011, Florida fans now wondered if it was time to fire Will Muschamp or at least one of his three offensive coordinators. Or Jim McElwain. UGA fans didn’t have completely smooth sailing once they started beating UF again, as they had more questions about whether it was time to fire Bobo (still no), Todd Grantham (after four years, yes), or Richt (eventually, yes). All that noise quieted down pretty quickly in the second half of the decade.
Last year’s Florida win was supposed to quiet things down in Gainesville. Everyone set it up during the offseason to be the Most Important Game in the Mullen Era, and the Gators passed the test with flying colors. Unfortunately, the quiet barely lasted more than a month.
Since that big win in Jacksonville, Florida has lost twice to severely shorthanded LSU teams, practically no-showed a bowl, and resolutely and determinedly stomped on a couple dozen rakes in a needless loss to Kentucky. By Bill Connelly’s calculations, their postgame win expectancy — how likely were you to win the game given the play-by-play outcomes the teams generated? — against UK this year was a cool 62%. Against LSU last year it was an astonishing 99.4%. Bill hasn’t posted one for this year’s Alabama game that I’ve seen, but a different method gives the Gators a 91% postgame win expectancy.
There are plenty of ways to show on paper how Florida’s been better than its record since the start of 2020. One of them is that some of the better computer rankings like SP+ (5th), FEI (7th), and ESPN’s FPI (7th) still have the Gators in their top tens.
In action against FBS competition, UF is eighth in yards per game and third in yards per play. On defense UF is a decent 28th in yards per game allowed, within ten per game in either direction of the acclaimed Texas A&M and Penn State defenses and one-loss teams Pitt and Baylor. In yards per play, they’re slightly better at 25th and within 0.1 per play of undefeated Michigan State and one-loss teams Alabama, Oklahoma State, Kentucky, Baylor, Auburn, and Oregon. These all are unadjusted for opponent, but this far into the season they’re not horrible for doing a quick and dirty sanity check of where teams are at.
As we all discussed given Mullen’s post-UK comments, yard differentials don’t win you games. They can indicate quality, though, and there’s no good reason why a team with a top-three offense and top-25 defense in terms of yards per play should be sitting on a 4-3 record. But, that’s what you can get when you go down 21-3 in the first quarter, have eight false starts and allow a blocked field goal return TD in the same game, and lose the turnover battle 4-0 while losing the ability to stop counter run plays.
Something is just off about the Florida program right now. A lot really is going right, but the things that go wrong go really wrong, and the head coach refuses to build up enough margin for error to weather those storms. A lot of big decisions need to happen after the season, but there still are five more games to go between now and then. They’re far from meaningless; a number of seniors and likely draft entrants only have five more chances, six if they don’t opt out of the bowl or get injured, to put on the orange and blue.
No one is wondering if some big changes need to happen. It’s beyond obvious; it’s just a question of how many will Mullen actually make. And little is really on the line here in terms of this season’s goals for the Gators. They’re not even going to finish second in the division, much less go to Atlanta or the Playoff. They’re playing for pride and the seniors now.
All of that means that this year’s Cocktail Party can just be about the game itself. It’s about beating a hated rival and nothing more. That’s supposed to be enough for college football teams in such games, and it is for myriad programs that don’t ever have realistic shots at conference or national titles. We hate those guys over there, and so we’re going to try extra hard to beat them.
It’s not about positioning in the standings or rankings. It’s about bragging rights and getting the 1980 jokes off of life support.
It’s about us versus them, on this field, on this day. If Florida can focus on just that and play their best game, they do have a shot to win. It’s not a great shot, but they could pull it off. If so many big swings can go against them in the last season-and-a-half, maybe a big swing could go in their favor for once.
It won’t solve any long-term problems or make any of the needed changes less urgent. It’d feel a whole lot better than losing, though, and for this week, that’s going to have to be enough.