Boy, do things change quickly in college football.
Less than a week ago, Gators fans were talking about their team potentially winning the rest of their games, getting a rematch with Alabama in the SEC Championship Game and earning the program’s first College Football Playoff berth.
And now, Florida’s season is on the brink of disaster. With two losses, their playoff hopes are shattered. Winning the SEC East will almost take divine intervention at this point. Even making a New Year’s Six bowl game will be an uphill battle.
But, somehow, the No. 20 Gators have to find the inspiration to play seven more regular season games in a way that they can be proud of.
The last two times that the Gators lost two of their first five games, they didn’t respond well. In 2014, they finished the season 7-5 and in the Birmingham Bowl. In 2017, they finished 4-7. In both situations, they found themselves with a head coaching vacancy before the season ended.
The 2021 Gators are confident that they will respond to the early-season adversity much better than those teams did.
“It’s not the end of the world for us,” quarterback Emory Jones said. “We have a lot to play for. We can do a lot of big things still. That’s all we’re trying to do, honestly, just improve from all of the things that we’ve done bad and then just move on from it and continue to get better week to week.”
Coach Dan Mullen said that it’s natural to be frustrated by the way they’ve started this season, but it’s crucial that they channel that frustration in a positive way. They have to use that feeling as motivation to turn things around instead of as an excuse to stop caring.
“Frustration’s an emotion and a mental state,” Mullen said. “A lot of times, frustration can cause negativity and point you in a bad direction. Frustration gets people to do things they don’t want to do. Like I said, once it’s done, it’s done. You can’t change what’s already happened. Now there’s nothing that we can do that can change the results of Saturday night. No matter what we want and how disappointed we are or frustrated we are, we can’t change those results. So, you can use that frustration and the emotion of frustration, and, a lot of times, it turns into a big negative.
“And then all of a sudden, you have one negative, and the frustration caused another negative. And once the second negative’s happened, you can’t change that. That’s happened. You still have to move forward. The biggest one to me is you use the frustration to motivate you. You’ve got to take the frustration and use it to motivate you to find ways to improve.”
His players seem to have received his message, as several of them said very similar things in their time with the media this week. Whether that translates to games or not remains to be seen.
“The main thing Coach Mullen put in our head was that we just need to watch the film and just see everything that we did wrong and know it and improve from it this week,” Jones said. “That’s all we can do right now. So, basically, just moving on from the game and using the frustration as motivation. That’s the message that he used. That’s what we’re going to do as a team, and we’re just going to move on from it and continue to get better.”
As long as the players only listen to their coaches, they should be all right mentally. But, with the ever-increasing influence of social media on young athletes, staying upbeat could prove to be quite the challenge.
Social media sites aren’t a very pleasant place to be right now for the Gators or their fans. Ever since the debacle at Kentucky, Mullen has been criticized for his game plan, his smile after the game, the things he’s said at press conferences and pretty much everything else under the sun. The offensive line is catching heat for its false start penalties. Jones is under fire for not leading a potent downfield passing attack.
As something is repeated again and again, people tend to accept it as the truth. There’s an awful lot of negativity out there right now that the Gators need to block out.
Receiver Jacob Copeland said that won’t be much of an issue for him.
“I feel like I don’t take it as a hard thing, and a lot of people on the team don’t take it as a hard thing because it’s a fact that a lot of those people who say this and that about us [are] not out there Monday through Friday grinding with us on the practice field, and they don’t know what we go through each and every day as a team,” he said.
Another potential pitfall is the temptation to start blaming others for the team’s failures. Certain individuals or groups might play extremely well in a particular game, but the team will lose the game because other areas of the team struggled.
In the case of UF’s loss to Kentucky, the defense played at an extremely high level except for a couple of plays, but the Gators lost because of the offense’s inability to put up points and a blocked field goal.
Even so, the entire team lost that game, so the defensive players can’t point their fingers at the offensive players and blame them for the loss. That’s happened at many schools before, including Florida, and it often leads to a divided locker room and a turbulent conclusion to the season.
Offensive lineman Stewart Reese said that hasn’t been a problem in the days since that loss.
“Being able to come out and everybody take a look in the mirror and say, ‘What could I have done better to help improve our play in the game so that we didn’t lose?’ I think that’s one of the biggest things for us as a team,” Reese said. “I know it’s hard in that situation, but, at the same time, there were many things that everybody could have done better to help improve the outcome of the game.
“Being able to come back as a whole and look at what everybody could have done and everybody holding themselves accountable as well as people holding each other accountable is really the biggest thing moving forward that I feel will keep us together as a team and help us continue to win games.”
The Gators have only practiced a couple of times this week so far, but the early returns are positive, according to the players. They’ve seen a team that is hungry to improve and prove their doubters wrong and not a team that is counting down the days until the season is over. They’re going to keep fighting.
“People have been locked in, very locked in this week,” tight end Kemore Gamble said. “And in the locker room, you can just feel the energy and how everybody … [wants] to get back on the field and just make every other team on this schedule suffer.”
While the trophies that Gators fans rightfully expect are probably out of reach for this team, they still have plenty to play for. They’re playing for their teammates, their coaches, their families, their fans, their futures in this sport and their love of being Gators.
Oh, and they’re also motivated by their love for the game of football, a factor that often gets overlooked when discussing a team’s motivation.
“I think everyone on the team’s got a love for the game,” Gamble said. “We come out here every day and working hard each and every day. If I [didn’t] have love for the game, I know I wouldn’t be out there each and every day practicing hard and busting my behind off and then going out there just wanting to lose. I’m trying to win each and every week.”
Last week is over. It’s Vanderbilt week now. The season hasn’t even reached the midpoint yet. The 2021 Gators will be evaluated and remembered for what they do over the course of the entire season, not just the opening chapter.
“It’s a long year,” Mullen said. “There’s a lot of football still to be played out there. We’ll know what this year is going to be like and what this team and the results of this team is going to be like when the year ends. There’s a lot of factors that are going to go into success during the course of a year and a lot of factors that go into you not being successful. At the end of the year, you’ll see both.”