The No. 11 Gators did just about everything they needed to do to knock off No. 1 Alabama in the Swamp on Saturday night.
They not only won the line of scrimmage against a team that prides itself on being the bully in the SEC, but they dominated the line of scrimmage. Florida outrushed Alabama 258-91 and averaged six yards per carry in the process.
Quarterback Emory Jones looked much more confident, comfortable and accurate than he did in the first two games of the season. He completed 17 of 27 passes for 181 yards and rushed for 80 yards and a touchdown on 19 carries in the finest game of his career.
The Gators outgained the Crimson Tide 439-324 and outscored them 26-10 over the final three quarters. It was the most yards that Alabama has been outgained by since the 2016 national championship game against Clemson. Those 324 total yards were also the fewest gained by Alabama since 2018 against Mississippi State.
However, almost doing everything they needed to do wasn’t good enough on this night.
The Gators threw an interception, surrendered four first downs via penalty, struggled with open-field tackling early on, missed an extra point and lined up incorrectly on a two-point conversion attempt.
When playing a terrific team like Alabama that doesn’t make many mistakes, you need to take advantage of every opportunity you get. UF didn’t do that, and, as a result, they fell to the Tide 31-29 before the fifth-largest crowd in the history of the Swamp (90,887).
“I think, early on, they kind of came out, hit some plays on us, a couple of mistakes, but, once we settled into the game, as I told you, our guys expected to win the game,” UF coach Dan Mullen said. “We just dug ourselves an early hole we had to dig ourselves out of. There’s just so many things you could point to during the course of the game that could flip it one way or the other. We have to find a way to make those plays to always flip it in our direction.
“I think we have the opportunity to be a pretty good team this year. There’s a lot of things we’ve got to fix up and we’ve got to get better at, but I think we have an opportunity to be a pretty good football team. Give them credit; they’re an excellent football team. Obviously, Nick [Saban] does a great job within the program and continuing to have guys play at an extremely high level. I thought we had a good plan offensively and defensively, and I thought our guys executed really well for the most part.”
It looked like the Tide (3-0, 1-0 SEC) might roll over the Gators (2-1, 0-1) for a blowout victory in the first quarter.
Alabama took advantage of a questionable pass interference call on Trey Dean and a poor angle by Rashad Torrence on a third-and-9 play to move right down the field on its opening possession. On second-and-goal, quarterback Bryce Young fired a pass into the left flat for Jase McClellan. McClellan caught the pass, slipped free of a tackle attempt and snuck into the end zone to give the visitors a quick 7-0 lead.
Jones led the Gators into the red zone on the Gators’ first possession. After Justin Shorter couldn’t make the catch on a tightly covered slant route on third-and-6, the Gators settled for a 25-yard field goal by Chris Howard to make it 7-3.
On the next drive, Kaiir Elam was flagged for pass interference against John Metchie on a third-and-7 play along the near sideline. Five plays later, Young connected with tight end Jahleel Billingsley, who was wide open following a well-executed rub route, for a 26-yard score.
On third-and-10 on the ensuing possession, Jones got pressured by Drew Sanders, which forced him to throw the ball before Xzavier Henderson had turned around to look for the ball. The pass sailed high, and Jalyn Armour-Davis intercepted it.
Young threw his third touchdown pass of the opening quarter just moments later by dumping off a pass to running back Brian Robinson, who made a defender miss in the open field and barreled his way into the end zone.
Just like that, it was 21-3, and the once-raucous crowd became cranky, irate and disgusted by what they had seen. It just felt like the Gators were going to get curb stomped like so many have against Alabama under Saban. They couldn’t throw the ball, and the defense couldn’t even get in the proper positions to make tackles.
But the Gators didn’t back down. They did what felt impossible at the time – they scratched and clawed their back into it by leaning on the ground game and tightening up the defense.
Alabama gained just three yards of total offense on 10 plays in the second quarter.
“[I] think sometimes guys, you get in big environments, guys try to make plays,” Mullen said. “Do your job within the scheme call, whether it’s offense, defense. Go out there. We make the call. Execute the defensive call. And if you do that within that scheme, you’re going to have the opportunity to make plays if you do what you’re supposed to do.”
Midway through the second quarter, the Gators picked up a first down on fourth-and-6 when Josh Jobe was penalized for pass interference against Jacob Copeland. On the next play, running back Malik Davis took the handoff, sprinted through a hole so large you could drive a car through it, made one guy miss in the open field and dragged a defender into the end zone for a 26-yard touchdown.
Howard pushed the extra point well to the right, though, which made it 21-9 at halftime. That missed extra point would come back to haunt them later.
Davis did most of the heavy lifting on UF’s first possession of the second half, piling up 27 yards on three carries and catching a pass for five yards. Dameon Pierce finished things off with a 3-yard score on fourth-and-1 to make it 21-16 and rejuvenate the crowd.
Once again, though, defensive mistakes caused their momentum to end quickly. The Tide converted two third-and-longs, the first coming on a pass interference penalty on Elam and the second on a 9-yard completion from Young to Cameron Latu in the red zone.
Robinson strolled in untouched around the left edge for a 3-yard score on fourth-and-inches to extend Alabama’s lead back out to 12.
Ja’Markis Weston called for a fair catch on the ensuing kickoff, but he muffed the catch and watched it roll out of bounds at the 1. By rule, the Gators got the ball at the 1.
No problem.
Jones completed an 18-yard pass to Nay’Quan Wright on third-and-10. Wright rushed for 30, 16 and 11 yards on the next three plays to advance inside the Alabama 25.
“The O-Line played huge,” said Wright, who finished with a career-high 58 yards on seven carries. “We can’t do nothing without the O-Line, so they played pretty huge. They showed up big for us, and we took advantage, and we ran behind those big guys.
“We [ran the ball well] the first two weeks. We’ve just got to continue to do it. Whether it’s Bama, Tennessee, LSU, whoever it is, we’re going to continue to run the ball. It doesn’t matter who’s out there, we’re just going to put the ball down and run the ball.”
Jones completed a beautifully thrown back-shoulder throw to Henderson for 18 yards on third-and-5. Jones powered into the end zone for a 5-yard touchdown on the next play to cut the lead down to 28-23.
“We’re just all together as a team, and I feel like people don’t think we’ll come out here and fight,” Jones said. “We didn’t play our best game the first two games, and, today, we came out here, and we still didn’t play our best game. I think we showed that we have a lot of fight on this team, and, this game right here, it meant a lot to us, and we didn’t get the outcome we wanted, but we got a lot of confidence from this game, and I just feel like we’re going to keep building from this game and keep getting better.
“We just told everybody to keep fighting. We knew coming in there was going to be a lot of ups and downs in this game. If they ever got up, we knew we were going to keep fighting. We’ve always been a team that keeps fighting no matter what the score is, and that’s what we did. I walked around and told everybody, ‘Let’s keep going and keep trying to score,’ and, eventually, we put up some points.”
The Tide took advantage of yet another pass interference penalty on third-and-7, this time on Avery Helm, to move down the field. Desmond Watson and Amari Burney combined to stuff McClellan on third-and-goal, and a false start penalty forced them to settle for a 24-yard Will Reichard field goal.
Jones then completed a 13-yard pass to Keon Zipperer and ran for 14 yards to get the next drive going. He completed a 5-yard pass to Trent Whittemore to move the chains on third-and-5. Pierce finished the drive with some magic, racing around the left edge for a 17-yard touchdown.
“You just can’t flinch in game situations,” Mullen said. “These guys didn’t flinch today. They just kept battling, kept battling, kept battling, put us in a position to we were right there with an opportunity to be within two points there at the end of the game.”
Trailing by two points due to the missed extra point from earlier, the Gators were forced to go for two points and the tie.
Davis lined up on the wrong side of Jones on the two-point play. Not wanting to burn a timeout in case they needed all three of them on defense if they didn’t get the conversion, they went ahead with the play anyway. Davis was stopped about a yard short of the goal line.
Alabama picked up a first down on its final possession to effectively put the game away.
While there is no such thing as a moral victory at Florida, the Gators walked out of the Swamp on Saturday night feeling confident about the type of team they can be. They just gave the greatest college football dynasty of all time a serious run for their money, and they only lost because of mistakes they made, not because Alabama was so much better than them.
Just like the 2020 SEC title game, this game was decided by a handful of plays. And just like then, the Gators came out on the wrong end of those critical plays, and that was the difference in the game.
After cleaning up those mistakes, they believe that they’ll be ready for a potential rematch in the SEC Championship Game.
“I like the attitude of this team,” Mullen said. “I like the effort this team has. I think it’s going to be really interesting to see our response in practice this week. I really do because I never doubted the effort that our team was going to give or the attitude our guys had. Our guys expected to win the game today coming into it. I know they’re disappointed.
“We completely control everything we want to do still for the rest of the season. That’s why I want to see that attitude that when we show up on Monday, that kind of hunger. After the SEC Championship Game, in the locker room, I saw a little bit of a hunger from our guys about next season, and ‘We want to put ourselves back in a position to go win and get back to Atlanta.’ And even in January [when we] came back, our guys, that desire to get back and compete for a championship. I want to see that on Monday, that hunger to go sit there and say ‘Hey, we’re going to fix those couple things.’”