With only a little more than 100 days remaining until the start of the 2021 Gators football season, it’s time to start peaking ahead at what challenges the Gators’ schedule might present to them.
Here are the three games that will play the largest role in determining how the 2021 season will be remembered. Keep in mind that these are the games that will affect UF’s SEC and national championship chances the most, not necessarily the most anticipated or hyped-up games on the schedule. Otherwise, the Alabama game would take up all three spots.
The three games are listed in the order that they’ll be played, not in order of importance.
At LSU – Oct. 16
Weird things happen when the Gators and the Tigers gather on the gridiron, such as epic fake field goals, quarterback drama, a hurricane, a goal-line stand, a missed extra point, a ground-shaking interception, a fog so heavy that the game can barely be seen even on television and a thrown shoe being the deciding factor in the game.
And that’s just within the last 11 years.
Due to a talent shortage created by heavy losses to the NFL Draft, opt-outs and key injuries, LSU fielded its worst team in recent memory in 2020. And yet, they walked out of the Swamp with a stunning upset victory that dashed the Gators’ playoff hopes last December. LSU has won eight of the last 11 meetings in the series.
The 2021 Tigers figure to be much improved. Head coach Ed Orgeron overhauled his coaching staff, which should combine with their elite recruiting to return them to near the top of the SEC on defense. Offensively, they have their usual crop of outstanding skill-position players and a quarterback competition that could go four-deep.
This will likely be a night game in Death Valley. While UF has historically fared better in these matchups than other schools in the league, it still figures to be a daunting challenge. Plus, this will be the Gators’ seventh game in as many weeks to start the season, so fatigue and injuries could be an issue.
With Alabama on the schedule earlier in the season and Georgia playing lowly Arkansas as their rotating opponent from the West, this will likely be a must-win game. If the Gators win, they’ll be serious contenders to repeat as East champions and earn the program’s first playoff birth. If they lose, the season will basically be over by mid-October.
Vs. Georgia – Oct. 30
The end goal at Florida isn’t merely to beat Georgia and win the SEC East. After all, Jim McElwain beat the Bulldogs and captured the East crown in each of his first two seasons and was still shown the door before he completed his third season.
However, any SEC or national championship aspirations the Gators and their fans have will run through Jacksonville first. That’s been the case for most of this century, and that will be even more the case this year with four of the other five teams in the division having first- or second-year coaches.
The Gators pounded Georgia 44-28 last year in a game that wasn’t even as close as the final score might indicate. But that was with a historically great Florida offense and a Georgia defense that slipped a bit as they relied on some young but talented players.
This year, the Gators’ offense figures to decline at least a little bit, and Georgia coach Kirby Smart should have his defense back among the nation’s elite. On the other side of the ball, quarterback J.T. Daniels revived the Bulldogs’ mind-numbingly bad offense after he took over as the starter for the final four games of the season.
This game will also have major ramifications in the ever-powerful world of outside perception. Dan Mullen and Smart have built their programs in polar-opposite ways. Mullen’s program is predicated on elite offensive game-planning and player development overcoming good-but-not-great recruiting. Smart’s Bulldogs recruit better than anybody other than Alabama and feature a stifling defense more often than not.
Was Mullen’s breakthrough in 2020 a sign of things to come or an anomaly created by Florida’s best roster in years coinciding with Georgia’s worst roster in several years?
If the Gators lose this game, their East chances will be gone, and the noise regarding Mullen’s ceiling at Florida will intensify.
At Missouri – Nov. 20
This just feels like it’s going to be one of those noon kickoffs that the Gators sleepwalk into and find themselves down two scores in a hurry.
The battle with the Tigers is trapped between a feel-good game with Samford and the big rivalry clash with Florida State, and it’ll probably be freezing cold in Columbia.
But the Gators can’t afford to take this game for granted. Missouri could be the third-best team in the East this fall, and they played the Gators tight for most of the first half in the Swamp last season. The Tigers have been a thorn in the Gators’ side since they joined the conference, winning four of the nine matchups, with all of the wins coming by at least 19 points.
The Gators could very well enter this game needing a win to seal the deal in the East and keep their playoff dreams alive. Even if they’ve clinched the East by then, they can’t let this game do to them what the LSU game did to them in 2020. They need to battle through some physical and mental adversity and win this game against a good team on the road.