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The Gator Country Magazine is now the fastest growing full color magazine printed on high quality glossy paper that’s dedicated to bringing you the best in-depth feature coverage of the Florida Gators. Our magazine is the only one that has award winning writers and columnists on staff so you can truly enjoy reading about your beloved Florida Gators.










There are ten issues a year and each issue is packed with feature stories & information, the latest recruiting news, excellent commentary, and outstanding photographs not found anywhere else. Unlike most magazines, we have fewer advertisements so as to allow us to pack more content for your reading pleasure.

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OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2008— Table of Contents



(This is a partial table of contents – there’s more!)
  • STAND UP AND HOLLER FOR MR. 2-BITS

    Mr. Sunshine of Gator Football will be hanging up his whistle after this season, ending his 60-year cheerleading career.

    George Edmondson would make a horrible trick-or-treater on Halloween Night. “Boo-oo-oo” is not in his vocabulary.

    After all, Edmondson’s alter ego, “Mr. 2-Bits,” is all about being positive, all about lifting up the spirits of others. Booing, to him, is offensive, and he never has hesitated to tell anyone how he feels about it.

    A couple of years ago, the Gator Club of Manatee County invited Mr. 2-Bits to speak to its members, and Edmondson told the partisans about his distaste for booing. “After my allotted time was up, I said I would be glad to answer any questions,” Edmondson remembered. “A little boy, about 9 or 10, stood up and asked, ‘Mr. 2-Bits, is it okay to boo the referee?’”

    After the laughter subsided, Mr. 2-Bits gave his answer. “I told the young boy that sometimes you feel like it,” he said, “but in the end you shouldn’t boo the referee. He’s trying his best, too.”

  • WELCOME TO THE ‘REAL’ SOUTH MATES

    Down under in Australia where the football is played without pads and helmets, real Gators are actually crocodiles but Mick Hubert comes in loud and clear on spring Sunday mornings

    Down on the Antarctic Ocean, it gets very cold in the winter. Pointers (Great Whites) are more common than barracudas in the Keys, and only crazy people go swimming.

    This is Adelaide, the heart of South Australia. In the summer, the heat hits 115 degrees for weeks at a time as the wind blows off the outback, sometimes bringing hordes of locusts and dust storms which cover hundreds of miles.

    And be careful of those ‘Roos and wombats when you drive at night. Hit one of those and you can total your car, fair dinkum. Thankfully there are gorgeous beaches, plentiful golf courses and hundreds of world-class wineries to take the sting off of the conditions.

  • THE 3-3-5 DEFENSE

    Florida’s new look is good against passing teams, bad against running teams

    The 3-3-5 defense is one of the most flexible defensive looks in the country. Florida opened its 2008 season with this defense because of the run-and-shoot attack presented by Hawaii. The hybrid defense should become more popular as more and more teams go to the spread attack that Urban Meyer utilizes at Florida. This defensive look gives coordinator’s flexibility with blitz packages and personnel. It is not, however, the defense that you would choose to face a power run team or an offense that has a balanced “I formation” attack. First, let’s look at the alignment and the personnel that goes with it. You start with three defensive linemen who can all rush the passer. You will have a nose tackle on the center and two defensive ends lined up on the offensive tackles. The three linebackers will normally line up directly behind each lineman in a stack formation look. This will confuse the quarterback or blocking back on which gap the linebacker is assigned to. A lot of times you will see the lineman slant one way and the linebacker will go to the opposite gap.

  • THE FOURTH-DOWN MASSACRE ON THE BAYOU

    Tigers converted all five of their last-down plays to rally past the Gators 28-24 in 2007

    The series between Louisiana State and Florida has provided Southeastern Conference football fans with some of the most memorable battles since the two teams, founding members of the SEC in 1933, first played four years later.

    And last year was no different as LSU used five fourth-down conversions to rally from a 24-14 third-quarter deficit at Tiger Stadium for a 28-24 victory over the Gators. The comeback kept the Tigers on the path to their second national championship of the new century.

    It’s an unusual rivalry of sorts. The excitement in this series usually begins in the days just before kickoff. A trip to Baton Rouge usually involves a stop on New Orleans’ Bourbon Street and then it’s on to Tiger Stadium where the atmosphere often resembles a Purple-and- Gold-garnished edition of Mardi Gras complete with an overwhelming smell of hard liquor.

    “Geaux Tigers” is painted everywhere. And catcalls are usually met with a Gator Chomp. Florida and LSU fans debate everything … the best sport fishing, prettiest co-eds and the largest alligators.

  • THE INCIDENT AND OTHERS

    Some points are not well taken whenever the Gators and Bulldogs meet to mark their territories in Jacksonville.

    Mark Richt is the luckiest coach ever. Not due to his Georgia Bulldogs, who gave Florida a 42-30 crunching last year in Jacksonville, about to materialize into one of America’s finest teams — nah, he is far more fortunate that “The Incident,” ill-advised exhibitionism by 70 players celebrating the first red-and-black touchdown against Florida, did not fester into what could have become the ugliest, bloodiest melee in college football history.

    “The Incident” is the second enormous infusion of escalating passions to affect the Florida- Georgia affair, triggering recollections of the mind-bending impact of 1968 when the Vince Dooley-coached Bulldogs gave some confused, perplexed, malfunctioning Gators a 51-0 whipping on a Saturday that would redefine the importance of the series.

    Florida began the ’68 season on a sweet cloud. Ranked sixth in the country before its opener. Newspaper columnists around the state predicted a 9-2 record at worst, probably 10-1 and maybe an 11-0.

  • FLORIDA-GEORGIA: A VERY UNCIVIL WAR

    Gators and Bulldogs take turns ruining each other’s seasons when they meet annually in Jacksonville

    Army-Navy, Michigan-Ohio State, Alabama-Auburn, Texas-Oklahoma, Notre Dame-Southern California, Harvard-Yale, Wisconsin-Minnesota, Washington-Washington State, Cal-Stanford … great college football rivalries all.

    Sorry, we’ll take Florida-Georgia or Georgia- Florida or whatever they want to call the annual Jacksonville grudge game now that it isn’t called (for societal correctness) “The World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.”

    The Dawgs vs. the Gators — you won’t find two species of animals and fans which are more territorial than these two are.

    There’s a certain nastiness to this late October hate-fest by the St. Johns that makes it so special, a lot of it put there by Steve Spurrier, who won the 1966 Heisman Trophy but lost to Dawgs, and later returned as head coach in 1990 and went 11-1 in 12 games against Georgia.

  • TURNING AROUND THE BATTLESHIP

    Emotions of coaches has been one factor in the changing dominance in the Florida-Georgia series

    I have often said that of all the incredible accomplishments Steve Spurrier had in his 12-year run as the head ball coach at Florida the greatest, in my opinion, was his ability to completely reverse the psychology of the Georgia-Florida game in Jacksonville.

    Understand that the momentum in a huge college football rivalry such as this is like a battleship. Once it gets headed in a certain direction, it takes a helluva lot to get it turned around.

    In order to completely understand why the infamous end zone “Incident” happened last season in Jacksonville, you need to know some history.

    Vince Dooley came to Georgia as a 31- year-old head coach in 1964. On day one the Auburn assistant was told that the Bulldogs had three big rivals: Florida, Auburn, and Georgia Tech. His career at Georgia, Dooley was told, would be defined by how his teams performed against those three schools.

  • URBAN’S WAY

    Part II: Launching the Tebow Era proved to be challenging

    The temporary nature of championships is good reason to cherish and celebrate them, but there is also a downside. Those championships have a dangerous allure and can turn a team into a pillar of salt, according to Urban Meyer.

    “The national championship is a powerful, but potentially evil thing, I found out,” Meyer said. “Obviously it’s great, but it also throws high expectations on people.”

    Unfortunately, those rings didn’t mean a thing once the 2007 season kicked off. Gator fans were about to draw their last few breaths of that “Titletown” aroma from the stifling August heat in Florida.

    They were hoping their football team could pull off back-to-back national championships as Billy Donovan’s basketballers had done a little over four months prior. Meyer knew better, but a coach can always pretend to dream along for a bit before reality sets in.

  • SHYNAK THE MAGNIFICENT HAS THE ANSWERS – AND THE QUESTIONS

    Larry Shyatt may be the Minister of Defense on the court, but Billy Donovan’s assistant also sometimes is a standup comic off it

    Shynak the Magnificent” pulls the envelope out of a mayonnaise jar and holds it to his forehead, just below his turban. He is concentrating and the soldout crowd packing the ballroom at the Ocala Hilton is eagerly waiting another moment of clairvoyance from the mysterious visitor from the East.

    Shynak opens his eyes and pulls the envelope away from his forehead. The silence is about to be broken.

    “42-14,” he says.

    Augie Greiner Jr., who is standing a couple of feet away, repeats, “42-14.” That draws a glare from the magnificent one.

    Now it is the moment of truth. Having revealed the answer, Shynak rips open the envelope and reads the question that has been hypothetically, hermetically sealed in the envelope and stored in the mayonnaise jar.

  • BILLY D CHASES HIS OWN GHOST

    Two national championships were won by a team built on the buddy system. Unfortunately, last season the Gator Basketball team ran out of buddies and lacked team chemistry.

    An aging vat would have been nice, but the kind that takes immature freshmen and sophomores and turns them into experienced, mature basketball players hasn’t been invented yet much to the chagrin of Billy Donovan. He could have used one last year when the Florida Gators stumbled to a 24-12 record and missed the NCAA Tournament for the first time in 10 years.

    There was a time when 24-12 and making the Final Four of the National Invitational Tournament would have had Florida fans dancing in the aisles but that was before Donovan forever elevated the expectations of the Gator Nation with a string of nine straight NCAA appearances that included a runner-up finish in 2000 and back-to-back national championships in 2006-07.

    “Our fans were spoiled,” Donovan said on a July Sunday morning in North Augusta, Ga., where he was watching some of the most talented kids in the country play in the Nike Peach Jam, an annual event that attracts nearly every Division I basketball coach in the country.

  • THE WORLD’S LARGEST OUTDOOR PSYCHE JOB

    Buddy Martin’s column

    For as long as footballs have been pumped up with air, coaches have engaged in mind games, conning their players with rhetoric and even employing a few dirty tricks to be used against rivals in big games. It sounds a lot like the style of Obama or McCain, but this is different than kicking the political football around. This is coaching football, which, to some, is more important than being president.

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