PD’s Postulations: Recovering from the UT game for the Florida Gators

I figured we all needed a few days. A few extra stanzas to process or just get past what was surely the biggest shock since watching the Gators lose to an FCS team in the Swamp. Or maybe that was not such a shock back in 2013, given who the head coach was and the way that season had already gone. Maybe it was the biggest shock since blowing a 23-point lead against Miami and former Gator golden boy quarterback Brock Berlin back in 2003. Surely seeing the former Gator lead a comeback with low character braggarts like Kellen Winslow Jr (you know, the soldier) was tougher to take than watching the program and players that Gator fans and players had been mocking for years make the good guys look like chumps.

But perhaps this surpassed even those two low points notched on the Gator belt by Ron Zook and Will Muschamp, two names that will live in infamy in Gainesville. And so will this game. You don’t shake that off quickly or easily. And there is no reason to analyze this game. We all saw it; we all know what happened and why it happened. Our players and coaches thought the game was won at halftime. They went soft on the field and soft in the head. And Tennessee kept playing and kept coaching. It is as simple a dynamic as I have seen. The only thing to do now is to cope with it. It seems that this is the sort of thing that destroys seasons. Or destroys fan confidence. Or destroys the enjoyment of your job if you have a Vol fan or two at your office. You feel sick, I know. You feel like you’ve been run over by a bus and your rehab will be years long, if you can even recover at all. You feel like you better have the priest start warming up those last rites.

But I am here to tell you that there is a cure.

You believe me, don’t you?

Don’t Bet On It

Well, this is why I don’t bet on sporting events. Up 21-0 with just a few ticks left in the first half, Tennessee floundering, Florida absolutely dominating every phase of the game, Tennessee fans leaving the stadium, and the Vols team just a few moments away from being booed off their own field as they went to the locker room at halftime…it is doubtful that anyone, anywhere would have bet that Tennessee was going to unleash an epic beat-down of Florida in the second half, the Gator players would come out soft and disinterested and the Florida coaching staff would go into a Muschamp-esque ultra-conservative shell until the game was too far out of their reach to do anything about. Who ran to their bookies to lay down thousands of dollars that DBU would humiliate themselves by giving up seemingly countless deep passes and big plays, many of which where they didn’t even bother to cover the receiver at all? That the defense that had only given up one (1) touchdown over the previous twelve (12) quarters would spend the next two (2) quarters giving up five (holy crap!) of them? That the Tennessee offense that couldn’t touch 30 points against Appalachian State or the Ohio Bobcats, were about to rip off 35-straight points in one half against what was statistically – and by the eye test – arguably the best defense in the nation?

It’s a safe bet that nobody in the country made any of those bets.

But there is something that bettors should have considered: streaks. Crash Davis famously said you never (bleep) with a steak. In betting terms, you never bet against one. But bettors know better than Hollywood writers that there is one inevitable truism about streaks – something that is as immutable as the sun and moon: they all end.

Ask fans at the Florida-Vandy game two years ago, or the Florida-Georgia State viewers for an even more unbreakable streak. The Gators likely will continue to rack up wins against Kentucky, but even that streak will eventually come to an end. And the fact is, nobody beats an annual top-half Power 5 program like Tennessee 10 years in a row, let alone 11. Florida needed magic, luck and frankly a lot of sheer incompetence from Tennessee to pull off the miracle wins the last two seasons.

Maybe that’s why I had an uneasy feeling all week. With absolutely zero reason to fear any amount of guts or brains, let alone glory, from Tennessee players and their remedial coaching staff, with absolutely no reason to think that the more talented Florida team would lay down like dogs, and with no reason to anticipate that the coaching staff would do a Will Muschamp impersonation for half of the game, I still had one of those bad feelings that the wild luck and good fortune of the last two years was going to be paid back to Tennessee with a pendulum swing this year.

Then I got the sign. Maybe this was the reason that even up 21-0 and rubbing their face in it, I kept couching my comments on the forum with phrases like, “There’s still a lot of football left to play,” and, “I have no idea if this lead will hold up”…or maybe not. But when I saw the graphic flash across the screen, I felt stars aligning for the Vols. Before the game started, some brainiac at CBS decided to put up a graphic showing that Florida led the series in Knoxville 12-11. That’s right. If I could have reached through the television and strangled someone, I would have.

With Florida looking to win their 12^th-straight game in the series, being forced by an injury to start #12 at quarterback, the Gators led the series in Knoxvegas 12-11. Something in my suddenly sour gut knew that fourth 12 was going to come home for the Vols to bring full and perfect symmetry to this equation.

Lessons Learned…Let’s Hope

Saturday was nothing if not a huge teaching moment for the Florida football players. And coaches. You don’t run your mouths during game week unless you are prepared to play at 110% for all 60 minutes. You don’t become complacent and start celebrating at halftime because you have a big lead. You don’t send your players terrible energy-killing messages by changing your entire game philosophy from creative and aggressive to predictable and ultra-conservative just because you built a big lead; you don’t down shift from playing to win to playing not to lose.

I understand the philosophy since we were stuck in our own red zone all third quarter, but you have to have a sense for the flow of the game. You have to be able to look you defensive players in the eyes and know if they’ve got anything left. Our coaches failed miserably on every level of this task. They will learn from this. The players will learn from all of the failures I mentioned above. And they will have a chance to put those lessons learned to good use very quickly, and not as a mental exercise. Not for the future. For the now. Because, like I said: there is a cure.

Lessons for the Fans

Anyone remember 1990? On the surface, we all immediately recall joy and jubilation. Spurrier’s maiden voyage, winning the SEC (“unofficially”), upsetting Alabama in Tuscaloosa to signal a changing of the guard at the top of the SEC that would last twenty years, destroying our arch-rivals Auburn and Georgia in the same season as never before. But in the early stages of that season, things were not quite so idyllic and serene. Because one of our first SEC games that year was a trip to Neyland Stadium to play these same Tennessee Vols. Well, they were a different team then – a much better one that this year’s iteration. The Gators came in 5-0, ranked in the top-10 for what might as well have been the first time in 300 years, it had been so long. It was the first time in series history that the two teams faced each other with both ranked in the top-10. The game was a tight 7-3 match going into halftime, and but for the first career drop (that anyone could remember anyway) by tight end Kirk Kirkpatrick, the Gators would have held a 10-7 lead. It was Tennessee’s Homecoming and the Gators looked primed for the upset to truly solidify Spurrier’s coronation. And then the skies opened and the Gators were swamped by a deluge of points and wound up getting curb-stomped to the tune of 45-3. You young fans think that watching Tennessee ring up 38 unanswered points was impossible? Well we older Gators knew it wasn’t because we watched them hang up 38-straight on us before, that afternoon in Knoxvegas. You think the new coaching regime might have been exposed, and our visions of having an elite head coach and ruling the SEC were shown to be unrealistic Saturday? How do you think it felt when the same doubts were leveled onto a coach and program that had never even won an official conference title in its history? A lot worse than it did Saturday for a program that has won two national titles in the last decade.

Well, I didn’t tell it so you could cry in your sprouts, or whatever that is, darling. I reminded you of that awful memory because despite that Tennessee team that thought it had the SEC wrapped up that day went out and had two more blemishes put on their SEC record and Florida claimed the SEC title (though claiming it was all the conference let us do that year, thanks to a few minor NCAA violations by the previous staff). They went out and tied Auburn and lost to Alabama, while Florida ran the table.

It was a little like 1992. Very much like it, in fact. Spurrier still hadn’t gotten the knack for beating the Vols in their own house (something the Spurs and the Florida program would become very comfortable doing with great regularity in the years to come). And so there were the Gators in the middle of September again, getting blown out by Tennessee 31-14. As badly as Florida played in the second half Saturday, the 1990 and 1992 games were far worse. The latter contest was not even competitive, with UT running out to a 14-0 lead, but at least at halftime Gator fans thought they had a chance – cutting the lead to 17-10 at the break – before getting tossed around badly in the second half, again in a torrential downpour. To make things worse, Florida went out and lost to Mississippi State in their very next game, putting them 2.5 games behind the Vols. Season over, right? Except that Tennessee still had three losses left in them, dropping contests to Alabama and SEC expansion newcomers South Carolina and Arkansas – three-straight games, three-straight losses.

So…you see where I am going with this. Tennessee has at least two losses left in them. They have played with fire against every one of their four opponents this year and honestly could very easily be 0-4 right now. The next three weeks, they play at Georgia, at Texas A&M and at home against Alabama. A&M and Alabama look like sure losses from here and Georgia will be looking at this game as their entire season, wanting to stay alive in the East race but more importantly to take back their manhood they had taken from them in Oxford Saturday. The last time Georgia had their manhood challenged at this level was going into the 2012 game against the undefeated and #2-ranked Gators. And the Gators, riding high like the Vols are now, imploded under the weight of self-inflicted wounds and Georgia played the best game of their season.

For Florida’s part, they likely will have to win out in the SEC to reach Atlanta, but given how fatally flawed LSU is, and given when we have seen from Georgia and Missouri – and the fact that it is very difficult to have two teams both break the mental domination yoke in the sand should Tennessee lose the next three-straight, as they did against all odds in 1992, then Florida would still have a margin for error.

And after the kind of game that we witnessed Saturday, the kind of soul-sapping devastation we endured – and continue to endure – of having a blowout in our pocket only to get blown out ourselves…well, this is the most we could hope for. Even with the streak over, an embarrassing loss and a 1.5-game deficit to the hated Vols, Florida has an easier path to Atlanta than Tennessee does.

And that’s a pretty good spot to be in, all things considered.