Buddy Blog--Gator Football: Where Does It Go From Here? I'm Glad You Asked!
A good day for Wilson on a bad day for Florida.
Hannah White/UAA Communications.
Teams lose. Good teams lose. Great teams sometimes get punched right in the mouth.
By Buddy Martin
My telephone and social media have been ringing, buzzing and generally behaving like the emergency broadcast system after a Category 4 hurricane in the past 24 hours.
“What just happened?”
“Was that real?”
“Did we really get manhandled by Missouri?”
“Is the season over?”
No, the season is not over. Nobody died. There is no need to lower the flags to half-staff over Ben Hill Griffin Stadium or send FEMA to Gainesville with bottled water and emotional-support jorts.
But make no mistake: What happened in Columbia was worse than a speed bump. It was a public mugging. It was a betrayal of sorts.
The question is: Who betrayed whom?
Maybe Missouri betrayed the script. Maybe Florida betrayed its own hype. Maybe the offensive line betrayed the quarterback. Maybe the quarterback betrayed the protection. Maybe the defense betrayed every poor soul who thought “physicality” meant something other than posing for photographs in sleeveless shirts.
Or perhaps the biggest betrayal was committed by the people convinced themselves the past few years of football misery had been sent to the landfill.
Put me in that group.
I believed this was going to be different. I saw Jon Sumrall’s energy, his honesty, his toughness and his refusal to sell sunshine in a bottle.
I heard him warn everybody about the dangers ahead. He sounded less like a football coach and more like the guy on the Weather Channel pointing at a red blob headed toward your house.
Still, we looked at the schedule and saw 5-0. We saw a ranking. We saw a hot quarterback, a celebrated play caller, what we were told was the nation’s best running back and enough muscle on both lines to make a WWE promoter start scouting Gainesville.
Instead, Missouri took all those toys, put them in a box and locked the lid.
The Gators’ best weapons were neutralized. The great running back found no daylight. The red-hot quarterback found no heat. The genius play caller appeared to be calling plays from inside a phone booth during a power outage.
Remarks like this from Eli Drinkwitz are troubling: “The more this coordinator (Faulkner) is on film, there's more tendencies that show up. There were things that we could tell, ‘hey, this is what's going to happen here.’"
One of the biggest offensive stars sat out with injury. The offensive and defensive lines that had been described as newly “nasty” were not nasty enough to bother Missouri, which treated the Gators like a rental car: drove them hard, ran them into the ditch and returned them damaged.
That is the part that ought to sting.
Not that Florida lost. Teams lose. Good teams lose. Great teams sometimes get punched right in the mouth by an opponent that arrived angry, capable and ready to settle a score.
It is HOW Florida lost.
The Gators were outplayed, outcoached, outmuscled and, perhaps most embarrassingly, out-believed. Eli Drinkwitz’s Tigers played like a team that had been waiting all week to prove it could ruin somebody’s happy little September story. Their quarterback was hot. Their receivers were quick, crafty and consistently open. Their defense came in annoyed, stayed annoyed and played like it had been denied a dinner reservation.
Florida, meanwhile, looked like it had just been told the annual “Bloody Tuesday” practice was optional.
Apparently, it was not.
Artificial Intelligence? Try Artificial Confidence.
Somebody asked whether the whole thing was the fault of “artificial intelligence.”
Well, it certainly was not intelligent.
But looking back, some of it does feel artificial.
The confidence. The assumptions. The easy belief that a few wins, a shiny ranking and an exciting new coach had erased every scar from the battered hide of Gator Nation. Florida had started to feel good again. That alone is suspicious. Florida football fans have spent the last several years walking around like people who have been informed by their doctors that bacon is now medicine.
Then Missouri showed up with a syringe full of reality.
This was not a Billy Napier flashback. Let us not get ridiculous. The atmosphere is different. The leadership feels different. The accountability is different. Sumrall is different.
That is why this loss hurts more than the ordinary garden-variety embarrassment.
Under the previous regime, disaster often felt like regular Tuesday. There was always an explanation, a process, a spreadsheet, an analytics chart, a five-year plan and somebody promising that the operation had gone well even though the patient was lying face down in the parking lot.
Sumrall did not try to perfume this one.
He did something refreshing after the game: He admitted what everybody with a television had just watched. The Gators got hit in the mouth. It was embarrassing. Winning had masked problems. And now people are going to be called out.
That is not panic. That is the beginning of grown-up football.
“There’s gonna be a lot of things that get called out, and it’s going to feel different,” Sumrall warned.
Good.
It should feel different.
Because if guys on this team do not own what happened in Columbia, then they should not be around very long. You cannot build a serious football program with players who think accountability is something that happens to the other guy in the meeting room.
Sumrall also said there are players who will not be on the team long if they refuse to accept responsibility.
Again: Good.
Put that on the locker-room wall. Put it on the scoreboard. Put it on the helmets, right under the Gator logo. And while they are at it, put it in giant letters at the entrance to the football complex:
WINNING DOES NOT ERASE WEAKNESS. IT ONLY HIDES IT UNTIL MISSOURI FINDS IT.
The Bloody Tuesday Fallacy
The most amusing part of modern football is the language.
Everybody wants a “culture.” Everybody wants “physicality.” Everybody wants “edge.” Everybody wants “Bloody Tuesday,” which sounds less like a football practice and more like a doomed British pub after a soccer match.
But Missouri did not care what Florida called Tuesday.
Missouri did not care if the Gators had a bruised Thursday, a violent Wednesday or a “Let’s Get Physical” playlist blasting through practice.
And, by the way, if you are going to get physical, please make it the old-fashioned football version. Not the Olivia Newton-John version, although Florida looked more prepared for synchronized aerobics than trench warfare.
The Tigers showed Florida what real physicality looks like. It is not chest-thumping. It is not social-media video. It is not coaches shouting “strain” while players bounce around in padded shorts.
It is winning first down.
It is protecting the quarterback.
It is tackling somebody before he gains eight more yards.
It is getting off the field on third down.
It is keeping the nation’s best running back from turning into the nation’s most expensive decoy.
It is looking across the line at an opponent who believes he can whip you and convincing him, early and repeatedly, that he has made a terrible life choice.
Florida did not do enough of that in Columbia.
No More Rat Poison
Now comes South Carolina, a team arriving in Gainesville with bad intentions and considerably more confidence than it probably had a few weeks ago.
That is the dangerous part.
The Gamecocks are better than expected, despite a heartbreaking one-point loss to Kentucky in overtime. They are rejuvenated.
They will watch Missouri’s film and see a road map. They will see what worked. They will see where Florida was soft, slow, confused or simply unable to respond when the game turned ugly.
And they will bring every bit of that to The Swamp.
This is where the Gators find out whether Missouri was a correction or a collapse.
There can be no more rat poison. No more ranking worship. No more talk-radio or podcast coronations. No more weekly declarations that Florida is “back” because it beat somebody it was supposed to beat.
Florida is not back because a poll says so.
Florida is back when it can take a punch, respond with its own and refuse to spend four quarters looking like it is searching the sideline for a customer-service representative.
The South Carolina game is not the season finale. It is not a playoff game. It is not, despite what the internet will tell you by lunchtime, the greatest crossroads in human history.
But it is an answer game.
It is the game that will tell us whether Sumrall’s hard words were merely excellent content for TwitterX, or whether they were the first sparks from a coach who is about to make the inside of that building extremely uncomfortable.
The Tebow Comparison?
Slow Down!
Then there is Curtis of TwitterX, one of those eternal optimists who sees every setback as a possible movie montage.
“If he turns it around in a big way,” Curtis says, “this could go down as the coach’s equivalency to Tim Tebow’s promise speech.”
Well, bless Curtis’ heart. And he is not wrong in his conviction.
That is the spirit. That is also how people end up buying crypto from a man wearing sunglasses inside a Waffle House.
Tim Tebow’s promise speech is sacred Gainesville folklore because it was followed by a response that changed the temperature of a season. It was not powerful because the words were dramatic. It was powerful because Tebow and his teammates backed it up with blood, sweat, stubbornness and victories.
Sumrall’s words will mean something only if his team answers them.
Not with a motivational video.
Not with a week of locker-room theatrics.
Not with a bunch of grown men tweeting flame emojis under a quote graphic.
With blocking. Tackling. Catching. Covering. Finishing.
With a football team that looks angry at what happened in Missouri — angry enough to make somebody else pay for it.
That is the assignment now.
Gator Nation is stunned because it had finally started to hope again. Hope is dangerous around here. Hope is expensive. Hope has a long history of arriving late, overstaying its welcome and leaving with the stereo.
But Sumrall has earned the right to fix this before anyone starts throwing dirt on the season.
He has also created the obligation to do it.
Missouri exposed the Gators. South Carolina will test whether they learned anything from being exposed.
And if Florida comes out Saturday still playing like it has been practicing in a Pilates studio, then the Kool-Aid needs to be dumped into Lake Alice.
Because this fan base has swallowed enough artificial intelligence/confidence to float a parade.
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