BUDDY BLOG: Here We Go Again. It’s Always LSU, But A Different Kind Of Storm This Time for Florida

QBs Steve Spurrier and Tommy Shannon. Back in 1964 when Florida's game at LSU was cancelled, it turned out to be favorable for the Gators. Photo Courtesy UAA

We won’t know what that blessing is until Dec. 12 when we find out which team prevails – providing we get to Dec. 12 with SEC football.

LSU. It’s always LSU. For the more than half century that I’ve been covering these games there’s been more disruption of the Gators-Tigers games it seems than all the other opponents on Florida’s schedule combined. This time it’s COVID-19. Usually it’s hurricanes.

The news this week that Saturday’s game was postponed and rescheduled for December should not have been a shock. Because the thing we should have most expected in the Year of the Unexpected was that we would experience a pause, or cancellation, or both. We’d already lost part of the season. So to get three games in was a gift. Now what?

What we know for sure is that we don’t know. How many games will be played? Don’t know. How many games will have to be played to make an SEC title “official?” Don’t know. What we know is that we’ve had about a third of the SEC games played. So far, the Big10 is a non-starter and hopes to launch next week. “Next week” seems like “next year” in this climate.

COVID is starting to impact not just the scheduling, but perhaps now even the outcome of games. This isn’t going to be a level playing field and the disease no doubt will be factor in who wins what.

We must look no further than Saturday’s scheduled game in Tuscaloosa – at this writing it’s still on – between Georgia and Alabama, which most figure are the two teams that will wind up in the SEC Championship game. If, indeed, one of those championship games is played.

When Nick Saban tested positive Wednesday and extracted himself from the Alabama facilities, the gambling lines changed by two or more points. Does Georgia’s Kirby Smart get an asterisk if he becomes Nick Saban’s first assistant to beat him, even though Nick won’t be on the sideline?

Back to LSU at Florida – as disappointing as it was to lose that game on Saturday. I’m not so sure both teams shouldn’t welcome the “Pause.” They are both coming off nightmarish defensive performances and need time to look under the hood. Plus the status of Tigers quarterback Myles Brennan was doubtful and Ed Orgeron was looking to a freshman quarterback to lead his offense in The Swamp.

In a sense, perhaps the pause is a blessing in disguise. We won’t know what that blessing is until Dec. 12 when we find out which team prevails – providing we get to Dec. 12 with SEC football.

We remember the 2016 postponement and the ensuing brouhaha between ADs Joe Alleva and Jeremy Foley which required the intervention of second-year SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey for resolution. Ultimately it required LSU buying out South Alabama and Florida buying out Presbyterian to reschedule the game on Nov. 19. But the residue of the hard feelings still lingers.

This series has been uber-competitive, Florida leading it 33-30-3, with colorful coaches, usually rich with action and always playing to big crowds in person and on TV, stellar athletes making big plays and often impactful on the Top Ten rankings. It’s maybe the Gators’ most fierce rivalry after Georgia.

One of the greatest football games I ever saw was the LSU win in between the Gators’ national championship years, 2007, when Les Miles converted five fourth downs – the last of which Jacob Hester stretched out for the game-clinching first down with very little time remaining. Urban Meyer remembers those games. “I hated it when I saw that game coming up on the schedule, because it’s not considered a rivalry – but it really is,” Meyer said this week.

“LSU and Georgia just looked different when they came out of the tunnel,” Meyer said. “I remember the first time I saw them and I said to my offensive line coach, ‘how we gonna block THOSE guys?!’

This wasn’t the first cancellation of an LSU-Florida game. Back in 1964, so long ago that Steve Spurrier actually played, Florida won a rescheduled game that worked to the Gators’ favor.

I had been in New Orleans in ’64 for the regularly scheduled game on Oct. 3 when Hurricane Hilda was about to hit us. Without the benefit of the Weather Channel and modern technology, on a Saturday morning we were guessing on whether to stay or leave. So without knowing if I was driving into a Cat 1 or Cat 5, my wife Joni and I took off through remote bayou country, otherwise fearing we could be stuck for days without our daughter Lori, age 2, who was back home with relatives.

Our friends stayed in New Orleans at the Roosevelt Hotel to party, unaware they were about to ride out a Cat 4 that would knock out the power. Splashing down the empty roads from New Orleans in our little aqua and white Chevy with Hilda bearing down, not another car in sight, I remember about 10 miles outside New Orleans being stopped by a roadblocking Louisiana trooper saying there was flooding ahead. So we decided going north was the safest bet.

So stupid and innocent were we. Humorist and former Gator player Red Mitchum of Ocala phoned his wife Grace in Florida to assure her that even though he was somewhat in peril, he was out of harm’s way, then headed straight for the Roosevelt bar, where he inadvertently wound up entertaining guests with his matchbook-strumming bit, making up funny country songs. It was fun for them, but it did not go well the next morning when Grace read in Tom McEwen’s Tampa Tribune column that Red had been “the hit of the evening” in the Roosevelt bar.

We white-knuckled the drive to Pensacola, listening to the radio report that a bridge behind us in Pascagoula, Miss. had just washed out. Once in Pensacola we found a hotel and crashed. Of course Hilda wreaked havoc, but we dodged the worst of it.

It went down as one of my dumbest decisions, so I was grateful to be spared by God’s traveling grace.

When we returned to Baton Rouge in December, it was so cold the stats couldn’t be run off on the mimeograph machine and the underdressed Florida writers (light cotton sport coats) had to bundle up in LSU jerseys to survive the night. The LSU team did not survive the night. Spurrier had an impressive game passing and the Gators wound up winning 20-6.

Florida finished 7-3, second to Alabama in the SEC, but wasn’t invited to a bowl game that year because the success came late in the year and there were only nine bowl games anyway. LSU finished behind Florida in the SEC but got the Sugar Bowl bid and beat Syracuse.

The Gators’ win over the Tigers was under-appreciated, perhaps, and a forerunner of things to come in 1965 and ’66 when Spurrier took them to the Sugar and Orange Bowls. Prior to that, the Florida Gators had never been to a major bowl. So we really don’t know what that December makeup game portends. But maybe karma owes them.