Buddy Martin Blog: There Once Was A Darker Time For Gator Fans. Some Who Lived It Say This Is Worse.
“This was a U-Turn on the Road to Resurrection and Redemption, what looked like a clear path to resumption of championship caliber play. Then suddenly it wasn’t.”
When I think of the rough patches for Florida football over the past seven decades, there are several eras of disappointment, failure and even semi-darkness that have rocked the world of Gator Nation and left a mark. This one is beginning to feel a lot like that.
I won’t take you through the pantheon of disappointments, or even the exhilaration of success, but suffice to say of all the peaks and valleys in the last 70 years, this is one of the most shocking reversals of fate I can remember – coming almost like a thief in the night.
First off, if you’re a Gator fan and this last 11-game streak is beginning to feel like a plague of locusts, you’re not alone. When historians look back at the cycles from 1990-2009 and what’s in between, they will likely be dumbfounded by what happened from the fall of 2018 to Dec. 12, 2020 and beyond.
This was a U-Turn on the Road to Resurrection and Redemption, what looked like a clear path to a resumption of championship caliber play. Then suddenly it wasn’t.
The Rise and Fall of certain college football programs seem bigger and more impactful than others. Truth is, all programs must endure the ebb and flow of “Dame Fortune,” which was what it was called back when Broadway playwrights could describe lucky and unlucky as such metaphors without being considered “sexist” or “misogynistic.”
“Dame Fortune” was a New York street term more or less originating with the song “Luck Be A Lady” sung by Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson in Guys And Dolls. And “Dame Fortune” ain’t smiling on Florida football these days. She’s kicking the Gators’ ass. But I digress.
Yes, this is ugly. HOW UGLY? to mimic the chirps of the late Johnny Carson? Soooo ugly …. Maybe the ugliest.
When I reflect on the current slump for Dan Mullen and the Florida Gators, tragic though it may look and feel, it’s also true that outcomes are somewhat governed by the current cyclical occurrences and maybe even laws of average.
I’m sure somebody smarter about analytics could explain it better. Still, it sucks and it hurts like hell. I think I understand why, in part, but if you’ve come here looking for assurances it will improve soon, you’d better look elsewhere.
Here’s what I do know: From the time the pandemic hit the U.S. and we all began to feel it in March 2020, terrorized by the disease, the welcomed distraction of a successful football season for Gator fans became a blessing, sometimes getting them through the day and the week.
When things began to unravel with an 0-3 finish to the 2020 season, for whatever reason, worlds began to fall apart. But, hey, maybe that was an aberration, and hadn’t Dan Mullen re-positioned his team for a strong comeback? So hopes were high in 2021. Until they weren’t.
Starting in 2021 with the Kentucky game when the offensive line couldn’t grasp the snap count, to the LSU game when a feeble LSU “Ground Hog Day” offense repeatedly ran roughshod over a Gator defense apparently incapable of adjustment, right through the South Carolina crash-and-burn game, this Florida team may have hit an all-time low point.
The bill came due and the price was the termination of two loyal aides – so far – with more changes likely to come. We won’t know the final tab for another year, but for now Mullen appears safe unless he can’t salvage something out of the last three games.
The residual impact is still going, as prized recruits previously committed keep bailing. Another one jumped ship to Georgia just Thursday. (Four-star WR commit Raymond Cottrell of Milton, FL.) This is not a harbinger of good things to come, although it may well still be reversible one day.
It kind of feels like flashbacks to some older Gator fans, who have had their hearts broken before.
A major setback was the inability of Doug Dickey to transpose his SEC championship model from Knoxville to Gainesville, to the bottomless pit of Charlie Pell wrongdoing and the subsequent NCAA burn, through the mediocrity of Ron Zook, Will Muschamp and Jim McElwain.
Of concern is not just that it came apart for Mullen, but how fast and how far it fell. We can write off losses to Alabama and Georgia as logical, but what happened after that was a total collapse, almost like the core disappeared.
We saw it with our own eyes, but could not discern why this was happening – nor did the head coach seem to have an explanation. I asked around.
Even the more sophisticated and enlightened Gator football observers I’ve spoken to had difficulty quantifying the reasons and responsibility for such abject failure. Nor did they want to pile on at a time when the glass half full/half empty turned out to be a dry Solo cup with a crack in the plastic that apparently sprung a leak a long time ago when we weren’t watching.
One person courageous enough to speak up and blame Mullen for his shortcomings – although he is a fan of the Gator coach and is rooting for him to fix it – is Lee McGriff. In a 20-minute interview on my streaming show, McGriff spoke candidly, but cautiously avoided trashing the coach or the program. He related it to his experience of walking through the fire.
“For me, it feels like maybe the worst I can remember – ever,” said Lee McGriff, broadcaster, the former Gator star receiver, coach and father of All-American receiver Travis McGriff.
“I coached (at Florida) and a part of that 0-10-1 season in ’79 and that was the beginning of the Charley Pell era. But we grinded and fought through those games – it was exhausting to keep losing. I was on the inside and I felt like we coached them to 0-10-1. Coach Pell was so determined to make them the toughest team in America. And sometimes we did things to prove we were tough and not to win the game.”
The end result, after the rock bottom in ’79, was the biggest turnaround in college football as the 1980 Gators bounced back.
McGriff said even in the midst of the winless season he felt progress was being made. “It was right there – ‘let’s go’ – and the next year we won eight games.”
What McGriff was also saying was that even in the darkness of the 0-10-1 season they never lost hope. He says, and I agree, that the difference was the 2021 Gators were expected to be successful. And then came the collapse.
“This season it was different – things felt like this was a team that probably was good enough to have beaten Kentucky and LSU and been 6-2,” he lamented. “The bottom fell out and was like, ‘what happened…what happened?' And it’s mysterious to me.’”
That feeling of a big regression is commonplace among close observers of the program, and I’m not talking about media people. McGriff’s statement that the program feels “empty” is shared by a large number of Gator loyalists.
Some of the national media wonder if the players at Florida have lost their desire to play football. Kirk Herbstreit said maybe Mullen needs to recruit a different kind of player with more passion for the game.
On the counter side, there have been a few warm and fuzzy quotes from players and Mullen this week in support of each other and both Dameon Pierce and Mohamoud Diabate see no signs of quit or transfer portal refugees on their team, they say.
So we are left as McGriff is, mystified about the future of Gator football, looking in the bottom of cracker jack boxes for answers and feeling a little bit like we were blinded by the light and sucker-punched by fate. Sooner or later it’s going to come down to a choice of faith, or not, and mustering the courage to have it. And a lot of my friends right now are straddling the fence.
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