Sorry Gator Nation, Somebody Has To Say It. They're Just Terrible!

It was such a bad night that the Vols even helped Lagway up. (Chris Spears Photo)

A bad night is just not getting hammered by a bitter rival that you were accustomed to beating like a rented mule.  A bad night is when you get “massacred” by 20 points which felt like 200 in a game where you were 3.5-point underdogs, lost your keys and wallet, not to mention your dignity, and then had your state’s highest ranking official hike his leg and urinate all over your pity party.

Then you find out your chosen one probably isn’t coming to save you. And this ain’t even the state of Louisiana! No wonder it feels like a voodoo curse!

Florida football has finally found a new bottom of the barrel, and Ron DeSantis is standing over the hole like a disappointed uncle who hasn’t been to a game since Tim Tebow learned to shave, announcing to the world that “getting blown out in the Swamp by Tennessee = rock bottom.” Rock bottom? That was three coaches and sixteen buyouts ago. This is whatever comes after rock bottom bedrock, sub-basement, maybe a shallow grave for what used to be a program.​

Sorry Gator Nation, somebody has to say it. And I feel terrible for the Jake Slaughters and Jadan Baughs and DJ Lagways who gave gallant effort in a season of promise that became a Netflix Halloween Horror Show. Slaughter, the All-American, was betrayed by fate and high-level administrative incompetence, plus even snide remarks by the governor who chose an odd time to pile on with his sophomoric platitudes.

Only in Florida politics can a sitting governor pause between culture wars to subtweet a football team like a message-board poster with state patrol. He remembers the days when “even someone like Peyton Manning didn’t have a chance against UF in Gainesville,” which is a nice way of saying: “Back when Steve Spurrier was running the ball score up out of pure Christian mischief and Tennessee walked into the Swamp like a condemned man to the electric chair.” Those days are so far gone you need a VHS player and a landline to call them back.​

Now the Swamp is a haunted Airbnb. The sign still says Welcome to The Swamp, but inside it’s all drafty windows, cold spots and the lingering odor of busted third-down conversions. After next week’s Comedy Central Show with the visiting Seminoles, maybe they should shut it down for early renovation and call the Orkin Man.

What about the curse of the thrown shoe? Well, gather round chil’ren.

Every good Southern tragedy has an origin myth, and this one wears a size 11. On December 12, 2020, Marco Wilson grabbed an LSU receiver’s shoe, reared back, and sent it end-over-end into eternal football purgatory, drawing a 15-yard penalty that helped LSU kick Florida’s playoff dreams straight through the uprights. It wasn’t just a flag; it was an exorcism in reverse. Whatever soul the program had left went out of the stadium with that shoe.​

Since that moment of aerodynamic stupidity, Florida has suffered the plagues of Job, losing 37 games, and Gator fans have decided there must be a curse — a sort of Bayou voodoo meets Gainesville dumbassery — now canonized as the “Curse of the Thrown Shoe.”

In a saner world, maybe you’d blame coaching turnover, soft culture and recruiting malpractice, but this is college football, where people believe in momentum, karma and that some higher power personally cares about your punt coverage.​

The truth is, the shoe didn’t start the fire; it just gave it a name. Under Dan Mullen, the program was already fraying like a cheap visor — roster mismanagement, recruiting laziness and a defense that treated tackling as an elective. The shoe toss was simply the moment the rest of the country noticed Florida had taken its hands off the wheel and started reading its own playoff press clippings.​

Billy Napier inherited that mess, looked at it and decided the solution was to build a “process” so elaborate NASA would’ve asked for a summary. Somewhere between “transformational culture” and “organizational alignment” and “complementary football” non-sequiturs, the team forgot how to block, tackle, or avoid getting humiliated at home, which reared its ugly head again as a Tennessee outfit that used to be Gainesville’s designated homecoming victims returned as Atilla The Hun.

This is not rebuilding; this is composting.​

So on this particular cursed Saturday, all the little demons hatched by that shoe came home to roost. Everything that could go wrong did, in ways that would make Murphy himself stand up and sue for defamation. Flags at the worst time, bounces the other way, blown assignments, bad spots, missed chances — it was like watching a three-hour blooper reel with mandatory TV timeouts. Not one call, bounce, or break seemed to fall Florida’s way, and yet every bit of it was self-authored stupidity.​

This is the uniquely modern Florida problem: The Gators aren’t just unlucky; they are industriously, creatively bad. There is a difference between being beaten and volunteering. This bunch volunteers (lower case v). They jump offsides on 4th-and-1 like it’s jury duty. They miss tackles like it was mandatory. They commit back-breaking penalties as if they’re trying to keep Marco Wilson’s memory alive in the most literal way possible.​

And lurking over everything is the most tedious ghost of all: The Lane Kiffin fantasy. Every time Florida face-plants, a certain faction of the fan base fires up Photoshop, slaps Kiffin in Gator gear and dreams of a future where the offense scores so fast nobody notices.

Kiffin? “He ain’t comin’. Book it,” is the one honest sentence in the whole saga. If, by some twisted multiverse logic, he ever was coming, the shoe curse and LSU’s rise scared him off like a cat being stalked by Curiosity with a Smith ‘n Wesson.​

Because that’s the final insult of the Curse of the The Thrown Shoe: LSU not only beat you in that game, they marched off into the future, scooping up our would-be coach while Florida stayed behind arguing over which coach, AD, or long-snapper to blame. The curse is not that Wilson threw the shoe. The curse is that the program never recovered. Which is why it’s called a curse.​

They all left town and poor Billy Gonzales was Next Man Up Holding the bag. In his dazed state, Gonzales took the blame for everything from Donald Trump’s tariffs to global warming, but in his infinite wisdom and profound sense of duty to seek answers, said to his team in his Hallmark Wisdom: “Sometimes life has to break you before you find out who you are.”

I love that honesty, more honest than anything Napier ever offered in his empty press post-game ramblings. And it feels very noble until you look at the field and realize life hasn’t just broken Florida; it’s ground the Gators into a fine powder and used them to line Tennessee’s victory cigars. If this is self-discovery, it’s the kind where you realize you’re not a sleeping giant — you’re a loudly snoring mid-tier program living off rental memories of Spurrier and Urban.​

So yes, maybe the Gators are cursed. Not by voodoo, not by bayou magic, not even by the airborne shoe itself. They’re cursed by something crueler and funnier: The refusal to admit that this didn’t “just happen,” that rock bottom was not ignited by a single night in 2020, but an ongoing commitment to half-measures, hero worship and hashtag nostalgia. Not to mention horrible hires for which the class of 2050 will still be paying.

The universe didn’t punish Florida when that shoe left Wilson’s hand. It just finally started keeping score. Part of that evenness came to life when on one of the darkest nights in the Gators Universe, Urban Meyer’s greatness was heralded as he was tapped for the prestigous Ring of Honor. It’s been a long time between drinks of Gatorade since that word “honor” has been used in association with Florida football.