The loss to Mizzou is history; the question is how will the Gators respond?

For an entire month Jon Sumrall had been warning that the Florida Gators would be exposed somewhere down the road if they didn’t change their ways. Somewhere down the road was Columbia, Missouri, where Saturday afternoon the 8^th-ranked Gators (4-1, 2-1 SEC) took one of those leave no place on their body without a bruise beatings at the hands of the 25^th-ranked Missouri Tigers (4-1, 1-1 SEC).  

Just a couple of days prior to this 45-17 mauling at Memorial Stadium one revised forecast after another had Florida penciled in as a College Football Playoff at-large. When this debacle came to a merciful end it seemed as if those 7.5-win predictions were far closer to reality than the Gators living large among the 12 teams that will duke it out for the national championship.

That Missouri hung 45 on the Gators and won by 28 points is almost irrelevant. Neither points nor point spread can even come close to adequately describing just how bad this beating was and it’s not like Sumrall hadn’t forecast something like this was inevitable. Rather than take him at his word, however, the first 4-0 start to a season since 2019 glossed over a lengthy laundry list of flaws that Missouri seemed to have no difficulty exposing. Florida certainly had no way of covering things up.

Cover up certainly wasn’t on Sumrall’s mind at his post game press conference. To his credit he didn’t spend the time trying to spin the loss in a positive way.

“I've seen all of our flaws and they've all been called out in front of the team,” Sumrall said. “We don't hide them. There's going to be a lot of things that get called out. It's going to feel a lot different because sometimes when you win, I think everybody thinks, 'Oh, it didn't cost us. We're okay.' Well you don't have that performance today and not have some sort of sickness in your stomach about what you just did. Like I said, there's guys on our football team that [if they] don't own that, they won't be on this football team very long. I don't really care. Like, we're going to play with guys that are tough and love football and are committed to their development and improving as a team, which you can see we have a lot of improvement to do. We've had a lot of improvement to do. It's just been masked by winning some games, but we haven't played really good football yet in my opinion. We've just found ways to win some games and made some plays but haven't played at a high enough standard."

It turns out the way the offense poured it on the first four games was like getting an overdose of Novocain in the dental chair. The high level offensive production numbed us to just how poorly the defense was performing. It created this we’ll just win shootouts until the defense figures things out expectation. That is a lovely theory when it works. When it doesn’t and the offense takes a powder like it did at Missouri, it gets ugly in a hurry.

Evidence that the numbness was wearing off rather hurriedly came on Florida’s first offensive possession. Jadan Baugh ran for 12 yards on his first carry. His longest carry after that was three yards. Wherever he went football in hand, it seemed no fewer than five Missouri Tigers were there to surround him.

On the opening drive the Gators had to throw to move the ball downfield but once inside the Missouri five there was a dark omen of things to come.

Florida’s offensive line that pushed Auburn and Ole Miss all over the yard couldn’t get any traction against Missouri’s front. The goal line defense was impenetrable. Two unsuccessful runs led to a third-and-goal pass by Aaron Philo that went incomplete. Had Philo looked to his right he might have seen Duke Clark wide open for what would have been an easy TDP. Rather than the TDP, however, the Gators were forced to kick a field goal on fourth-and-goal from the Missouri one. Fourth-and-goal at the one and it’s a field goal and not Baugh trying to power his way in for a TD? We should have known the kind of night it was going to be from that decision alone. Later in the quarter Philo was stuffed on a fourth and inches quarterback sneak at the UF 34. Why the gamble at the UF 34 and not at the goal line? This loss can’t all be pinned on underperforming players. Coaching decisions have to be included in who is responsible and accountable for what happened.

When the final whistle sounded the Gators had a loss pinned on them marred by nearly as many negative plays in one game (11) than they had in the four previous games combined (14). Over on the other side of the ball, the Gators gave up eight pass plays that covered at least 21 yards and running plays of 77 and 80 yards. It’s hard enough to win on the road in the SEC when everything is going right. At Missouri, even things that needed to go right went sideways.

The game didn’t get out of hand until the final four minutes of the second quarter when Missouri went from a 10-10 tie to a 20-10 halftime lead. From that point onward the Tigers took on the look of a runaway freight train. The first half pain transformed into throbbing in the second half and the Gators seemed helpless to do anything about it.

Name the flaw on this Florida football team and Missouri exposed it, a blueprint for every team the Gators will face from here on out. Fixing the pass defense would be the obvious problem that needs to be solved, but that’s only one solution. There are so many others that we are reminded of the sage philosopher Roseanne Rosannadanna who said, “It just goes to show you, it’s always something. If it isn’t one thing, it’s always something else.”

With these Gators it is always something. Sumrall warned that the cuts suffered in weeks one through four would become gaping wounds. Saturday at Missouri the Gators ran out of tourniquets to stop the bleeding.

"I can't pin it down to one thing,” Sumrall said. “Look, what bothered me was our lack of execution, our lack of discipline, our lack of detail. I did not feel that this week, but, man, today, it's like, guys, you get 12 regular season opportunities, you can't let one get away from you without giving your best, and the fact that we put less than our best out there absolutely makes me freaking sick. I am freaking livid over the fact that we just did that.

“I told the guys in the locker room, anybody that's comfortable with that, come see me tonight. We ain't moving forward like this. The score is the score. But it's not just what we do, it's how we do it, and how we just did what we did, it's not acceptable, and it will not be acceptable. I'm livid. I'm frustrated about so many things that I can’t pin it down to one thing." 

This is a first for Sumrall at Florida, but it isn’t the first time in history the Gators have had to recover from a disastrous loss on the road. Here are five examples of double digit losses away from The Swamp that required changes in attitudes and changes in latitudes to recover.

Tennessee 45, No. 9 Florida 3, 1990: Steve Spurrier’s first season at UF. The Gators were 5-0 when the Vols nuked them in Knoxville. The Gators dropped from 9^th to 17^th in the AP poll but didn’t lose again until FSU in Tallahassee in the season finale.

Tennessee 31, No. 4 Florida 14, 1991: The Gators were ranked fourth, the Vols 14^th. A dominating loss in Knoxville. The next week the 13^th-ranked Gators lost badly to Mississippi State in Starkville, dropping all the way down to No. 23. From that 1-2 start the Gators finished 9-4 and came within one play of beating eventual national champ Alabama in the first SEC Championship Game.

Georgia 37, No. 6 Florida 17, 1997: A couple of weeks earlier the Gators were No. 1 when they lost to LSU in Baton Rouge, 28-21. They were No. 6 when Georgia ran all over them in Jacksonville, the only time Spurrier lost to Georgia in his 12 seasons on the job at UF. The Gators won their last four games including a 32-29 heart throbber over FSU, knocking the then No. 2 Seminoles out of the national championship picture.

Mississippi State 47, No. 4 Florida 35, 2000: The Gators couldn’t stop unranked Mississippi State from running the ball, but rebounded with five straight wins before falling to FSU in Tallahassee. The next week the Gators beat Auburn to win the SEC championship, the last of Spurrier’s six league titles.

Auburn 27, No. 2 Florida 17, 2006: Auburn beat the Gators without scoring an offensive touchdown. Florida won the next seven games including Arkansas for the SEC championship and then No. 1 Ohio State, 41-14, for Urban Meyer’s first of two national championships.

Those five losses are worth mentioning because each one required plenty of soul searching in the aftermath. In. much the same way, Sumrall and the Gators have to dig deep to find answers after this loss to Missouri. It can have an end of the world effect if they let it or they can use this as motivation to ensure nothing like this happens again. Sumrall predicted exposure. Now we get to see how the Gators respond because that is going to define the season.

“Sometimes you can write like a sentence or a page of a story when you win because it like masks a deficiency,” Sumrall said. “When you lose, you're going to write a chapter. We got to learn from this. We got to sit on this a little bit, and we have to see our guys look in the mirror and take the accountability. And everybody in our program, top to bottom, like I said earlier, starting with me, all of the coaches, the staff, the players, everybody in the building, like, look at it, look into it, own it, don't shy away from it.

“It sucks. It's not fun but I expect these guys to respond. I can promise you this. I'm going to do everything in my freakin' power, everything to help them respond. That's my job and we’re not going to be okay with this. This is not our standard here and [I am] disgusted by it but have to help this team grow.”