AUBURN, Ala. — For the first time in 27 years, Florida is leaving Jordan-Hare Stadium with a victory. The Gators beat Auburn 44-39 Saturday night in a game that turned from statement win to survival test in the final minutes. Florida led by double digits in the fourth quarter, absorbed one last Auburn push and recovered the late onside kick to finish off its first road win over the Tigers since 1999. Florida improved to 3-0 overall and 1-0 in the SEC in Jon Sumrall’s first conference game as head coach. Auburn fell to 2-1 and 0-1. Baugh owned the night Jadan Baugh was the center of everything Florida wanted to do offensively. The junior carried 26 times for 162 yards and three touchdowns, averaging 6.2 yards per attempt and repeatedly giving the Gators an answer when Auburn threatened to change the game. Baugh was especially effective after halftime, when Florida needed to control tempo and protect a lead in one of the SEC’s loudest road environments. He finished the second half with 106 rushing yards and two touchdowns. Florida ran for 245 yards and finished with 497 yards of total offense. Aaron Philo threw for 202 yards and a touchdown. Vernell Brown III caught five passes for 86 yards, while Dallas Wilson had four receptions for 74 yards and a score. Photo by Chris Spears / GatorBait Media Auburn made Florida finish it The Gators led 20-17 at halftime and pushed the margin to 34-24 after three quarters. Auburn, however, kept the game alive behind quarterback Byrum Brown, who threw for 271 yards and three touchdowns and added 65 rushing yards with another score. Florida’s defense allowed 15 fourth-quarter points, but the Gators also produced four sacks and held Auburn to 102 rushing yards. Auburn had only minus-3 yards in the first quarter before finding a rhythm, but it never fully took control. Photo by Chris Spears / GatorBait Media The final scare came with 24 seconds remaining when Brown hit Chaz Nimrod for a 35-yard touchdown to cut Florida’s lead to 44-39. Auburn failed on the two-point conversion, then Florida secured the ensuing onside kick. One kneel-down later, the drought was over. The road drought ends Florida had not won at Auburn since 1999, a span that covered multiple coaching eras, conference realignment and long stretches in which the old Florida-Auburn rivalry nearly disappeared from the schedule. That history gave Saturday night more weight than a routine September road game. It was Florida’s first trip to Auburn since 2011 and the first SEC road test for Sumrall’s rebuilt program. The result does not answer every question about these Gators. The defense gave up late explosives. Auburn stayed within one possession until the end. There will be plenty for Sumrall and his staff to correct. But Florida went on the road, ran the football against an SEC defense, survived the fourth quarter and won a game that generations of recent Gators never got to celebrate. What it means Florida is 3-0 for the first time since 2018 and now carries an unbeaten record into next Saturday’s home game against Ole Miss. More important in the short term, the Gators have their first conference win under Sumrall and a road result they can point to when the season gets harder. For one night on the Plains, the rebuild looked real. FINAL: Florida 44, Auburn 39 GatorBait Staff

By Buddy Martin GatorBaitMedia.com They used to say you couldn’t win big on the road in the SEC until you actually did it, at which point everybody acted like they knew you could all along. That’s the league for you — forgives nothing, remembers everything, and never once admits it was wrong about a coach until he’s standing in the middle of somebody else’s stadium with the scoreboard behind him telling the truth. So here’s the truth: Jon Sumrall took his Florida Gators into the meanest zip code in the state of Alabama, into a building where visiting teams have historically gone to have their souls removed, and came out the other side with a 44-39 win that wasn’t nearly as close as that final digit wants you to believe. Auburn didn’t lose this one so much as it ran out of stadium. Photo by Chris Spears / GatorBait Media The question hanging over Sumrall since the day he signed his name to a Gators contract was the only question that ever matters in this league: Can he win on the road, in the SEC, against a team with something to prove and 88,000 people howling for his head? Saturday night, in front of Alex Golesh and his first Auburn team, the answer arrived loud and unambiguous. Yes. Yes he certainly can. Give the credit to the kid who did the dirty work. Jadan Baugh ran the ball 26 times for 162 yards and three touchdowns, the kind of workmanlike demolition job that doesn’t show up pretty on highlight reels but shows up permanently in a coach’s trust. He averaged 6.2 yards a pop, which in SEC math translates to Auburn’s defensive front getting slowly, systematically dismantled for four quarters. His signature moment came late — a 53-yard touchdown gash through the fourth quarter that had Auburn’s sideline looking like men watching a house fire they’d already given up trying to put out. Florida kept leaning on him while it bled the clock and Auburn’s night away. Duke Clark chipped in 50 more rushing yards, including a 20-yard touchdown where he bounced off Tigers like they were toll-booth arms that hadn’t gotten the memo he wasn’t stopping. Aaron Philo didn’t need to be spectacular. He needed to be steady, and steady is exactly what a road environment like that demands from a quarterback who’s still writing his own book. He finished 15-of-22 for 204 yards and a touchdown, including a 20-yard strike to Dallas Wilson. Wilson finished with four catches for 74 yards and the score. Vernell Brown III did his part too — five catches, 86 yards, the sort of quiet, dependable night that never gets its own paragraph in the box score story but wins football games anyway. All told, Florida ran for 243 yards and threw for 252 — 495 total yards from a team that looked far more finished than a team that’s supposedly still figuring out who it is. Auburn, to its credit, wasn’t a pushover. Byrum Brown completed 20 of 35 for 271 yards and three touchdowns, ran for another 65 yards and a score, and generally made you understand why Golesh brought him along. But Florida controlled long stretches of the night, and when Auburn finally tied the game at 17, it came on a nine-play, 75-yard drive with 5:25 left in the first half. Florida answered with a field goal before halftime and never trailed again. From there, the Tigers were chasing. Brown had to try to win it with his arm while Florida kept making him earn every answer. Auburn finished with 373 total yards and only 102 on the ground. Auburn made things briefly interesting at the end, when Brown found Chaz Nimrod for a 35-yard touchdown with 30 seconds left — the kind of late strike that keeps the ghost stories about Jordan-Hare alive. The extra point cut Florida’s lead to 44-39 with 24 seconds remaining, but Florida recovered the onside kick and took a knee. Photo by Chris Spears / GatorBait Media Florida moved to 3-0 for the first time since 2019, 1-0 in the league, and — more to the point for the folks keeping score on Sumrall’s résumé — notched its first win at Auburn since 1999. That’s not a typo. That’s a quarter-century of history that just got rewritten by a first-year Florida coach in his conference road debut. And now, because the SEC never lets anybody catch its breath, Ole Miss went and beat LSU 32-24 the same Saturday. That means next week Florida hosts an honest-to-God 3-0 versus 3-0 fight in The Swamp — the kind of game that decides whether “signature road win” turns into “statement season” or just a nice story people tell about a team that flamed out in October. The verdict: Sumrall didn’t just answer the question. He put it out of its misery. The Swamp is about to find out what all the shouting in Auburn was really about.

FINAL FROM JORDAN-HARE STADIUM — Florida survived a penalty-filled night and Auburn’s furious late rally to win 44-39, improving to 3-0 overall and 1-0 in the SEC. FINAL: Florida 44, Auburn 39 Florida finished with 495 total yards and controlled the ball for 39:16, but the Gators made the night far harder than it needed to be with 16 penalties for 138 yards. The turnover battle finished even at 1-1. The Gators ran for 243 yards and passed for 252. Auburn finished with 373 total yards — 271 passing and 102 rushing — while possessing the ball for 20:44. Decisive fourth-quarter sequence Jadan Baugh delivered the biggest blow with 12:38 left, turning fourth-and-1 from the Florida 47 into a 53-yard touchdown run that pushed the Gators ahead 41-24. Auburn refused to go away. Byrum Brown scored on a 21-yard run and the Tigers converted the two-point try to cut the margin to 41-32 with 6:10 remaining. Patrick Durkin then gave Florida critical breathing room with a 40-yard field goal at 2:53, extending the lead to 44-32. Auburn scored again on fourth-and-13 when Brown hit Chas Nimrod for a 35-yard touchdown with 24 seconds left, making it 44-39. Florida recovered the ensuing onside kick and took a knee to end it. Florida survived itself The central problem all night was self-inflicted damage. Florida’s 16 penalties cost 138 yards. Earlier in the game, the Gators had already piled up 10 penalties for 83 yards while repeatedly creating longer down-and-distance situations and extending Auburn opportunities. Even with those mistakes, Florida controlled the game statistically: 24 first downs to Auburn’s 22, 7-of-15 on third down compared with Auburn’s 6-of-12, and a perfect 3-for-3 on fourth down while Auburn finished 1-for-2. Baugh powers the road win Jadan Baugh carried 26 times for 162 yards and three touchdowns. His 33-yard touchdown run opened the second half, and his 53-yard fourth-quarter score became the defining play of the win. FINAL TEAM STATS Florida: 44 points, 495 total yards, 252 passing, 243 rushing, 24 first downs, 7-of-15 third downs, 3-of-3 fourth downs, 16 penalties for 138 yards, 1 turnover, 39:16 possession. Auburn: 39 points, 373 total yards, 271 passing, 102 rushing, 22 first downs, 6-of-12 third downs, 1-of-2 fourth downs, 6 penalties for 65 yards, 1 turnover, 20:44 possession. How the score changed First quarter: Florida 7, Auburn 3. Halftime: Florida 20, Auburn 17. Patrick Durkin’s 28-yard field goal with nine seconds left in the half put the Gators back ahead. Third quarter: Florida 34, Auburn 24. Baugh opened the half with a 33-yard touchdown run, and Aaron Philo later hit Dallas Wilson for a 20-yard touchdown before Auburn answered late in the quarter. Fourth quarter: Baugh’s 53-yard touchdown made it 41-24. Auburn cut it to 41-32, Durkin’s 40-yard field goal made it 44-32, and Auburn’s final touchdown with 24 seconds left produced the 44-39 final. Earlier game tracker updates 12:38 4Q — Florida 41, Auburn 24 On fourth-and-1, Baugh broke a 53-yard touchdown run to give Florida its largest lead of the night. End 3Q — Florida 34, Auburn 24 Auburn cut the lead to 10 on a late third-quarter touchdown after Florida had built a 34-17 advantage. 13:34 3Q — Florida 27, Auburn 17 Florida opened the second half with a three-play, 75-yard touchdown drive, capped by Baugh’s 33-yard run. Halftime — Florida 20, Auburn 17 Florida led 14-3 early, Auburn rallied to tie it at 17, and Durkin’s late field goal restored the Gators’ lead before the break. First-half warning signs Florida moved the football but repeatedly hurt itself with flags and one turnover. Those mistakes kept Auburn within striking distance despite Florida controlling large stretches of the first half. What the win means Florida leaves Jordan-Hare 3-0 and 1-0 in SEC play after surviving its first true road test of the season. The Gators proved they could win a high-pressure game away from home, but 16 penalties for 138 yards will be the obvious correction point going forward.

How would Florida fans react to Jimbo returning to Tallahassee? Florida State’s coaching search is starting to look like a parole board meeting, and Jimbo Fisher just requested his hearing. Per Bruce Feldman of The Athletic, FSU brass is “looking into” bringing Fisher back once Mike Norvell finally gets processed out. Fisher isn’t waiting on the paperwork — he’s been lobbying alumni, ex-players and broadcast colleagues, building his own character-reference file for a job that isn’t even vacant yet. Let’s read the case file straight. Fisher didn’t walk out of Tallahassee on good terms in 2017 — he left in a cloud of lawsuits and half-truths about his own exit that torched real goodwill. Sentenced to Texas A&M’s blank-check NIL money, the richest program in the sport at the time, he still went 45-25 over six years before the Aggies revoked his contract and paid out $77.5 million — the largest buyout in college football history. If unlimited resources couldn’t rehabilitate him once, why would a broke, trigger-happy Florida State succeed where Aggieland failed? His attitude alienated people everywhere he went, his offenses in College Station were maddeningly erratic, and he turns 61 on October 9 — hardly a fresh start candidate. Denied. Case closed. Column over. Except it isn’t, because Florida State isn’t the one holding leverage here — it’s the desperate party in this arrangement. This is a program that just fired its own athletic director days before an Alabama game, sits at 1-1, and faces roughly $130 million combined just to cut Norvell loose and hire anybody — a coach who’s 39-35 overall and a miserable 8-18 since 2024. A program that broke doesn’t get to be picky about who’s on its short list. It’s the one filing the appeal, not the one granting the release. Which flips the whole ruling. Fisher, already carrying his $77.5 million settlement, has signaled he’d take supervised release for cheap — something like $4-5 million against a market rate closer to $8-10 million. “I never got into coaching for money,” he’s said. “I’m not going to get out of it because I’ve got money”. For a school about to hand Norvell $46-51 million just to leave the building, that’s not sentiment — that’s a plea deal. A coach who already knows the boosters, the campus and the recruiting pipeline, for pennies on the dollar of a fresh outside hire? Suddenly the parole board looks less like a formality and more like the only realistic path off the docket. And here’s what the file conveniently leaves out: Fisher’s record before he got sent up wasn’t the problem. He went 83-23 in Tallahassee with a national title and three straight ACC crowns — the best winning percentage in program history. One source told The Athletic, “Jimbo’s rosters didn’t stink — his ability to adapt to modern football is what caught up with him.” And the fan base already delivered its verdict in decibels, chanting “We want Jimbo” when he walked back onto campus as a broadcaster before the SMU game. Gator Nation’s reaction to a Jimbo Fisher reunion tour in Tallahassee is going to split right down the middle, same as it always does with an old tormentor. There are still Gator fans old enough to remember Fisher’s first stint costing Florida five straight losses in the rivalry from 2013 to 2017, a stretch that included his 2013 national title run — the ugliest run the series has seen in decades. For them, “Jimbo’s coming back” isn’t nostalgia. It’s a flashback to getting mugged annually by a coach in a garnet visor. But that’s not the fan base Florida has right now. This Florida team owns the last two meetings — a 40-21 beatdown in the Swamp in 2025 and a Black Friday date already circled for November 27 in Tallahassee — and Florida still leads the all-time series. For that crowd, watching FSU staple a $77.5-million buyout scar to a discount-rate reunion isn’t a threat. It’s dinner theater. Nothing sums up a rival’s desperation quite like re-hiring the guy they once literally threw a Christmas tree out for on his way to Texas A&M. So here’s the ruling, contradictions and all: Paroling Jimbo Fisher back into Tallahassee is a bad bet built on a rap sheet of burned bridges — and it’s also probably the smartest, cheapest, least-reckless move a broke, dysfunctional program can make right now. Sometimes the guy you swore never to let back in the building is the only one who already knows where every door in it leads. Don’t expect a clean record. Expect time served, good behavior noted, and a 4 million ankle monitor.

Vernell Brown III turned a close first quarter into a Florida runaway Saturday, scoring three touchdowns in the second period as the Gators defeated Campbell 52-3 at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. Brown’s consecutive punt-return touchdowns broke open a 10-3 game and helped Florida reach halftime ahead 45-3. The Gators improved to 2-0, but coach Jon Sumrall’s postgame assessment made clear that the final margin did not settle every concern before the SEC opener at Auburn. Brown changes the game Brown scored on returns of 64 and 70 yards, then added a 14-yard touchdown reception from Aaron Philo. He became the first Gator to return consecutive punts for touchdowns since Jacquez Green in 1996. Florida’s official gamebook credited Brown with four punt returns for 173 yards, a school single-game record. A later return traveled 58 yards before an illegal block in the back brought Florida back to its own 15. Brown credited the players opening lanes around him as well as his own instincts. “I’m grateful for those guys and appreciate them blocking for me,” Brown said in his postgame press conference. The return touchdowns were more than an individual highlight. They gave the Gators two scores without requiring an offensive possession and changed the energy of a game Florida had led by only a touchdown after one quarter. Big numbers, work remaining Jadan Baugh rushed 14 times for 136 yards and two touchdowns, including a 75-yard score in the third quarter. It was his third consecutive 100-yard rushing game, a streak dating to the 2025 season finale. Philo completed 16 of 21 passes for 242 yards and two touchdowns and ran for another score. Dallas Wilson caught five passes for 104 yards and a touchdown. Florida held Campbell to 210 total yards and no touchdowns. After the Camels’ opening-drive field goal, the Gators kept them off the scoreboard. The second half was less convincing offensively. Florida scored seven points after halftime, and penalties disrupted its opening two possessions of the third quarter. The Gators finished with eight penalties for 95 yards across the entire game. “We have got a lot of improvement to do,” Sumrall said in his postgame press conference. Sumrall praised Brown’s return work but questioned the consistency of Florida’s execution, particularly as more players received opportunities in the second half. His message puts the Campbell result in perspective: Florida produced game-changing plays while leaving details that will matter against conference opponents. The Gators open SEC play Sept. 19 at Auburn, with kickoff scheduled for 7 p.m. Eastern. Postgame quotations: UAA Communications transcripts prepared by ASAP Sports — Vernell Brown III and Jon Sumrall, Sept. 12, 2026. Statistics: Florida’s official gamebook.

The Buddy Martin Show brought together Laura Rutledge, Ali Peek Wilbur and Carlton Reese for a night that moved from a national college-football sideline controversy to a deeply personal piece of Gainesville history. Laura Rutledge: What really happened on the sideline Rutledge gave a first-person account of the Steve Sarkisian–Holly Rowe sideline moment that drew attention nationally. She explained that the confusion involved production and camera communication and said the broadcast side needed to own its part of what happened. Carlton Reese remembers “14 Days in Gainesville” Reese, who lived and worked in Gainesville during the 1990 student murders, recalled the fear that hung over the city. His memory of keeping a putter in his hand while other people carried baseball bats gives the ESPN documentary’s story an unsettling firsthand dimension. Watch the full Buddy Martin Show episode on YouTube.

Best Friday in Football is GatorBait Media’s Friday football show. Buddy Martin hosts Pat Smith of WJOX, Franz Beard and Rob Dotson for a Friday morning run through the biggest SEC football, Florida Gators and college football storylines heading into the weekend. Florida heads to Auburn for its first SEC road test of the season, and the conversation covers the biggest SEC and Florida Gators storylines heading into the weekend. WATCH BEST FRIDAY IN FOOTBALL ON GATORBAIT MEDIA →

So fee, fi, fo, fum on that haunted football emporium, with a name not even correctly pronounced all these years. Would they call it the “Jerden” River? Ralph Shug (Call Me ‘Jerden’) Jordan. (Facebook) By Buddy Martin GatorBaitMedia.com There is a particular strain of Southern hospitality practiced on the Plains of Auburn, Alabama, that goes something like this: They will hold the door for you, call you “sir,” sell you a $9 hot dog with a smile, and then, right around kickoff, gut you like a bream and dance around the fire with your heart still twitching. I have covered games in a lot of stadiums over six decades, and I will tell you plainly — there is no place in the Southeastern Conference where the folks are nicer and the football is meaner than Jordan-Hare Stadium. (Pronounced “Jerden” after Coach Shug.) It’s the SEC’s version of a tribal ceremony, except instead of feathers and drums they’ve got war eagles and 88,000 people in orange doing the wave while your quarterback loses his mind on national television. They will genuinely, sincerely, ask if your family made the trip down all right. Then they will eat your heart out on the 50-yard line and wash it down with something served in a mason jar, all with a smile you’d swear was sincere — because, in its own strange way, it is. They don’t boo you out of that building. They just quietly consume your soul and hand you a program on the way out, in case you’d like a souvenir of your own demise. I have personally witnessed some of the ugliest football ever played by Florida Gators inside that building, and I’m including in that ledger the November afternoon in 1969 when one of the greatest arms this state ever produced, John Reaves, walked into Jordan-Hare — then still wearing its old Cliff Hare bones — and threw the ball into the waiting hands of Auburn defenders nine different times. Nine. That is not a typo, and it is still the NCAA record nobody has come remotely close to touching. Nine interceptions from a future first-round pick. (Think of this for frame of reference: All last season Patrick Mahomes threw just 11 interceptions!) Auburn’s Pat Sullivan threw two touchdowns that day, ran for two more and Reaves’ Gators, unbeaten going in, staggered out on the wrong end of a 38-12 licking that remains one of the strangest and most humbling days in Florida football history. That building has always had a knack for devouring great quarterbacks. It just prefers them served with a side of turnovers. Even Steve Spurrier, who authored more misery for Auburn than any man alive, never quite solved the Plains. As a player he was busy winning Heisman Trophies in Gainesville, but once he came back to coach the Gators from 1990 to 2001 — a run that produced a scarcely believable 122-27-1 record — Jordan-Hare still found ways to bite him. In 1993, his No. 4 Gators walked into that stadium and got outlasted by Terry Bowden’s undefeated, probation-bound Tigers, 38-35, in a track meet that still gives Gator fans of a certain age heartburn. His happiest trip there came in 1999, when Florida throttled Auburn’s running game down to one — one! — rushing yard and won going away, 32-14. That, friends, is the last time a Florida team has won a football game inside Jordan-Hare Stadium. Not last year. Not last decade. 1999. Y2K hadn’t even happened yet. Florida has been back on the Plains exactly three times since — 2001, 2006, and 2011 — and lost all three. The Gators’ last actual win over Auburn anywhere came in 2019, a 24-13 job — but that one was played safely at home in The Swamp, where the natives are considerably friendlier. Florida hasn’t set foot inside Jordan-Hare in 15 years. There is a whole generation of Gator fans who have never watched their team try to survive that building. (BTW, Fi on that haunted football emporium, with a name not even correctly pronounced all these years. Would they call it the “Jerden” River?) And it isn’t just Florida who leaves the Plains rattled. Nick Saban — a man who won more national titles than most fan bases have ever seen, and who spent 17 years driving his Alabama teams two hours down I-85 to Auburn — stood on College GameDay and declared the building flat-out haunted. “In my opinion, in 17 years, going to Auburn, playing in Jordan-Hare, that place is haunted,” Saban said. “I guarantee it. The way we lost games and the way we won games there, it’s unbelievable.” This from a man who is not exactly known for believing in ghosts, or in anything he can’t out-recruit. Understand what he’s talking about. This is the building that produced the Kick Six, when Auburn’s Chris Davis fielded a missed Alabama field goal one second from the end of the 2013 Iron Bowl and returned it 109 unbroken yards to beat the No. 1 team in the country, 34-28. Two weeks earlier, in that same building, in that same magic season, Auburn faced fourth-and-18 against Georgia with 36 seconds left, needing a miracle — and got one, when Nick Marshall’s desperation heave deflected off a Georgia defender’s hands and into Ricardo Louis’s arms for a 73-yard, game-winning touchdown that history now calls the Prayer at Jordan-Hare. And in case you thought the building had retired, in 2023 Alabama faced its own fourth-and-31 with 43 seconds on the clock and somehow, impossibly, converted it into the winning touchdown to beat Auburn 27-24. Three different miracles, three different decades, all under the same set of lights. If that’s not a haunted house, somebody ought to call the Ghostbusters and get a second opinion. Now, before you light a candle and start reading tea leaves — there is a far less supernatural explanation floating around, and Auburn folks will tell it to you themselves. It isn’t ghosts. It’s noise. Jordan-Hare gets absurdly, structurally loud, the student section rocks, and 88,000 people screaming into a bowl-shaped stadium has been known to rattle a placekicker or a freshman quarterback about as effectively as any poltergeist ever could. Coaches around the league — Kirby Smart among them — have said as much about visiting the big, hostile SEC buildings: The sheer weight of the crowd noise turns a normal Tuesday-practice-clean football game into forty-eight minutes of pure chaos, sometimes enhanced by piped-in crowd noise, as was the case in 2006 when the SEC fined Auburn for doing that after the Florida game. It isn’t hoodoo. It’s just a really, really mean home-field advantage with a good PR department and a bag of mischievous Tom Foolery. Which brings us, at last, to Saturday night. Florida travels back onto the Plains for the first time in 15 years to face Auburn, and for once both sides are walking in with fresh blood on the sideline — Jon Sumrall in his first season running the Gators after coming over from Tulane, and Alex Golesh running his first Auburn team after his own stop at South Florida, following a season that ended with Auburn firing Hugh Freeze in November. Two brand-new head coaches, both 2-0, both trying to prove their program is for real, meeting for the first time under the lights at 7 p.m. ET — with Florida a modest 2.5-point favorite and the over-under total sitting around 53.5. It is, by any measure, a legitimately big early-season swing game for both jobs. I don’t know what it is about that particular patch of Alabama real estate. Maybe it’s the noise. Maybe it’s the ghosts of Sonny Ferguson’s three interceptions off poor John Reaves. Maybe Auburn just built the stadium directly on top of an ancient burial ground for opposing kickers. All I know is that Florida is favored to walk in there Saturday night and finally do something the Gators haven’t managed since Bill Clinton’s second term — win a football game inside Jordan-Hare Stadium. History says don’t bet the mortgage on it. But then again, somebody has to be the team that finally breaks the curse, and it might as well be a bunch of Gators who’ve never even been inside that haunted house before. Bring garlic. Bring a horseshoe. Bring your best offensive line. You’re going to need all three. I pick the Gators and lay the points. I think they will break the curse and bring relief to their new coach for the “Burden of Jerden.”

There is this theory that has been circulating for a few months that Jon Sumrall is Florida’s football coach because athletic director Scott Stricklin got the best of the guy he once mentored. It is only a theory but one that has grown legs. It has its start back in 2008 when Scott Stricklin left Kentucky to become the senior associate athletic director at Mississippi State. Coincidentally, MSU needed a new baseball coach and Kentucky head coach John Cohen just happened to be available. Was this a package deal? They would probably both deny it, but there are folks who believe it. When Greg Byrne (now Alabama AD) left Mississippi State for Arizona in 2010, Stricklin became the MSU athletic director. And, when Stricklin left MSU for Florida in 2016, Cohen was immediately named as the replacement. Cohen remained at Mississippi State until 2022 when he succeeded Allen Greene as the athletic director at Auburn. Fast forward to October of 2025. After a 3-4 start and a win over Mississippi State of all schools, Stricklin pulled the plug on Billy Napier, naming Billy Gonzales as the interim head coach for the rest of the season. A couple of weeks later up at Auburn, Cohen pink slipped Hugh Freeze, who was finding creative ways to lose very winnable games. For the next month, Florida seemed zeroed in on Ole Miss coach Lane Kiffin. There was talk at Auburn about hiring Missouri coach Eli Drinkwitz and bringing one-time Auburn offensive coordinator and former Florida State head coach Jimbo Fisher out of retirement but the one name that resonated with the Auburn faithful was Jon Sumrall, busy coaching Tulane to the American Conference championship and the College Football Playoff. Sumrall was a natural fit: Alabama native (from Huntsville), married to an Auburn grad, championship pedigree. Just when it seemed Kiffin was a lock for Florida, the narrative changed. Perhaps guided by super agent Jimmy Sexton, Kiffin started leaning heavily to LSU. Meanwhile, Sumrall kept checking all the boxes for Stricklin and very quietly he became the target. At the same time, Sumrall was Auburn’s top target and because of the connection to the state of Alabama and the Auburn grad wife, many assumed Auburn was a mortal lock. A funny thing happened on the way to a mortal lock. In a scene reminiscent of the ending of “The Graduate” in which the blushing bride throws off her veil and sprints down the aisle to her true love, who fights off the wedding guests with a cross, Scott Stricklin stole Jon Sumrall off the Auburn altar. That was November 30, 2025. On that same day, John Cohen went Plan B by hiring Alex Golesh from South Florida. Had Sumrall taken the Auburn job would Golesh have been Florida’s Plan C (Kiffin was Plan A)? Only Scott Stricklin knows for sure and he’s not talking. By stealing Sumrall away from Auburn and his old buddy John Cohen, Stricklin has successfully turned Saturday night’s Florida-Auburn matchup at Jordan-Hare Stadium (7 p.m., ESPN) into a grudge match that lacks only Gordon Solie hyping it with one of his legendary interviews. Both teams come into the game 2-0. Florida is a 2.5-point favorite, which means oddsmakers view this as a white knuckles finish tossup. For Auburn fans it is a Dusty Rhodes-Harley Race revenge match. So, who wins it? The SEC Soothsayer knows for sure. The Sayer says Sooth!: Florida’s many weapons will put three or four touchdowns on DJ Durkin’s Auburn defense but the shocker will be Brad White’s Florida defense. The plain vanilla of the last two weeks will emerge fierce and motivated. Florida will win and it might not be as close as some expect. ELSEWHERE IN THE SEC Texas-San Antonio (2-0) at No. 1 Texas (2-0): You go from Ohio State to UTSA in a week. That’s like chasing a crystal flute of champagne with a Mickey Malt straight from the bottle. The Sayer says Sooth!: The Horns face the Vols on the road next week. Give the fans a show then make sure nobody gets hurt is the agenda. Texas is favored by 30.5 points. No. 2 Georgia (2-0) at Arkansas (1-1): This game will be only slightly tougher than last week for Georgia. Last week the Bulldogs hung 10 TDs on Western Kentucky. The Sayer says Sooth!: The only question is does Kirby Smart leave Gunner Stockton in long enough to give him some Heisman-like stats. No. 7 LSU (2-0) at No. 8 Ole Miss (2-0): Juicy! Lane Kiffin returns to Oxford where he is only slightly more popular than a case of incurable gonorrhea. If Sam Leavitt can’t play then LSU’s defense better deliver in a very big way, but do the Tigers have the ability to shut down Trinidad Chambliss? With Leavitt, LSU is a 3-point favorite. Without him? Odds tilt heavily in favor of Ole Miss. The Sayer says Sooth!: All eyes are on Lane Kiffin, but they should be on that LSU defense, which has a nasty streak. All bets are off if Leavitt doesn’t play or he is visibly hindered by some injury, but if he’s healthy it’s an LSU win. Kentucky (1-1, 0-1 SEC) at No. 9 Texas A&M (2-0): For a half, Will Stein had Kentucky faithful believing last week. Then reality set in and Bama blew the doors off the Wildcats. The Aggies might have a better defense than Alabama which is why they are 17.5-point favorites. The Sayer says Sooth!: Nothing more than a tuneup game for the Aggies, who have to play at LSU next Saturday night. Florida State (1-1) at No. 10 Alabama (2-0, 1-0 SEC): The Seminoles embarrassed Alabama in Tallahassee last year. Paybacks are hell. Alabama has had this one circled on the calendar since January. That Alabama is only a 19.5-point fave is curious however. The Sayer says Sooth!: FSU QB Ashton Daniels better show up in his feets don’t fail me now persona because the Bama defense is going to leave him battered and bruised. Kennesaw State (1-1) at No. 15 Tennessee (2-0): The Vols are favored to win by five touchdowns. Why so few? With Texas on the agenda for next week the Vols’ most important task will be to keep everyone healthy. The Sayer says Sooth!: The Vols should hang 40 on the scoreboard by halftime. Troy (2-0) at No. 20 Missouri (2-0): It’s Mizzou. It’s September. Eli Drinkwitz rarely loses a game in September. Troy is a 27.5-point road dog. Ahmad Hardy still hasn’t played for the Tigers but they won’t need him Saturday. Another big game for Austin Simmons. The Sayer says Sooth!: Troy would need a surprise equal to the legendary Trojan Horse to win this one. Mizzou by a mile. Or two. New Mexico (2-0) at No. 24 Oklahoma (1-1): The Sooners have a graduate level defense and a Romper Room level offense that better improve in a hurry. As get well games go, this one is likely to stay close for at least a half and maybe into the fourth quarter. The Sayer says Sooth!: Oklahoma, but the final score might not reflect on how close it really is. Mississippi State (2-0) at South Carolina (2-0): The Gamecocks are favored by four, but why? They haven’t played anyone while Mississippi State has already gone on the road to stick it to a Big Ten opponent. LaNorris Sellers has to play like the LaNorris Sellers of 2024 for South Carolina to win this one. Kamario Taylor of MSU only has to play like he did last week against Minnesota. The Sayer says Sooth!: Beware Mississippi State. The Bulldogs are a whole lot better than expected and they’ll win Saturday. North Carolina State (1-1) at Vanderbilt (2-0): Hotshot freshman Jared Curtis will start at QB for the Commodores, who are 3-point favorites. Any pressure he’s feeling is dwarfed by the pressure on NC State coach Dave Doren. He’s skating on thin ice and a loss to Vandy will draw out the sharp knives among the boosters. The Sayer says Sooth!: Vandy wins this in a fourth quarter chest clutcher. COUNTDOWN TO FIRING DAY: SEPTEMBER 18 EDITION EXTINCT SPECIES LIST None so far, but it’s not October. Yet. ON LIFE SUPPORT Mike Norvell, Florida State: The new prez fired the athletic director for the audacity of not only running up $437 million in debt but giving Norvell a sweetheart contract that will require $51 million to send him to Lake Oconee, the rather hip gathering place in North Georgia for former coaches living off the buyout money. The Seminoles are at Alabama this week and Alabama is still pissed for losing to FSU in Tallahassee last year. Luke Fickell, Wisconsin: Rather than circle the football complex, buzzards are sitting in the trees just waiting for someone to pull the plug on Fickell. Eastern Michigan is this week’s opponent. Wisconsin won’t have a winnable game until Rutgers on November 7. Dave Aranda, Baylor: DJ Lagway’s high ankle sprain is likely to keep him out of this weekend’s game with Louisiana Tech. The goal is to have him ready for Colorado in the Big 12 opener next week. A loss to Lousy Tech would be a walk the plank sentence for Aranda but if Lagway further damaged the ankle, the Bears will be in deepest and darkest. The defense better win this one. Bill Belichick, North Carolina: Son Steve has resigned as part of a growing scandal at UNC so Bill is calling the defense. Apparently, he hasn’t forgotten how to do it. Two games, two wins, 13 points allowed and just 5.5 yards per pass attempt. Now if he can just get the offense cranked. The Heels could be 3-0 after this week because Clemson’s offense would have trouble scoring against a flag football team. Mike Locksley, Maryland: The Terps are 2-0 but won’t won’t be favored to win a game until October 17 when they play Rutgers. Such is life in the Big Ten. The money flows but the wins don’t. Dell McGee, Georgia State: Reality sets in Saturday at the Bounce House. UCF is not going to be nice and will end Georgia State’s thrilling 2-game winning streak, which has been seen by a combine 27,743 hardy souls. Bill O’Brien, Boston College: The Eagles are 1-1. Okay, the one win was Rutgers but they’ll get another win Saturday. Okay, it’s Maine but D1AA wins count the same in the record book. A 2-game win streak baby! Greg Schiano, Rutgers: It’s not so much that he’s a bad coach. He really isn’t. The problem is it’s Rutgers, an absolute graveyard where a 7-win season should set off a week of parties. The Scarlet Knights are 0-2 and the only winnable game remaining on the schedule is against D1AA Howard. ENDANGERED SPECIES LIST Dabo Swinney, Clemson: The Tigers almost bought the ranch last week against Georgia Southern. They have no offense. Dabo needs to pledge to the faithful that he will spend NIL money and find a quarterback in the portal. They aren’t going to fire him. He’s earned the right to leave on his own terms, but the higher ups who write the checks aren’t happy campers. Shane Beamer, South Carolina: The Gamecocks are 2-0 against vastly inferior opponents. This week they start SEC play. Week three and it’s must win time already in Columbia. A loss will ramp up the rumblings that maybe it’s time for a change. Dave Doren, North Carolina State: The Wolfpack rung up D1AA Richmond for 73 big ones last week. Now they have to play Vandy in Nashville where things could get ugly in a hurry. Dave’s been there since 2013 and he still hasn’t won anything. Brent Key, Georgia Tech: No Buster Faulkner calling the plays means a miserable offense. The Jackets are 0-2. Other than Mercer this week, Stanford and Boston College there aren’t many wins left on the schedule. Tech fans are already dreaming of the day that Buster Faulker returns as the head coach. Joe Moorhead, Akron: The Zips won’t go winless this year because they beat D1AA Robert Morris. Moorhead is 14-36 at Akron and on his way to a fifth straight losing season. They had no idea what they were getting into at Akron when they fired Terry Bowden. At least The Little Dweeb could get them an occasional bowl game.

By Buddy Martin / GatorBaitMedia.com There is a particular strain of Southern hospitality practiced on the Plains of Auburn, Alabama, that goes something like this: They will hold the door for you, call you “sir,” sell you a $9 hot dog with a smile, and then, right around kickoff, gut you like a bream and dance around the fire with your heart still twitching. I have covered games in a lot of stadiums over six generations, and I will tell you plainly — there is no place in the Southeastern Conference where the folks are nicer and the football is meaner than Jordan-Hare Stadium. (Pronounced “Jerden” after Coach Shug.) It’s the SEC’s version of a tribal ceremony, except instead of feathers and drums they’ve got war eagles and 88,000 people in orange doing the wave while your quarterback loses his mind on national television. They will genuinely, sincerely, ask if your family made the trip down all right. Then they will eat your heart out on the 50-yard line and wash it down with something served in a mason jar, all with a smile you’d swear was sincere — because, in its own strange way, it is. They don’t boo you out of that building. They just quietly consume your soul and hand you a program on the way out, in case you’d like a souvenir of your own demise. I have personally witnessed some of the ugliest football ever played by Florida Gators inside that building, and I’m including in that ledger the November afternoon in 1969 when one of the greatest arms this state ever produced, John Reaves, walked into Jordan-Hare — then still wearing its old Cliff Hare bones — and threw the ball into the waiting hands of Auburn defenders nine different times. Nine. That is not a typo, and it is still the NCAA record nobody has come remotely close to touching. Nine interceptions from a future first-round pick. (Think of this for frame of reference: All last season Patrick Mahomes threw just 11 interceptions!) Auburn’s Pat Sullivan threw two touchdowns that day, ran for two more and Reaves’ Gators, unbeaten going in, staggered out on the wrong end of a 38-12 licking that remains one of the strangest and most humbling days in Florida football history. That building has always had a knack for devouring great quarterbacks. It just prefers them served with a side of turnovers. Even Steve Spurrier, who authored more misery for Auburn than any man alive, never quite solved the Plains. As a player he was busy winning Heisman Trophies in Gainesville, but once he came back to coach the Gators from 1990 to 2001 — a run that produced a scarcely believable 122-27-1 record — Jordan-Hare still found ways to bite him. In 1993, his No. 4 Gators walked into that stadium and got outlasted by Terry Bowden’s undefeated, probation-bound Tigers, 38-35, in a track meet that still gives Gator fans of a certain age heartburn. His happiest trip there came in 1999, when Florida throttled Auburn’s running game down to one — one! — rushing yard and won going away, 32-14. That, friends, is the last time a Florida team has won a football game inside Jordan-Hare Stadium. Not last year. Not last decade. 1999. Y2K hadn’t even happened yet. Florida has been back on the Plains exactly three times since — 2001, 2006, and 2011 — and lost all three. The Gators’ last actual win over Auburn anywhere came in 2019, a 24-13 job — but that one was played safely at home in The Swamp, where the natives are considerably friendlier. Florida hasn’t set foot inside Jordan-Hare in 15 years. There is a whole generation of Gator fans who have never watched their team try to survive that building. (BTW, fie on that haunted football emporium, with a name not even correctly pronounced all these years. Would they call it the “Jerden” River?) And it isn’t just Florida who leaves the Plains rattled. Nick Saban — a man who won more national titles than most fan bases have ever seen, and who spent 17 years driving his Alabama teams two hours down I-85 to Auburn — stood on College GameDay and declared the building flat-out haunted. “In my opinion, in 17 years, going to Auburn, playing in Jordan-Hare, that place is haunted,” Saban said. “I guarantee it. The way we lost games and the way we won games there, it’s unbelievable.” This from a man who is not exactly known for believing in ghosts, or in anything he can’t out-recruit. Understand what he’s talking about. This is the building that produced the Kick Six, when Auburn’s Chris Davis fielded a missed Alabama field goal one second from the end of the 2013 Iron Bowl and returned it 109 unbroken yards to beat the No. 1 team in the country, 34-28. Two weeks earlier, in that same building, in that same magic season, Auburn faced fourth-and-18 against Georgia with 36 seconds left, needing a miracle — and got one, when Nick Marshall’s desperation heave deflected off a Georgia defender’s hands and into Ricardo Louis’s arms for a 73-yard, game-winning touchdown that history now calls the Prayer at Jordan-Hare. And in case you thought the building had retired, in 2023 Alabama faced its own fourth-and-31 with 43 seconds on the clock and somehow, impossibly, converted it into the winning touchdown to beat Auburn 27-24. Three different miracles, three different decades, all under the same set of lights. If that’s not a haunted house, somebody ought to call the Ghostbusters and get a second opinion. Now, before you light a candle and start reading tea leaves — there is a far less supernatural explanation floating around, and Auburn folks will tell it to you themselves. It isn’t ghosts. It’s noise. Jordan-Hare gets absurdly, structurally loud, the student section rocks, and 88,000 people screaming into a bowl-shaped stadium has been known to rattle a placekicker or a freshman quarterback about as effectively as any poltergeist ever could. Coaches around the league — Kirby Smart among them — have said as much about visiting the big, hostile SEC buildings: The sheer weight of the crowd noise turns a normal Tuesday-practice-clean football game into forty-eight minutes of pure chaos, sometimes enhanced by piped-in crowd noise, as was the case in 2006 when the SEC fined Auburn for doing that after the Florida game. It isn’t hoodoo. It’s just a really, really mean home-field advantage with a good PR department and a bag of mischievous Tom Foolery. Which brings us, at last, to Saturday night. Florida travels back onto the Plains for the first time in 15 years to face Auburn, and for once both sides are walking in with fresh blood on the sideline — Jon Sumrall in his first season running the Gators after coming over from Tulane, and Alex Golesh running his first Auburn team after his own stop at South Florida, following a season that ended with Auburn firing Hugh Freeze in November. Two brand-new head coaches, both 2-0, both trying to prove their program is for real, meeting for the first time under the lights at 7 p.m. ET — with Florida a modest 2.5-point favorite and the over-under total sitting around 53.5. It is, by any measure, a legitimately big early-season swing game for both jobs. I don’t know what it is about that particular patch of Alabama real estate. Maybe it’s the noise. Maybe it’s the ghosts of Sonny Ferguson’s three interceptions off poor John Reaves. Maybe Auburn just built the stadium directly on top of an ancient burial ground for opposing kickers. All I know is that Florida is favored to walk in there Saturday night and finally do something the Gators haven’t managed since Bill Clinton’s second term — win a football game inside Jordan-Hare Stadium. History says don’t bet the mortgage on it. But then again, somebody has to be the team that finally breaks the curse, and it might as well be a bunch of Gators who’ve never even been inside that haunted house before. Bring garlic. Bring a horseshoe. Bring your best offensive line. You’re going to need all three. I pick the Gators and lay the points. I think they will break the curse and bring relief to their new coach for the “Burden of Jerden.”

Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer went 85-33-1 on the road when they coached the Gators A few thoughts to jump start your Thursday morning: In the Southeastern Conference nothing is more terrifying than a road trip. Just ask Urban Meyer, whose 65-15 overall record from 2005-10 included a 30-11 record away from Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. At home, Meyer won 89.74 percent of the time, but 73.17 percent of the time on the road. “There is no such thing as an easy road game in the SEC,” Meyer responded to a question I asked him Wednesday afternoon. “Getting a win anywhere on the road in the SEC isn't just a win, it's an accomplishment.” Steve Spurrier compiled a 122-27-1 record at UF during his 12-year run from 1990-2001. The Gators were 55-22-1 on the road during his tenure. The Gators won 93.06 percent of their home games but 71.15 percent away. The two greatest coaches in University of Florida history – Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer – combined for a 187-42-1 record (81.52 percent) with eight Southeastern Conference and three national championships during their combined 18 seasons. In the non-Spurrier and Meyer years since 1990, the Gators haven’t won a single SEC or national championship. The combined overall record of the Ron Zook, Will Muschamp, Jim McElwain, Dan Mullen and Billy Napier eras is 133-94, which is a mediocre 58.59 percent. On the road, those five are a combined 51-63 (44.37 percent. The Zook era Gators went 10-9 on the road; Muschamp era 12-12; McElwain era 9-11; Mullen era 15-12; and Napier 5-19. Counting the last two years of Mullen and all four of Napier, the Gators went 10-28 on the road, 6-18 in SEC roadies. In the ever-changing world of college football, what the Gators did in the Spurrier and Meyer years is ancient history but whether it’s ancient or recent, the numbers don’t lie and the story they tell is that the Florida Gators (2-0) better keep their chinstraps buckled and make sure they remember to insert a cup in their jocks Saturday night (7:30 p.m., ESPN) at Auburn (2-0). It will be the first taste of life away from home as Florida’s head coach for Jon Sumrall and it comes at a place that hasn’t been kind to the Gators through the years. Florida is 8-26-1 all-time at Jordan-Hare Stadium. The last time the Gators won there was 1999 when Doug Johnson threw for 310 yards and a TD and Jeff Chandler kicked four field goals for a 32-14 victory over the then-Tommy Tuberville coached Tigers. The SEC, in its infinite wisdom, ditched Florida-Auburn as an important rivalry after the 2002 season. The Gators lost there in 2006 and 2011. In the only Florida-Auburn matchup since 2011, the Gators beat 7th-ranked Auburn 24-13 at BHG behind two touchdown passes by Kyle Trask and 130 rushing yards by LaMical Perine including an 88-yarder for a TD that sealed the win. Even though six seasons have passed since the Gators and Auburn last played, this is a game that has been circled on the Auburn calendar for months. The only time Sumrall and first-year Auburn coach Alex Golesh have met head-to-head was 2024, Sumrall’s first season at Tulane where the Green Wave blew the doors off South Florida, 45-10, in New Orleans. Considering Florida’s road recent road woes – 10-28 since 2020, 0-6 last season – and a venue that hasn’t exactly proven friendly for UF throughout the years, the Gators are a surprising 2.5-point favorite to win, which would be, in Urban Meyer’s words, “an accomplishment.” MIAMI GETS $200 MILLION DEAL FROM NIKE Miami will be leaving Adidas for Nike starting with the 2027-28 athletic year, a deal reportedly worth $200 million over the next 10 years. LSU signed a new deal with Nike late in 2025 that is rumored to be worth in excess of $10 million a year and includes 10 LSU athletes getting NIL deals directly from Nike. Tennessee is leaving Nike for Adidas, a deal that is said to be 10 years for more than $100 million. Texas is coming to the end of its 15-year, $250 million deal with Nike. Ohio State has a similar deal with Nike. It is worth mentioning the Miami deal and the money numbers for the other schools because Florida hasn’t disclosed an extension with Nike/Jordan Brand. When Michigan switched over to Jordan Brand in 2017, which is a part of the Nike family, the deal was reportedly worth $15 million per year. Is Florida getting anything close to $15 million a year? And if not, then why? With a stadium renovation estimated at $1.5 billion, the Gators should not be on the short end of a deal with Nike. The last reported deal for the Gators was a 7-year extension of the Nike contract that paid UF $3.1 million per year. That, of course, did not account for the deal to switch over to Jordan Brand in 2017. IT’S NOT ROCK BOTTOM JUST YET AT FSU, BUT IT’S GETTING CLOSER Michael Alford was fired as the athletic director at Florida State University back on Monday. Good riddance and long overdue say an overwhelming number of Seminole fans, desperate for a return to relevance. Alford was hired to provide financial stability and instead of putting FSU on a firm foundation, he ran up enough debt that insolvency is almost reach out and touch close. FSU is at least $437 million in debt. Some say more than that. No matter the exact amount, it’s a staggering debt for an ACC school without the deep pockets of a North Carolina, Duke or Virginia where old money backs up the ACC’s yearly contributions. FSU is heavily reliant on ACC money which is not only dwarfed by the amount of money Florida gets from the SEC but a gap that will continue to widen. Making matters worse is football coach Mike Norvell, who has posted consecutive losing seasons. To fire Norvell would cost something like $50 million, plus buyouts for his staff. Hiring a new coach and staff would cost millions more, again, money FSU doesn’t have. There is also the matter of NIL money. FSU doesn’t have it for Norvell and it’s not going to find it for a new coach, either. The FSU faithful live in a dream world that the Southeastern Conference or Big Ten would invite them to join, but there are two chances that will happen: No way and no how. The SEC is content with 16 teams, but if expansion is somehow a necessity, schools that fit the geographic footprint and bring something to the television market. Florida State brings nothing to the television equation. If the SEC were to consider another school in Florida it would be Miami. It will take a roll of the dice by Florida State, a situation reminiscent of that old Darryl K. Royal adage, “Three things happen when you pass the football and two of them are bad.” In the case of FSU and Norvell, three things can happen and two of them are bad: (1) They can keep him, hope he wins but knowing he probably won’t; (2) fire him and risk bringing in another coach who, faced with the financial difficulties and challenges of the ACC, won’t win big; or (3) get lucky and find someone who can actually win and make the football program relevant again. The key word in all this is relevance. Can Florida State become relevant again? Right now FSU is a bug on the windshield of college football. ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT: College football’s arch-villain returns to the scene of the crime Saturday night. Lane Kiffin returns to Ole Miss, this time as the head coach of LSU, a 3-point favorite to leave Oxford with a win that will certainly catapult the Tigers into the legitimate national championship buzz. A year ago this time Lane was coaching Ole Miss and the world was discovering Trinidad Chambliss. If Ole Miss is to emerge a winner Saturday night it will be because Chambliss shows why many experts think he is the most dynamic and important player in all of college football. The funny thing is nobody is talking about Trinidad Chambliss this week. As singularly important as he is to the outcome of this football game, any mention of Chambliss and Ole Miss is drowned out by the anger and vitriol generated by Kiffin, who jilted Ole Miss for LSU at the end of an 11-1 regular season run in 2025. We’ve heard all the stories about how Lane really wanted to coach Ole Miss in the playoffs and how Ole Miss responded with a resounding no. Ole Miss chose to take its chances with defensive coordinator Pete Golding in the College Football Playoff and came within a pass interference no-call of beating Miami in the semifinals. Pete went 2-1 in the playoffs. Could Kiffin have done any better? Maybe, maybe not. As good a football coach as Lane Kiffin is – forget all the drama that seems magnetically attracted to him wherever he goes – he still hasn’t won a championship anywhere he has been a head coach. Not at Tennessee, not at Southern Cal, not at Florida Atlantic and not at Ole Miss. At every whistlestop on the Lane Kiffin journey there has been a hiccup or two that has taken his team out of championship contention. There is no denying Kiffin can scheme scary good offenses and has figured out how to manipulate the portal to ensure he has high level talent to coach up. Those things aren’t debatable. What is debatable is Kiffin’s ability to emerge victorious in a must win situation. This is a must win situation on which 90 percent of the pressure is squarely on Kiffin’s shoulders. He NEEDS this game in the worst way to eradicate the perception that he can’t win the big one. He can’t afford one of those “get your popcorn ready” moments like the one he had at Alabama in 2023. He’s famous for things like that. Because they have happened so frequently in his coaching career you have to wonder if he has a self-destruct mechanism that takes over any time he’s faced with a game he has to win. There is no doubt about it, this is a must win for Kiffin that goes beyond the perception of the unfaithful husband returning to the home town of the blushing bride after the nasty divorce. That he might have to try to pull it off without quarterback Sam Leavitt, a surprising "doubtful" listing by LSU Wednesday evening only makes this story juicier. Throw in the matter of the recent showdown between Kiffin/LSU with Greg Sankey and 15 of the 16 presidents of the Southeastern Conference and Taylor Sheridan could turn this into 10-episode season of must-watch TV. Sankey got the best of Kiffin and LSU on this one but in doing so created what LSU fans see as a Butch Cassidy persona for Lane Kiffin. Kiffin is an outlaw, but the faithful in Louisiana think he's ever so lovable as long as he will do that voo doo that he does so well for the Tigers. To Sankey, the rest of the SEC and most college football fans, Kiffin is John Wesley Harding, who once shot a man for smiling. For Tiger fans, an LSU win Saturday night will be like several million middle fingers raised in unison to Sankey and the rest of the SEC. To the rest of the college football world and especially the SEC offices in Birmingham, an LSU loss will best be described by one word. Righteous.

“I was just thinking football,” Spurrier said from his office Wednesday when discussing the 1990 season opener and the murders. “I have a way of putting all that out of my mind.“ By Carlton Reese GatorBaitMedia.com In watching the recent ESPN documentary “14 Days in Gainesville” I certainly did not expect to learn anything new and figured only to have some memories I had wished extinguished long ago to be rekindled. On both counts I was mostly correct. For anyone in or around Gainesville in late August and early September of 1990, the stories of what happened at that time need no explanation from a documentary or anywhere else. Thankfully, this documentary was as much about football and its power to bring about healing in a community as much the grisly murders brought everyone together if only out of fear. I remember during the week before the season opener, which would be the unveiling of the Steve Spurrier era so anxiously anticipated since the past December when he was announced as the new head football coach, my mother, aunt and a friend came up to Gainesville for a round of golf with me. Most of the conversation was about the murders and the abject fear gripping the city, and not much about the upcoming game. When we walked off the 18th green, my putter did not go in the bag – it stayed in my hand as it would the rest of the week as a measure of self-defense. Today, 36 years after that horror, I have vivid recollections of the murders, but also of that first game against Oklahoma State. Funny, not until this documentary aired did I ever really associate the two, instead keeping them safely compartmentalized in my mind. When I interviewed coach Spurrier recently for material on his forthcoming book we spoke of that first game against the Cowboys, the preparation headingin, quarterback Shane Matthews’ readiness, and many details of what happened. At no point was there any discussion of the Gainesville murders and its effect on that game – it took Tuesday night’s documentary to remind me that all this was happening at the same time. “I was just thinking football,” Spurrier said from his office Wednesday when discussing the 1990 season opener and the murders. “I have a way of putting all that out of my mind. After that week when they caught the dude, there was no sense talking about it.” The documentary stated how people were carrying baseball bats and such out of paranoia, and this was no exaggeration. Everything in the documentary I already knew from having lived in Gainesville and working on the sports desk at The Gainesville Sun at that time. Everything except one: that Spurrier allowed the players’ girlfriends to stay at Yon Hall so they could be safe. Speaking on Wednesday, Spurrier refused to take as much credit as was given him in the documentary, in which players claimed they were going to stay with their girlfriends for protection, but that Spurrier said it would be safer for them all to be at Yon Hall. “I didn’t say that. I said ‘you can spend the night with your girlfriends if you want to.‘ I may have allowed (the girls in Yon Hall), but I didn’t tell them to bring them.” It was 36 years ago, so perhaps the details are remembered a little bit differently by coach and certain players. Nonetheless, allowing the girls into Yon Hall at that time was not just a stroke of genius, it was also a stroke of humanity. “That was just Coach being Coach,”said Shane Matthews. Students had left Gainesville in droves, with many transferring to other schools under the cloud of the murders. But on gameday, Florida Field was packed and for three hours no one was thinking about murders. “It brought everybody back together,” Spurrier said of that game, especially the winning of that game. “Three passes (to start the game), then we ran it in. Dexter McNabb scored the first one.” In a manner of speaking, Spurrier and his Gators were heroes that day – they breathed new life into a community stunned and in mourning. The timing could not have been any better. I’ve watched many of these ESPN documentaries and while they are for the most part entertaining, they are dripping with egregious biases (see ‘The U’ in which they want viewers to believe the Miami Hurricanes players enjoyed more celebrity than Dan Marino, Mark Duper or Mark Clayton. Pshaw!) This one seemed very fair and on point, although it conveniently left out the blowout losses that year in Knoxville and Tallahassee. We can forgive them for that, even thank them, honestly. What this documentary did was put things into contexts that I had completely forgotten. For me, Florida 50, Oklahoma State 7, had become merely a scoreline that marked the beginning of an era, a pivot point in Gator football history. Now, I recall all that surrounded what truly was a glorious day and an appetizer for what would be a glorious future. In the end, it was more than just football and that does not happen very often. The Miracle on Ice was more than just a great hockey victory, it was a moment of patriotic pride that grabbed everyone, hockey fan or not. Ten years later, it would be a Super Bowl to bring a nation together when Operation Desert Storm was just getting underway. No one is fool enough to think sports is such an important endeavor in this world, but one need not downplay its significance either. Chief Justice Earl Warren once stated, “I always turn to the sports section first. The sports sections records man’s accomplishments; the front page has nothing but man’s failures.” The 1990 Florida Gators football team was about the beginning of a new era and finishing first in the Southeastern Conference. But, looking back years later, it was about much more than we could have ever known at the time. It was about bringing joy to a place where only gloom had dwelt. It was a reason to celebrate when tears and fears held sway. A great movie or play, or even a rock concert or art show could not have reversed the mourning. No, it took a victory. A victory to redefine a culture and turn people’s focus to hope and excitement for the future, instead of dwelling on the melancholy gripping them so tightly. Were Steve Spurrier not the head football coach at the University of Florida during those dark days, it’s more than likely melancholy and man’s failures would have won.