![]() ![]() Yes, Smart had Justin Fields on his roster in 2018. Most Georgia fans understand Smart’s quarterback decision in 2018 was far more complex than we make it seem now. The willingness to forgive would plummet. By any objective measure, Smart and Mullen have been tremendous successes since they were hired to their respective jobs. This doesn’t mean either coach would be in trouble for losing. And now that a 10-win 2018 and an 11-win 2019 have nudged the Gators’ expectation levels back to their default position, only one fan base gets to be happy at 8 p.m. The goal remains the same, and the impatience increases each time the calendar page flips with another highly ranked recruiting class and no national title.īoth fan bases feel their teams should be competing for national titles. And he almost did it in his second season, but Tua Tagovailoa and DeVonta Smith crushed that dream on second-and-26 in overtime of the national title game. Smart replaced Richt following the 2015 season with the mandate to bring a national title to Athens for the first time since 1980. And the only way to win the East now is to beat Georgia. And they can’t do that if they can’t win the SEC East. But simmering under the surface is the expectation - created by Steve Spurrier and enhanced by Mullen’s former boss Urban Meyer - that the Gators are supposed to compete for national championships. Dan Mullen notched double-digit wins in each of his first two seasons at Florida, and everyone in Gainesville has seemed pretty happy with that. This seeming evenness is what makes this matchup so fascinating. But Georgia seems limited by what Stetson Bennett IV can do at quarterback, and the usually dominant Bulldogs defense has been decimated by injuries. 60 in the nation in yards per play allowed (5.8), and the fear is that the Gators might make a pedestrian offense look spectacular and force that exceptional Florida offense into a last-team-with-the-ball-wins affair. The cons for each team line up nearly as evenly as the pros. That’s similar to the gap that has separated Ohio State and Michigan, and we all know how that series has gone. 7, but the Bulldogs still have 12 more former five-star recruits and seven more former four-star recruits. Florida checks in at a more-than-respectable No. 1 in the nation in the current 247Sports Talent Composite, which combines the recruiting rankings of every player on each roster. Thanks to coach Kirby Smart’s recruiting machine, the Bulldogs rank No. Georgia, meanwhile, still has a prodigious talent advantage. Tight end Kyle Pitts is a matchup nightmare, and the emergence of Kadarius Toney as a playmaker within the flow of the of the offense - rather than as a raw athlete getting force-fed touches - has made defending the Gators a Sophie’s Choice for all their opponents so far. That’s more than the 2010, 2011, 2012, 20 Florida teams threw in each of those seasons, and it ties the numbers produced by the 20 teams. Through four games, Trask has thrown 18 touchdown passes. Both fan bases expect a win this season.įlorida has its best quarterback since Tebow in Kyle Trask. Georgia fans expected victory and got it.īut those days are gone. Florida fans hoped their team could win but understood when it didn’t. In each of the past two seasons, an improving Florida team met a better Georgia team and the generally expected result played out on the field. Saturday’s loser will have 364 days of soul-searching ahead.īoth parties haven’t had this much riding on this game for quite a while because the series got quite weird - more on that in a bit - and then it got quite boring. Saturday’s winner will have the easiest path to Atlanta for an SEC title matchup against (presumably) Alabama. The annual meeting between Florida and Georgia in Jacksonville hasn’t been loaded with this much emotional freight since 2012, when Florida’s most talented post-Tim Tebow team met Mark Richt’s best Georgia team in a 17-9 rock fight that the Bulldogs sealed when Georgia’s Jarvis Jones jarred the ball loose from Florida’s Jordan Reed near the goal line with 2:05 remaining. ![]()
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