It came a lot earlier this year.
And the stage isn’t nearly as big as it usually is.
But make no mistake about it, IT is here.
This Saturday, Florida will play its most important game of the season — a title usually reserved for a showdown in Atlanta or a title shot at the BCS Championship Game location.
Not this year.
Two unranked Southeastern Conference teams will battle it out in Jacksonville, and the consequences are dire.
As bad as it’s been — and losing to Mississippi State at home is Bad with a capital B — the Gators can still make something of what looks like their worst season under coach Urban Meyer.
If they can beat the Bulldogs, they will still control their own SEC Championship destiny. And back-to-back wins against Georgia and Vanderbilt would go a long way in picking up some momentum and confidence heading into a Nov. 13 battle with South Carolina for the right to get the crap beaten out of them by Alabama or Auburn (Kidding. Relax. OK, I’m kind of serious …)
Watching UF play the last three games, it would be ludicrous to suggest this team is capable of not only winning the East, but pulling an upset in Atlanta and getting to a BCS bowl game. But if Florida beats Georgia, that crazy dream will still be out there.
Gators fans will still have hope, no matter how unlikely a scenario that seems.
However, if UF loses this game, what are we realistically looking at for the rest of the season?
The SEC title game will be all but out of reach, and Florida will have lost four games in a row for the first time in more than 20 years.
Losing to Georgia would mean a loss after a bye week and a loss to a rival — two things that just don’t happen to Meyer.
Losing to Georgia would mean the coaches will have to find some other way to explain this season’s struggles besides injuries, as Meyer expects to have a mostly healthy squad with two weeks of rest under its belt against the Bulldogs.
Losing to Georgia would mean this team could be heading for a 6-6 regular season. UF will almost definitely be underdogs against South Carolina and FSU later in the year.
Once-proud programs like Tennessee, Michigan and Notre Dame have all had historically bad seasons in recent years in which they failed to even make a bowl game. From afar, outsiders like myself, and probably any Gators fans reading this, watched these teams collapse and wondered how it’s possible for a powerhouse to crumble so quickly and swiftly.
The answer is: Somewhere along the way they lost a game or two like this one.
Fans and media alike called for sweeping changes in game plan and personnel after the loss to MSU, but listening to the team talk for the last two weeks, it sounds like few changes, if any, will be made.
The Gators will fight the Bulldogs with more or less the same blueprint that has landed them in this precarious position expecting different results.
The same result — a loss — may send a big enough tremor through the program to inspire some of those changes that everyone outside of the program is looking for.
But by then it will be too late to save the season.
