They moved up and down en masse, a wave of white and red.
Jumping, pumping their fists in the air and waving towels in the north end zone, nearly 70 players rushed the field from the Georgia sideline to celebrate Knowshon Moreno’s leaping touchdown.
Half of the packed stadium in Jacksonville went wild. The other half sat stunned.
The move was a motivational ploy from Bulldogs coach Mark Richt, who, after taking the job six years earlier, had won just a single contest against bitter rival Florida. In 2007, Richt said he had had enough. After Moreno scored in the first quarter, his troops followed their orders.
“I told them if they didn’t get a celebration penalty after our first score, all of them would be doing early morning runs,” said Richt afterward.
Twentieth-ranked Georgia went on to a convincing 42-30 victory against No. 9 Florida. The result of the game didn’t have a huge impact, but that act, that unforgettable exploitation would be immortalized.
It lives on forever in the lore of one of the greatest rivalries in the history of college football. It lives in the minds of fans, and it rises deep from inside players on Halloween weekend each year.
One of the few seniors on the roster who was present that day, defensive tackle Jaye Howard, said he had not seen anything like it.
“I’ve never witnessed that in a football game before and just to see it, was like — they don’t care about Florida, really,” he said. “You don’t do anything like that. ... Total disrespect.”
Florida running back Chris Rainey, who watched the Bulldogs smile and gloat that day, said he will remember it always, even when he sits down decades from now to watch the game.
“All I can remember of this team is when they were dancing on us,” he said. “That’s embarrassing. That stays in my head when people do something like that to me.”
For all the similarities Will Muschamp shares with his predecessors, the Gators’ first-year head coach is completely different when it comes to rivalry games.
In the week before a matchup with Tennessee, his first against a traditional foe, Muschamp and his players didn’t want to talk about history. They didn’t want to talk about the Volunteers and what the game meant to them.
Instead, the talking point all week was “nameless, faceless,” meaning Florida was approaching each opponent the same each week. No team deserved special preparation, or merited extra motivation.
“It’s a very important game; we don’t need to tell our players that,” Muschamp said in September. “They come to play at a place like Florida to play in a game like this. That’s why we approach it that way.”
That measured and calculated method continued against top-ranked teams like Alabama and LSU. But after losses in those games, followed by another on the road against Auburn, things have changed around Ben Hill Griffin Stadium.
Inside the building that houses the same team that has denounced big game after big game all season, one highlight has been played on loop.
“They’ve been showing [the celebration replay from 2007] all throughout the building the last few days and all during the off week,” Howard said.
What began as motivation for a downtrodden pack of Dawgs has become the driving force for a desperate bunch of Gators.
That’s something Urban Meyer or Steve Spurrier would have done. Both were known for the importance they placed on rivalries with Georgia, Tennessee and Florida State.
Spurrier once said the Florida-Georgia game is “the biggest game of the year.” After losing to UGA during his Heisman season of 1966, Spurrier held a special hatred for Georgia. When the series moved to a home-and-home format for two years in the mid-90s, Spurrier boasted about scoring 50-plus points between the hedges in Athens, Ga.
“That’s what we wanted to do,” he said. “This may be the only time in our lifetime that Florida plays here, so we wanted to make it memorable for the Gators.”
After “The Stomp,” Meyer was the same way. He became entrenched in the rivalry.
A year later, with less than a minute remaining in a 49-10 Gators victory, Meyer called two time outs, forcing the Bulldogs and all their fans to endure the loss for just a little longer.
The rivalry between two of the south’s most prestigious and historic institutions is so contentious that Florida and Georgia can’t even agree on when it officially began.
The Bulldogs say 1904, while the Gators say 1915.
For Muschamp, it started in 1991, when he enrolled at Georgia to play safety.
For four straight seasons, Muschamp’s Bulldogs lost to Spurrier’s Gators.
A boy who grew up in Gainesville cheering for Florida became a man during those four years at Georgia.
Now, 20 years later, he is the head coach of the team he rooted for as a child and despised, at least by association, as a young adult. Entering his first game against his old team, Muschamp says none of that matters.
“I know there will be a lot of wasted ink on the fact that I played at Georgia and now I’m coaching at Florida, but this is not the first time that I have coached against Georgia,” he said Monday.
“Wherever I played has no bearing on this game at all. Every game is important; they’re all important games. It’s a SEC East opponent, it’s a big rival, it’s important to the University of Florida, so it’s important to me.”
Others aren’t so sure the game won’t mean more to Muschamp.
“He won’t know until the game is played in my opinion,” Richt said this week.
If it does in fact hold a special place for him, Muschamp won’t admit it publicly. He’s trying to build a reputation as a tactician, focusing on preparation and technique rather than motivation and emotion.
But even Muschamp had to admit that Saturday’s showdown is unique.
“There’s no question that there’s a little more juice involved in the game,” Muschamp said. “This is one of the great rivalries in all of sports.”
All the hype, all the buildup manifests on the bus ride in.
Frankie Hammond, a junior wide receiver, had been told about coming across the Hart Bridge in Jacksonville, looking down and seeing the metropolis of RVs, the sea of red and black and orange and blue.
Still, he said, “Until you experience it yourself, you don’t really know what to expect.”
The gathering of two fan bases in one place, the view from above, it’s a spectacle.
“You get charged when you come over that bridge, and you see all the RVs, the passion and the tradition of the game,” Muschamp said. “You get goosebumps talking about it.”
But stepping off the bus, the pageantry dissolves, and all that’s left is the game to be played, the history to be made.
There’s a new coach etching his name into the books this year, and although he takes a different approach than those who came before him, some things never change.
As Georgia defensive back Sanders Commings put it: “We don’t like them, and they don’t like us.”
Contact Matt Watts at mwatts@alligator.org.
After Georgia running back Knowshon Moreno scored a first-quarter touchdown of the 2007 meeting, the entire Bulldogs team stormed the field in celebration. It was a motivational move orchestrated by coach Mark Richt.
