It was this week a year ago when this Florida program was unraveling at every seam.
Then-coach Jim McElwain had created questions surrounding his team that he had no answers for. Allegations of death threats were being thrown left and right.
The Gators were at their lowest point as they took a two-game losing streak into a bye week with their biggest challenge of the season awaiting them.
With nothing but pride and the slight shot at a bowl game to fight for, Florida let last year’s game against Georgia get out of hand just as quickly as the events in the week prior had.
But one year later, the Gators are a completely different team than the one that suffered a 42-7 defeat in Jacksonville.
No one would have dared mention the phrase “playoff contention” for the Gators ahead of last year’s Florida-Georgia matchup.
Yet here the Gators are, ranked No. 9 the very next season — just two spots below No. 7 Georgia — with the same record as the Bulldogs. And it’s not beyond my belief that the winner of this game might go to the College Football Playoff.
Not many people thought the Gators would carry a 6-1 record into the bye ahead of their annual trip to Jacksonville.
I’d pegged them at the beginning of the season to be 5-2 by now with losses to Mississippi State and LSU because it seemed that the full rebuild of a team that went 4-7 last year would take time.
As Scott Frost’s 1-6 Nebraska Cornhuskers and Chip Kelly’s 2-5 UCLA Bruins have shown this season, success doesn’t come easy for first-year coaches these days.
That hasn’t appeared to be the case for Dan Mullen’s Gators, however, even though they were a team that looked absolutely lost before his arrival.
Mullen has preached continuously this season that his team still has a lot of growing to do.
And it does.
Florida still has a ways to go in finding its identity. But the Gators will enter the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party already with bowl eligibility, and they’ve had two weeks to prepare for a game that they’ve likely been thinking about since last year’s clock hit zero with them sitting at the wrong end of the 35-point thrashing.
We’ve sat and pondered all season as to whether the Gators are as good as we all think they are. And that question will be answered on Oct. 27 in one of the most prominent rivalries in college football.
Florida-Georgia has always been about the rivalry, the atmosphere. But this year, it could be about a story coming full circle.
Alanis Thames is a football writer for The Alligator. Follow her on Twitter @alanisthames and contact her at athames@alligator.org.
