They may wear purple and gold, with three letters above a Tiger on their gold helmets but it may as well be a Halloween costume.
The LSU team that will travel to Gainesville this weekend is a shell of the 2019 team that ran the table on the way to a National Championship and are limping in off of their worst loss to Alabama since 1922.
That 2019 team won an SEC, a National Championship, Heisman, Biletnikoff, Thorpe, Coach of the Year, Offensive Line of the Year, and many more awards. They ran up a huge tab and each Saturday they’re paying for the dream season.
This week the Florida Gators started to rack up those honors, with four players garnering semi-finalist nods to six different national awards. The Gators won’t go undefeated this year, but there are a lot of parallels to the 2019 Tigers and this edition of the Florida Gators.
With a date already on the books with top=ranked Alabama in Atlanta for the SEC crown, are the Gators in danger of overlooking LSU? Is it even possible to overlook a cross-divisional rival?
“This is Florida-LSU. This is a big football game,” offensive coordinator Brian Johnson said Monday night. “If you have a problem getting up for this game, that’s a you problem.”
Counterpoint: After beating Georgia it looks like, from the outside, that Florida already started looking towards an eventual matchup with Alabama. Dan Mullen called a 38-17 win at Vanderbilt “ho-hum.” The following week Florida trailed in the first half to Kentucky before a Kadarius Toney punt return touchdown, and last week the Gators’ offense sputtered while the defense gave up two late scores to turn a 31-7 game into a 31-19 victory that didn’t sit well.
“I think we missed a lot of opportunities last week,” Mullen said. “I think we had three possessions start on the plus side of the field with zero points, I mean you should be 100% at that. So, I think we left 21 points out there on the field that we should have had.”
There is a revenge factor, perhaps. Nick Saban said as much prior to the Crimson Tide’s complete and utter 55-17 dismantling of LSU last week. The Tide racked up 650 yards and dominated from the coin flip until the final tick of the game clock. Like, I said, this isn’t your typical LSU team.
In 2019 Florida traveled to Death Valley and the Gators even had a lead in the third quarter. LSU went on to win the game 42-28 but it was much closer than the final score. Can the Gators draw on the disappointment of that game to fuel them this week?
The fact of the matter is that Florida has to focus on itself. They came into the season wanting to get the Georgia monkey off its back and win the SEC East. They’ve done that. Their attention is to now win the SEC Championship and compete for a National Championship. They need to continue getting better as a team, offense, defense, and special teams if they want to do that. There will be time to focus on Alabama and gameplan for a Crimson Tide team that looks as scary as the boogeyman. This week is about focusing in on a single goal, a single task.
“I’ll be honest with you, you focus on that,” Mullen said. “Our focus is that we’ve got to get better. If you want to be a championship team, as I’ve said all year, you’ve got to get better from one week to the next. You don’t regress. You don’t want to go backward.
The reality is, if you want to be a great football team, you focus on the task at hand. And the task at hand is us getting better as a team.”
