It's only October 3 but the Florida Gators are already passive participants in the 2021 football season.
No. 10 Florida, even with a loss to Alabama, traveled to Lexington to play unranked Kentucky still in the driver's seat. Florida enters every season with the initial goal to win the SEC East and then to win the SEC.
Dan Mullen took over a team that had talent on the roster but had just endured a coach quit on them in the middle of a season that ended with just four wins. Mullen's first task was to get the team to buy into his program. He did just that and Florida won ten games.
Mullen noted that it would be harder to go from 10 wins to 11 than it was to go from 4 to 10, then the Gators won 11 games in his second season. Each of Mullen's first three seasons ended in a New Year's Six Bowl game and, despite some lackluster recruiting, it appeared that Florida was on the right trajectory.
Heading into the 2021 season many picked Florida to finish third in the SEC East, something the coaches and players relished. They enjoyed being overlooked and the perception of disrespect.
Through five games it looks more like a premonition than anything else.
Florida's 20-13 loss at the hands of Kentucky Saturday night in Lexington relinquishes the distinction of being able to control your own fate the rest of the way.
"It's pretty disappointing because we work hard, we work hard for these moments, all offseason and we came out sore," senior defensive lineman Zach Carter said. "We just got to control what we can control, just win out."
Even by winning out the Gators would still need help to get to Atlanta. Winning out would make Florida 6-2 in the SEC with wins over Tennessee, Vanderbilt, LSU, Georgia, South Carolina, and Missouri. They would need Georgia to lose a second SEC game and would need Kentucky to lose three of their remaining SEC contests (LSU, Georgia, Mississippi State, Tennessee, Vanderbilt).
That's what happens when you lose two of your first three league games. You no longer have the right to control your destiny.
What will the Gators do now?
They have a large number of seniors and several draft-eligible juniors on the roster. When the Gators wake up on Sunday morning and look in the mirror, will they pout and show up to meetings with a woe is me, defeated mentality? Will practices become harder to endure, meetings more difficult to pay attention to now that you no longer are in control of your own future? Or will Florida continue to fight?
"I mean we all said that we have a decision to make. This can either go one of two ways. We can be pouty, sad about it and lose out or we can stay focused and get back to the drawing board and work as hard as we ever have before to win out," Starting quarterback Emory Jones said. "So that's what we're going to do. We're going to try our best to go out there and do our job every week."
Dan Mullen preaches about the Gator Standard, which, he says, is competing for championships. Florida doesn't control that now. The only they they can control is how they pick themselves up after the first loss in Lexington since 1986 and how they will respond the rest of the season.
