Gators coach Dan Mullen can cap his first regular season with nine wins if Florida can snap a five-game losing streak against Florida State on Saturday in Tallahassee. (Photo: Kaila Jones/UAA Communications)
Gators Can Finish Strong, Play Spoiler vs. Seminoles
Tuesday, November 20, 2018 | Football, Scott Carter
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By: Scott Carter, Senior Writer
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Separated by 150 miles, the distance between the Florida and Florida State campuses has seemed at times an ocean apart, and at other times a stone's throw away since the schools first met on a football field 60 years ago.
The Gators' dominance in the first two decades of the rivalry cast the Seminoles in a little-brother light. The arrival of head coach Bobby Bowden in 1976 gave fans of a certain persuasion reason to finally puff out their chest, and when Steve Spurrier took over the Gators in 1990, Florida-Florida State was the nation's most intense rivalry for a decade. The distance between the campuses never seemed shorter with the Gators and Seminoles intertwined on the national stage as Spurrier and Bowden conducted opposing orchestras.
Following another period of UF dominance under Urban Meyer, FSU seized control on a cool Tallahassee afternoon eight years ago with a 31-7 victory at Doak Campbell Stadium, Meyer's final regular-season game at Florida.
The befuddled Meyer, who announced his resignation several days later, voiced concern afterward when he said his program was "broke a little bit" and "has to be fixed." The day Meyer uttered those words, Dan Mullen was in Oxford, Miss., leading Mississippi State to his second consecutive win over Ole Miss in what is known as the Egg Bowl in the Magnolia State.
Mullen was unconcerned about a turn in the Florida-Florida State rivalry. He had a victory to celebrate. Of course, that changed on the day last November, two days after Florida's fifth consecutive loss to the Seminoles, when Mullen was introduced as the Gators' new head coach.
Beating FSU is definitely part of the Gator Standard that Mullen has expounded the past 12 months.
The Gators return to Doak Campbell Stadium on Saturday in search of their first win in the series since 2012 and only the second this decade.
"That's not good,'' Mullen said. "We were on the four-game winning streak when we left."
Mullen's last taste of Florida-FSU came on a rain-soaked Saturday in 2008 when the Gators, on the way to their second national championship in four seasons with Mullen as offensive coordinator, hammered the Seminoles 45-15. It turned out to be Bowden's penultimate season and led to a shift in power as Jimbo Fisher assumed control of the Seminoles in 2010 and won seven of eight against the Gators.
However, for the first time in 58 years on Saturday, the schools will meet while being led by first-year head coaches in Mullen and FSU's Willie Taggart. The faces on the sideline are new, but the rhetoric remains the same.
Gators defensive lineman Dominique Easley celebrates with fans after Florida's 37-26 win in Tallahassee in 2012, the Gators' last victory in the annual series. (Photo: Jason Parkhurst/UAA Communications)
"A lot of great players and a lot of great coaches throughout all of those games,'' Taggart said of the rivalry's history. "You can throw out all the records and all the stats. It doesn't matter that game. This game is important for a lot of reasons."
In a rivalry in which former Gators head coaches Ron Zook and Will Muschamp won in Tallahassee -- and Steve Spurrier did not -- Mullen takes his first shot at beating the Seminoles on the road.
Mullen offered a view similar to his counterpart as the Gators (8-3) prepare to face the Seminoles (5-6) with an opportunity to cap his first season in memorable fashion.
"Obviously, winning this game would be big for the guys that are on the team," Mullen said. "When you play a rivalry game, to say that I beat them — for the seniors — to say I beat them in my last game. For the underclassmen, we haven't beaten them in a while. To say, 'hey, we got a big win. I went in and hopefully we start a streak going in the other direction.' I think that's always huge. Going into the offseason, you want to finish on a really high note because it creates a lot of excitement and energy for the next season."
Florida has regrouped following back-to-back losses to Georgia and Missouri with home wins over South Carolina and Idaho. For the team's veterans, beating the Seminoles is a high priority since they have never done it.
Equally important, the Gators seek to keep their bid alive at playing in a New Year's Six bowl, something few envisioned with Florida coming off a 4-7 season that included a 38-22 loss to FSU at the Swamp. Florida climbed two more spots -- to No. 11 -- in the latest College Football Playoff rankings on Tuesday night.
"It'd be a whole reverse from last year,'' UF junior linebacker David Reese said. "Just [a] whole opposite feeling, being able to finish top-10 in the country [rather] than finishing how we finished last year. So it'd be great, the fans will enjoy it, I will enjoy it. Everyone will probably be happier instead of being home for three to four weeks, miserable without football."
On the opposite sideline, a bowl trip is uncertain. Same goes for a winning season.
How rare is that? Consider FSU owns the nation's longest active streak of consecutive winning seasons (41) and consecutive seasons with a bowl appearance (36).
FSU avoided both streaks ending a week ago with a 22-21 comeback win over Boston College, making Saturday's showdown with the Gators potentially a historic one.
"We're a prideful university,'' Taggart said. "We pride ourselves on winning. You think about the streak, that's winning. That's important to us. We know what's at stake."
So do the Gators.
Prior to FSU's current five-game win streak in the series, the Gators had never lost more than four in row to the Seminoles, first from 1977-80 as Bowden woke a sleeping giant, and then from 1987-90 as Florida dealt with NCAA sanctions.
Mullen has an opportunity to do what Fisher did in his first season: reverse momentum and turn it into sustained success.
"If you're on the winning side of it it's great to be on a long winning streak in rivalry games,'' Mullen said. "If you're on the losing side it doesn't feel good for you or your fans. So we have to go try to start a new streak."
Gators quarterback Feleipe Franks grew up a short drive from Doak Campbell Stadium in Wakulla. He said he wasn't enamored with the rivalry growing up, but that has changed since he joined it.
As if dancing around in the pocket, Franks measured his words carefully when asked what it would mean to end the losing streak to the Seminoles on Saturday.
"It would be nice,'' he said.
Should the Gators win Saturday, expect less of an understatement.
