Florida Gators

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Feleipe Franks was mostly business while meeting his media obligations Monday afternoon. The fourth-year junior quarterback, in previewing Saturday night's super-hyped and hotly anticipated season-opening showdown between No. 8 Florida and Miami, answered questions ranging from his team's expectations, tight ends, alpha dogs, defenses and, of course, the renewal of the UF-UM rivalry. 

On the latter, Franks had this to say. 

"If you're asking me the knowledge and stats and all that stuff, I have no clue," said Franks, a Florida panhandle boy born in 1997. "Growing up and in high school — I was right there [near] Tallahassee — all I heard about was Florida State-Florida, Miami-Florida. It was always Florida State-Florida or Miami-Florida. That's kind of what it boiled down to and what I grew up hearing. I knew it was an in-state rival game, but they have a really good team and we have a really good team. I think it will be a good matchup." 

After taking his turn at the podium, Franks was stopped on his way to the elevator on the Press Level of Ben Hill Griffin Stadium and was hit with one more question regarding the showdown that will pit these two Power Five programs from the same state at sold-out Camping World Stadium in Orlando. 

Would it surprise you that the UF and UM 'rivalry' has been played just six times the last 31 years — and not at all from 1988 until 2000? 

"I didn't know that," Franks said. "Obviously, those first few years I would say weren't my era of the game, but I do know football." 

Now, he knows a little more, but nowhere as much as he'll learn this weekend amid the atmosphere at CWS. The stakes of the game stand on their own, what with two marquee brands — the Gators and the "U" — dropping the ceremonial flag for the 150th season of college football. ESPN lobbied both schools to move the game up a week to make it the stand-alone 2019 season lid-lifter and will dispatch both its "GameDay" and "SEC Nation" crews to Central Florida to amp up the prime-time fanfare for these two cross-state foes playing for the first time since 2013, and for only the sixth time since 1988.

Certainly worth mentioning, though, are the generations of fans that came well before Franks and knew the Hurricanes as an opponent that played Florida — get this — 20 times before the Gators played Florida State for the first time. UF and UM played annually (except for one year) from 1938 to 1987. 

One of those longtime watchers was in the media audience Monday. Actually, this watcher and admirer of great UF-UM games also played in them. 

"It was a big deal," said Lee McGriff, a wide receiver at Florida from 1972-74 and now the color analyst alongside Mick Hubert for the Gator Radio Network. "These guys wouldn't understand, but that's just the way it is now."
The annual UF-UM series was disbanded after '87 and has only been renewed through three contracts and two bowl games. That's not much of a rivalry. 

"I consider a rivalry a game you play every year," senior wideout Josh Hammond said. 

Can't blame Hammond for that. Heck, even his brother, who was a very good wideout for the Gators from 2009-2012, missed out on playing in a UF-UM game, arriving after the '08 game and leaving the season before the next one in '13. 

Here's more context: When Florida and Miami were still playing annually, UF coach Dan Mullen was a quarterback in his junior year of high school in Manchester, N.H. 

"Maybe how deep a rivalry this is gets lost on the people that are going to be on the field Saturday night, to be perfectly honest," said Mullen, who got one crack at the Hurricanes during his four seasons as a UF assistant under Urban Meyer, winning 26-3 in 2008.  "Even a lot of the former Florida players — you're going back 30 years ago, to '89, '87. It kind of slowed down. You're looking at guys after that, a lot of great players on both schools, that this was not maybe the rivalry it was beforehand."

True. So, this current crop of players will have to settle for a plain 'ol' high-stakes non-conference game ... with the entire nation tuned in. 

That'll be plenty good enough. "Everyone knows its going to be a pretty exciting game," UF senior tailback Lamical Perine said. "We're going to be the only game on that day. Honestly, you've just go to look yourself in the mirror and understand what you've got to do."

For Florida, the best thing the Gators could do is pick up where they left the 2018 season. UF won its final four games — averaging 45.0 points along the way with an average margin of victory of nearly 35 — and capped the run with a rousing 41-15 wipeout of No. 8 Michigan in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl. Along the way, Franks (58.4 percent, 2,457 yards, 24 TDs, 6 INTs, plus 350 yards, 7 TDs rushing) was spectacular in leading an offense that matured and became all the more lethal as it became more comfortable and adept with Mullen's system. Perine (826 yards, 7 TDs) played his best football late in the year. UF has had to replace four starters on an offensive line that was paramount to Franks' success, but defensively returns eight starters and both specialists in the kicking game. 

So there's a reason the Gators, who trail the all-time series 26-29, showed up eighth in the inaugural Associated Press poll released Monday and opened at more than touchdown favorite over the Canes. 

UM has a new coach in Manny Diaz, a Miami native whose rise in the profession came as a defensive coordinator at four stops, including two stints for Mullen at Mississippi State, and the last two with the Hurricanes. UM went 7-6 last season, marred by a four-game losing streak midseason and finished with a 35-3 drubbing at the hands of Wisconsin in the Pinstripe Bowl. The next day, then-Coach Mark Richt surprisingly announced his retirement. The Hurricanes enter 2019 as a projected contender in the Atlantic Coast Conference Coastal Division, considered the weaker side of the league.

Diaz has some work to do in rebuilding a Miami offense that ranked 93rd nationally in '18, including 108th in passing. The headlines out of Coral Gables last week focused on Diaz's decision to name sophomore Jarren Williams, who threw just three passes all last season in one appearance against Savannah State, over returnee and part-time starter N'Kosi Perry and hot-shot transfer Tate Martell, by way of Ohio State.  "It's tough preparing for a guy you've never seen play," said UF junior cornerback Marco Wilson, who is back in the starting secondary after suffering a season-ending knee injury in the second game last season. "I heard [Williams] is a pretty good quarterback, but he's also young so we can try to use that to our advantage. I know as a young person it might be tough to play, and definitely at quarterback. So that's something. We're going to try to put some pressure on him."

Franks can expect the same treatment from a Miami defense that figures to be the strength of Diaz's first team. The Hurricanes, with Diaz calling the shots, finished 2018 ranked fourth in the nation in yards allowed per game (247.7 per game) and No. 1 in third-down defense, with the stalwart linebacker corps of Shaquille Quarterman, Michael Pinkney and Zach McCloud all back and looking to return the "Turnover Chain" to prominence. 

"Look at what they did last year," Franks said. "Obviously, [Coach Diaz] is doing something right." 

It'll be up to Franks and friends to do the same thing, if the Gators are going to experience a win over Miami for the only second time since Heisman Trophy winning quarterback Vinny Testaverde was a junior under center for the Hurricanes. 

Note: Testaverde turns 56 in November. 

Yeah, it's a big game, all right. 

For young and old. 

"Oh, I can absolutely appreciate what it means to people because it's a rivalry that dates to way before my time and the time of all the guys on this team," said Franks, who just as well could have included the UF coaches, as well. "Coach Mullen, you know, talks about upholding the 'Gator Standard,' and that's a standard that was set by the people who came through way before us. That translates to the Florida-Miami game. The standard is a winning standard. We want to uphold that."