Charting The Gators: First-Year Coaches vs Vols

during the Gators' game against the Tennessee Volunteers on Saturday, September 26, 2015 at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in Gainesville, FL / UAA Communications photo by Tim Casey

Antonio Callaway dashes to a 63-yard touchdown with just over a minute to play in UF's epic comeback over Tennessee in 2015, which was quite a UF-UT debut for then-Coach Jim McElwain. (Photo: Tim Casey/UAA Communications)

Charting The Gators: First-Year Coaches vs Vols

Wednesday, September 21, 2022 | Football, Chris Harry

By: Chris Harry, Senior Writer

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — The Florida-Tennessee rivalry gets a lot of attention from both fan bases, and for good reason. The series has been around since 1916 and has featured plenty of bad blood storylines along the way, especially in the 1990s when UF-UT was not just one of the biggest games of every Southeastern Conference season, but one of the most-anticipated in the country.

The Gators and Vols as annual foes, however, is a relatively recent thing. In fact, when the SEC expanded and split the league into two division for the 1992 season — and paired UF and UT in the East to play every year — the two programs had only met 19 times, despite being charter members of a conference that was founded in 1932.

The two teams first played in 1916 and just 10 times over the next 37 years, with the Vols winning all 10, before the Gators got their first victory in 1954.

UT led the series 11-1 when the two were paired to meet in the 1969 Gator Bowl at Jacksonville under the most bizarre of circumstances. UF coach Ray Graves was set to retire and the Gators reportedly were poised to hire UT coach Doug Dickey, a former Florida standout who had just led the Vols to the SEC title. Yikes.

After that, the rivalry began moving from awkward to heated to bitter.

It went next-level, of course, when Steve Spurrier, the every-sport superstar at Johnson City (Tenn.) Science Hill High and 1966 Heisman Trophy winner at Florida, returned to coach the Gators in 1990. His homecoming as UF's head coach that first season did not go well — Tennessee 45, Florida 3 — but he exacted revenge the next year on the way to the first SEC title in program history and many years after.

The last first-year Florida coach to lose to Tennessee was the greatest of all the Florida coaches.

Now comes Billy Napier, born in Cookeville, Tenn. (about halfway between Knoxville and Nashville), for his first taste of the Gators and Vols. He'll become the first 13th UF coach to face UT in his first season and hopes to continue a run of five straight Florida first-timers with a win in the rivalry.

"I've got a lot of family that's diehard Tennessee fans," said Napier, whose parents moved to Georgia when he was 2 years old. "My mom's parents owned a tobacco farm in Sparta, Tennessee. My dad grew up in Salina, Tennessee. Know all about the Vols, for sure."

But will his family be pulling for the Gators?

"If they're not, they won't be at the game, I can promise you that," he said.

CHARTING THE GATORS
Here's a look at how those dozen first-year UF coaches fared in their first showdown against UT.

Year	UF Coach	Site	Score	Series	What happened
1916	Charles McCoy	Tampa	L 24-0	0-1	Rex Farrior-led Gators went 0-5 that season and scored (feel free to squint) a total of just 3 points (those came in season finale vs Indiana).
1928	Charles Bachman	Knoxville	L 13-12	0-3	Legend has it, UT hosed down the field in the middle of the night to offset the speed of UF's Dale Van Sickel and the fastest team in the country. Two missed PATs cost the Gators a trip to the Rose Bowl.
1933	D.K. Stanley	Knoxville	L 13-6	0-6	Florida led by six for the better part of game before Tennessee rallied for two 4th-quarter TDs and the victory.
1940	Thomas J. Lieb	Knoxville	L 14-0	0-7	Vols broke open a scoreless game with TDs in third and fourth quarters to further frustrate the Gators in the series.
1970	Doug Dickey	Knoxville	L 38-7	2-12	Ten months earlier, Dickey (once a walk-on Gators QB/S from Gainesville) was coaching UT against UF in the Gator Bowl, which Florida won 14-13 on second-half John Reaves-to-Carlos Alvarez pass in Ray Graves' final game. No. 11 Vols won this one in a blowout.
1984	Galen Hall	Knoxville	W 43-30	5-13	It was Hall's third game as interim coach after Charley Pell was fired three weeks into the season amid an infamous NCAA investigation. No. 18 UF steamrolled UT on the way to (what the Gators thought) was a SEC title, which was vacated the following summer.
1990	Steve Spurrier	Knoxville	L 45-3	6-14	UF was unbeaten, ranked 9th and ineligible for the SEC championship in Spurrier's return to his native state to face No. 5 UT in what was/remains most lopsided outcome in series history. Gators trailed just 7-3 at halftime, but Dale Carter's 91-yard second-half KO return for TD opened the flood gates.
2002	Ron Zook	Knoxville	W 30-13	15-17	Two weeks after getting blasted at home by No. 1 Miami, Rex Grossman passed for 324 yards and three TDs for a huge road upset of the 4th-ranked Vols, as the roller-Zook-coaster pulled out of the station.
2005	Urban Meyer	Gainesville	W 16-7	16-19	Andre Caldwell ran 18 yards on a reverse, Chris Hetland booted three fields and the sixth-ranked Gators upended the No. 4 Vols before a record UF crowd.
2011	Will Muschamp	Gainesville	W 33-23	22-19	No. 10 Florida scored the first 16 points and Chris Rainey's electrifying 83-yard swing pass TD reception from John Brantley blew things open in the third quarter.
2015	Jim McElwain	Gainesville	W 28-27	26-19	Will Grier's pass to Antonio Calloway on 4th-and-13 turned into a 63-yard TD and capped a rally from 13 down with five-plus minutes to go and stands as one of the most electrifying moments in "The Swamp" this century. UT's Aaron Medley was inches wide right on his 55-yard field-goal try as time expired/
2018	Dan Mullen	Knoxville	W 47-21	28-20	Feleipe Franks passed for 172 yards and 3 TDs, while the Gators defense forced six turnovers, as UF scored its most points ever at Knoxville.