This year the bye week split the 12 game season in two parts. It could not have come at a better time with the Gators coming off of two heartbreaking conference losses and 3 rough conference games in the next 4 weeks on deck. What they need to do is use this bye week to treat this season as two halves and forget about the first half. They still control their own destiny and with an undefeated second half of the season will be the SEC East champion.College football this season has been full of upsets and parity and the Gators have been right in the middle of it. If someone would have said at the beginning of the year that USF and BC would be in the top 5 right now, while USC and UF were not, they would have been called crazy. Anything seems like it can happen this year, so the Gators need to focus on their own business and let everything else work it itself out. The Gators are lucky in the fact that they pretty much control their own destiny in the SEC East.
The Gators do have two conference losses already, but everyone else in the East also has at least one conference loss and the Gators get to play all of them except Tennessee. If Tennessee loses one more conference game and the Gators can beat Kentucky, South Carolina, Georgia, and Vanderbilt they will be the SEC East Champion. There are a lot of ifs in that scenario, but they are very possible. The gators get a week to prepare for Kentucky, who will be coming off of a tough game against #1 LSU. Georgia has been not been as good as they were supposed to be and Florida has a history of beating UGA no matter how well they are playing. Vanderbilt always play the Gators close, but have not beat the Gators at the swamp since 1945. The South Carolina game will be the toughest by far as South Carolina has been great this year especially at home.
The above scenario also counts on Tennessee losing at least one conference game, but looking at their schedule it looks very good for the Gators. The Vols have away games at MSU, Alabama, and Kentucky. They also have home games against Arkansas and South Carolina. Tennessee looked great against Georgia last week, but they also had a bye week that gave them an extra week to prepare. Tennessee was dominated by UF and Cal earlier in the year and have looked terrible on defense for most of the year. The gauntlet that they have to run for the rest of the season will create at least one trip game.
The Gators had a rough go of it recently and the mood around the team has seemed to be a bit down. This week will help to get some of the players like Bubba Caldwell and Markihe Anderson get totally healthy. The big thing the Gators need to do in this time is to forget the first half of the season and get ready for the new season. They control their own destiny and still have a lot to play for. This is a young team and the second half of the season will tell show fans a lot about the character of these young guys.
2 comments:
I was very impressed with the way Tebow managed that game. Consider it being a big time SEC matchup, late game of the night and on television at LSU and you can see where this could have went all wrong. Still, coming off a loss against Auburn, I thought the Gators did very well against LSU.
If someone would have told me that we would score 24 points on LSU, I would have taken that and run. The offense did struggle in the last part of the game, but dominated at great LSU defense for the majority of the game. The defense let the team down by allowing those long drives and not getting stops. I don't blame the players though, I think the system that Urban has them running allows for long drives and holes int he defense that can be exploited.
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