The days get shorter and the weather gets colder, and pumpkins adorn the stoops of houses. A familiar dread creeps into the heart as I anxiously await the return of a horrific menace. But I’m not worried about zombies, witches, or any other fictional beasties. It’s a very real horror that quickens my pulse and makes my palms sweat. For more than a quarter-century, a specter haunted Georgia football: the Florida Gators.
The 1990s were a relatively down period for the Georgia Bulldogs. Though Georgia was a respectable enough 72-43-1 overall during the decade, the team only had two 10-win seasons. As if that weren’t bad enough, the same decade saw bitter rival Florida experience a renaissance thanks to the arrival of Steve Spurrier and his freewheeling, scoreboard-breaking Fun ‘n’ Gun offense. While the Dawgs stacked season after season of adequacy, the Gators became one of the nation’s premiere teams with an explosive, pass-first offense that delivered the school its first national title in 1996.
Spurrier, who made incredible advancements both in offensive football and the field of being a hater, seemed to take special pleasure in beating Georgia. The Dawgs had handed his Florida Gators a loss during the otherwise storybook 1966 season in which he won the Heisman.* In fact, as a player, Spurrier finished 1-2 against Georgia. So he seemed to make it his personal mission to annoy, frustrate, and humiliate Georgia football at every turn.
Under Ray Goff and Jim Donnan, Georgia had been 2-10 against the Gators. The lowlight of this era was the 1995 season. Playing in Athens because of renovations on the Jacksonville stadium, Spurrier ran up the score so he could lead the first opposing team to hang half a hundred on the Dawgs in Sanford. To date, that’s the most points Georgia has ever surrendered at home, and it’s also why Goff got a pink slip at the end of that season.
Dawg fans finally caught a break when Spurrier shocked everyone by announcing he was leaving Florida at the end of the 2001 season. As he headed off to receive a lesson in humility in the NFL, things had to get better. Right? Right??
Mark Richt revived the fortunes of a largely moribund Georgia football program. Unfortunately, Florida remained the thorn in his side. After a solid debut season, his Dawgs broke through in 2002 and emerged as the best team in the conference, winning an SEC championship for the first time in two decades. The team’s lone blemish was a disastrous faceplant against hapless first-year head coach Ron Zook. His fourth-ranked team would get upset again in 2003, losing 16-13. Richt finally beat Florida in 2004, but lost again in an upset to a new Florida coach named Urban Meyer — a man who has the social acumen of the kind of mortician nobody will leave alone with the corpses — in 2005. Meyer would go on to win two titles at Florida with some of the most annoying rosters ever assembled by a college football team.
Ultimately, Richt was 145-51 overall but went 5-10 against Florida, the most losses he had to any one team. Florida hired three coaches during Richt’s tenure at Georgia, and each of them beat the Dawgs in their first year. Both of Richt’s SEC championships came in years in which Georgia lost to Florida. Richt’s inability to beat Florida, like Ray Goff before him, was one of the primary reasons for his firing. His last two years at the helm featured two of his most crushing defeats at the hands of the Gators. In 2014, a Georgia team with national title ambitions came in ranked 11 and lost a 38-20 upset to a lame-duck Will Mushcamp in which the Gators rushed for more than 400 yards. The 2015 game sealed Richt’s fate when new head coach Jim McElwain, who looks like he’s in the Before segment of a Flobee commercial, led Florida to a 27-3 rout of the Dawgs. Richt’s decision to start Faton Bauta at quarterback may have been the worst one of his entire coaching tenure.
You can see why this game still gives me the jitters. I’ve seen dominant Georgia teams have their seasons wrecked by forgettable Florida squads more times than I can count. Rex Grossman — REX GROSSMAN!!! — kept Georgia from a national title shot. Those sour memories aren’t easily shed.
The upside is that I always especially cherished beating the slippery lizards and watching their be-jorted fans slink out of EverBank Stadium as the sun sets on the St. Johns. I watched the 2012 edition of the rivalry in a small grad student office in a small midwestern town and screamed at the top of my lungs when Jarvis Jones stripped the ball out of Jordan Reed’s hands as he tried to be a hero.
One of the benefits of hiring an alum to run the football program is that he understands the importance of hating your rivals. Smart only beat Florida once as a player, and so he seems to particularly enjoy beating them now. Maybe more than anything else, I appreciate Kirby Smart restoring order to the Georgia-Florida rivalry.
The shifting balance of power became clear in the 2017 season when Georgia heaved Florida into a volcano. My sister was at that game and said, by the time she got to her seat, it was already 21-0. McElwain was dismissed afterwards, becoming the first trophy in Smart’s case. Florida is currently in the market for the fourth head coach they’ll have hired since Smart arrived in Athens. That’s at least in part because they can’t find someone capable of competing with Georgia.
How do you exorcise a demon? You get your own, meaner one.
*To get an interesting snapshot of how much college football has changed, Spurrier won the Heisman with a stat line of 2,012 yards, 16 touchdowns against 8 interceptions and a 132.2 QBR. In 2022, Stetson Bennett finished with 4,127 yards, 27 touchdowns against 7 picks and a 161.2 QBR. He also threw in 10 rushing touchdowns. His Heisman invitation was widely considered a lifetime achievement award since he didn’t have particularly flashy stats.
