I have been thinking about on this quiet June evening with nothing else to do? The old Florida game. Not this Texas nonsense they are feeding us now. I was sittng here reading the ESPN SEC preview and they are talking about how the league is stacked and I just kept thinking about the 1997 game against Florida in Jacksonville. We went down there with a defense that hit you in the mouth and Bobo was slinging it around and we had that chance. That game meant something because it was the Cocktail Party. It was Florida. It was Spurrier on the other sideline with that visor and that smirk. We lost that one 32-14 if I remember right and I sat in that parking lot for two hours after just staring at the tailgate thinking about what could have been. That is what I miss. The buildup. The hate. Knowing you had one Saturday a year to settle the score with the Gators and if you lost you had to hear about it for twelve months straight.
Now we are playing Texas and Oklahoma and who knows who else. I do not hate Texas. I do not care about Texas. There is no history there. No blood. You cannot manufacture a rivalry like Florida-Georgia in a boardroom meeting with TV executives. That game was built on decades of brawls and broken hearts and Herschel running over people and Belue to Scott sending us to the 1980 national championship. You cannot buy that with a conference check. The SEC preview says we are contenders again and maybe we are but the schedule does not hit the same. We play Texas in October and I am supposed to get worked up about a program we have played like ten times in history? They are fine. They are good. But they are not Florida. They are not the team I grew up wanting to beat more than any other program on earth.
The portal has made it worse. Kids bounce around so much now that by the time you learn to hate a player he is already at another school. Back in the 80s you knew every name on that Florida roster because they stayed four years. You knew Emmitt Smith. You knew Shane Matthews. You knew those defensive ends that gave us fits. You built a relationship with the hate. Now I look at our schedule and I see Texas and Oklahoma and Missouri and I just shrug. Where is the fire? Where is the week where the whole state of Georgia stops breathing because Florida week has arrived? I will never get that back and that is what stings the most about all this realignment nonsense. They took our game and made it just another Saturday.