Florida gets its measuring stick on Saturday. No. 4 Ole Miss comes to the Swamp at 3:30 p.m. on ABC, and first-year head coach Jon Sumrall finds out exactly where his program stands.
The No. 21 Gators have been better than expected. Beating a top-five team at home is a different category of accomplishment.
The Letdown Spot Is Real for Ole Miss
The Rebels are coming off an emotional victory over LSU. Every coach in America knows what happens the week after a game like that, and Lane Kiffin has spent all week trying to prevent it.
Emotional wins followed by road trips to hostile SEC stadiums are how top-five teams lose games they should not. Ole Miss is walking directly into that pattern.
Sumrall’s Job This Week
He has to prove Florida is legitimate rather than lucky. That is the entire assignment.
First-year coaches at blue-blood programs get one early season game that defines the narrative for the rest of the year. This is Florida’s. Win and the Gators are a program on the rise. Lose badly and the No. 21 ranking gets treated as a September mirage.
The Swamp Still Matters
Florida has not been a national power in some time, and that has not made the stadium any easier to play in. A 3:30 kickoff in Gainesville in late September is a heat and humidity problem on top of a noise problem.
Ole Miss has the better roster. Ole Miss also has to deal with an environment specifically designed to make talent advantages irrelevant in the fourth quarter.
What the Playoff Picture Looks Like After This
A loss does not eliminate Ole Miss from anything. The expanded playoff has made one-loss SEC teams entirely viable, and the Rebels’ resume already includes LSU.
For Florida, the math is more urgent. A win over a top-five opponent would be the single best result on the Gators’ schedule and would change every projection about their season.
The Rest of a Loaded Saturday
No. 1 Texas plays at No. 14 Tennessee at noon. No. 3 Notre Dame is at Purdue at 2. No. 12 USC visits No. 20 Oregon at 7:30 and No. 23 Texas A&M is at No. 10 LSU in the same window.
Four ranked-on-ranked games plus Notre Dame on the road is the deepest single-day slate of the season so far.
The Pick
Ole Miss survives. The Rebels have more talent, and Kiffin’s teams have generally handled the letdown spot better than their reputation suggests.
But this stays within one score into the fourth quarter, and if Florida gets a turnover in the red zone, the Swamp gets its upset. Sumrall has his team in the right place. The roster gap is the only thing standing in the way.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.