Rivalry’s craziness offers UF sole edge

McElwain’s naysayers ignore upset wins by ill-fated predecessors.

JACKSONVILLE — People have been asking me all week if Florida can beat Georgia.

The answer, as always with this rivalry, is why not?

CBS always pencils this game in early for a 3:30 p.m. national broadcast, never much caring about the records or the trends, because the Gators and Bulldogs are famous for flipping the script.

There are examples to cover every possibility, but at the moment the overarching narrative seems to be Jim McElwain has lost his edge as an offensive coach and lacks the special qualities needed to be a big success at Florida.

Back-to-back losses at the Swamp are sure to stir that stuff up, but first try to remember what you were thinking about a couple of former Gator head coaches, lesser Gator coaches, as their teams prepared to play Georgia.

Ron Zook went 2-1 against the Bulldogs. He beat them when Georgia was No. 5 in the nation, getting a touchdown on an interception return and playing great defense overall. He beat them when Georgia was No. 4 in the nation, too, and did it with a field goal in the final minute.

Will Muschamp also had his moment in this rough and frequently ridiculous rivalry.

Just a few weeks away from his firing as Gators coach, Muschamp pounded the No. 9 Bulldogs 38-20. The Gators rushed for 418 yards and five touchdowns that day, controlling the line of scrimmage like never before, and that was good because quirky quarterback Treon Harris sure didn’t need to be throwing. He completed 3 of 6 passes for 27 yards in the monstrous upset.

Does this make you feel any better about McElwain and his inability to get redshirt freshman quarterback Feleipe Franks up to speed? Probably not, but it makes sense to remember how these things are done, and how it has been done to the Gators by Georgia through the years as well.

The team with the most to lose in this rivalry plays tight. The coach with the least to use rolls out everything he’s got. And the fans with the most to drink forget where they parked, they forget their names, they forget practically everything except that they are in Jacksonville for the Florida-Georgia game, which serves as the alibi for the kind of animal behavior that would make real bulldogs and alligators feel ashamed.

My feeling is it’s going to be awful tough for Florida to get this 3-3 season back on track, but knocking off Georgia remains the surest way to do it.

The 7-0 Bulldogs look better on both sides of the ball, and results against common opponents back that up. Florida didn’t put Vanderbilt away until the final minutes, but Georgia crushed the Commodores 45-14. Florida barely got by Tennessee on a final-play touchdown bomb, while Georgia rolled the Vols 41-0.

Kirby Smart, in his second season as Georgia coach, is a defense-minded coach getting nearly 40 points per game out of his offense, and that’s another bad look for McElwain, who is a quarterback whisperer by reputation but in three years hasn’t been able to develop much at that position.

It’s an anxious time, no doubt, for McElwain. He stumbled badly this week by talking of death threats aimed at Florida coaches and their families and admitting later there was nothing to that. Then, on Thursday, came news that some of nine Gator players suspended all season while under investigation for credit-card fraud may eventually be cleared through pretrial intervention. When that might be, and whether they will be welcomed back to the team, remains an open question.

Somewhere in all of this mess there is a football game to be played. Four quarters of tackling and blocking and chasing down fumbles. Four hours, or close to it, of sweaty chess moves between McElwain and Smart, who worked together on a couple of Nick Saban’s national championship staffs at Alabama.

Keeping it as simple as possible, McElwain will look smart again by finding ways to get the ball to Tyrie Cleveland, the game-breaking receiver who has missed the last two losses with a high ankle sprain, and by leaning hard on his young running backs to grind out tough first downs, and by having some kind of a change-up package with backup quarterback Malik Zaire, the secret weapon who has remained too much of a secret.

Even if all of that happens, the Gators may see an end here to their threegame win streak over Georgia. Matter of fact, I expect they will, by a score of about 26-17.

Either way McElwain will look like something less than Steve Spurrier and Urban Meyer. It’s what every coach knows when he takes the Gator job. It shows a fair amount of boldness just to give it a try.

McElwain, 2-0 against Georgia and twice an SEC East champion, brings that edge to EverBank Field if he has no other.