The 2024 Gators football schedule is out, and their SEC opponents are… (Photo credit: John Raoux, Associated Press)
The 2024 Gators football schedule will be released in its totality in a few months. But at least we now know each team on it.
As we learned a few weeks ago, Florida will play Georgia in Jacksonville. Today, we learned the rest of the teams they will face in 2024.
Headlining the 2024 Gators football schedule is the fact that Florida will travel to Austin, Texas, to take on the Longhorns. It will be the first trip to the capital of the Lone Star State since 1939, and the Gators’ first overall game against Texas since 1940.
Florida will also travel to Mississippi State and Tennessee, keeping two of the Gators’ older SEC foes on the slate. In addition, Florida will host Kentucky, LSU, Texas A&M and Mississippi.
Overall, it’s a far easier schedule than perhaps maybe were expecting- especially with the reduction of SEC games from nine (as it was rumored to be) to eight.
Last month, rumblings began growing that the nine-game SEC schedule thought to be the future of the league was falling out of favor with too many SEC teams. The 3-6 model- which would have seen three permanent yearly opponents and six additional SEC teams on each team’s schedule every year- was scrapped. That idea was replaced by a 1-7 eight-game model for 2024 due to teams having too many non conference games that they didn’t want to cancel.
It’s still yet to be seen how long this eight-game conference schedule model will be the law of the land. It could be a one-year bridge until the league figures things out in 2025, or it could be a four-year rotation of schedules so that every school hosts and visits every other SEC school one time. Sources indicate that it is extremely unlikely to be a permanent solution, though.
In addition to the eight teams assigned to Florida, the 2024 Gator football schedule will also include its previously announced non conference opponents. Miami, Central Florida and Samford will each be making a trip to the Swamp, and the Gators will play in Tallahassee for their annual showdown against FSU. Those games were all on the docket years ago, although Florida was one of five schools willing to work through the logistics of postponing previously agreed upon non conference games to make the nine-game model work.
In the future, though, when that isn’t an issue? It’s hard to imagine the SEC staying with eight games. It feels like a nine-game SEC slate is in the cards.
And that’s just fine and dandy with me.
