This picture of the Florida Gators is worth two numbers and a hyphen: 52-20. (Photo credit: Gainesville Sun)
Thanksgiving is a time for us to celebrate all the wonderful things we have in our lives. Primarily, I’m talking about real-life things. You know. The stuff that actually affects us, like our friends, our family, our health, and the things we’ve been able to accomplish in our lives.
But when it comes time to put our real-life worries aside and just be sports fans, those who cheer for the Florida Gators have a little bit more to be thankful for than those to the west. Specifically, the fact that they have all the bragging rights in the series.
The Gators and Seminoles are tied with three national championships apiece, but as is the case in any major sports league’s standings, the tiebreaker goes to the team that won the head-to-head matchup. And under the SuperDome lights in January of 1997, the Gators did exactly that, conquering the Seminoles with a 52-20 curb-stomping. To prove that was no fluke, the Gators also delivered the aftershock ten and a half months later, costing the top-ranked Seminoles a national championship for the third year in a row. (Florida had also finished off FSU’s title dreams in 1995 with a 35-24 victory in Gainesville.)
Additionally, the Florida Gators have owned the Seminoles in recent years. Dan Mullen dominated FSU with 41-14 and 40-17 bludgeonings in 2018 and 2019; after the teams did not play in 2020, interim coach Greg Knox stepped in after Mullen was fired and, after Emory Jones had spotted FSU three interceptions, Anthony Richardson came in and guided Florida to its third straight win in the series. With the help of three straight wins, Florida owns FSU 37-26-2. And yes, though the Jimbo Fisher years were bad, Florida still holds a 10-7 lead since famous “Ron Zook Field” game in 2004, which sparked a six-game winning streak for the Gators.
It’s at this point that FSU fans go one of two dead-end routes: either they accuse Florida of being afraid to play them in their program’s early days from 1947-57, or demand some credit for “not taking so long to get good!”
To the first point, FSU’s annual opponents in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s included Millsaps College, Livingston State (now West Alabama), the University of Tampa, Stetson, Furman, and Erskine. And in a fantastic example of foreshadowing, Jacksonville State even gave the world a preview of what was to come two-thirds of a century later by walking into Tallahassee and beating FSU, 7-0, in 1947. Meanwhile, the Florida Gators were in the SEC with teams like LSU, Georgia, Auburn, and Mississippi State to deal with, and played the Miami Hurricanes- then a legitimate program- as a nonconference opponent.
So, actually, yes! Florida was too good to play FSU from 1947-57, in its first eleven years of existence. There was no need to play them. There was nothing to prove. It would be comparable to East Tennessee State slowly growing into a football powerhouse by the year 2055 and then claiming that the Tennessee Volunteers were too scared to play them, or that “the state government had to force us to play!” There was nothing for the Florida Gators to gain by playing FSU in the 1950’s.
And what happened on the field in the first two decades of the rivalry proved it. Once the Gators finally did roll their eyes and agree to play the inferior program from Tallahassee, the results were exactly what you would expect. Florida won five out of the first six games, and the one they didn’t win was a tie that was so embarrassing that a fuming Ray Graves likened the result to a “death in the family.” Florida managed to move past that game and built a commanding 16-2-1 lead in the series.
As to the second point- as you may have guessed by the above list of opponents- FSU played in the Dixie Conference in its early years. The Noles then went independent, and managed just six winning seasons in the next fifteen years, from 1951-1965. Bill Peterson and Larry Jones seemed to right the ship a little bit in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, but then FSU went 0-11 in 1973. They fired Jones and brought in Darrell Mudra, who went 1-10 in 1974 and 3-8 in 1975. FSU said, “the hell with this,” and brought in Bobby Bowden, who struggled in his maiden voyage in 1976 before beginning to turn FSU into a respectable program.
So it’s true that FSU did not need as long as Florida to become a powerhouse. It took Florida almost 60 years to become a serious threat on a national scale, which I’m marking as the Gators’ first back-to-back major bowl appearances: the Sugar Bowl in 1965 and the Orange Bowl in 1966. FSU, meanwhile, required just over a third of a century to accomplish this feat with back-to-back Orange Bowls in 1979 and 1980. The Seminoles do get that one bragging right… but needing until Year 33 to become a true threat on a national scale is still not exactly the overnight metamorphosis that their fans attempt to imply.
There’s also the fact that, by refusing to play a school with the prestige of Erskine on a yearly basis in the late 1940’s and early-to-mid 1950’s, Florida actually did FSU a favor. The Gators’ 37-26-2 lead over FSU is only as close as it is because Florida saw no value in sledgehammering a fledgling program every year.
Sure, it’s possible that Florida might have had a bad day in a contest against FSU at some point between 1947-57. I’ll even be generous and grant two of them, just for argument’s sake. Tacking nine wins onto Florida’s win total and two for FSU in that eleven-year span would make the all-time series score 46-28-2, and unless the Gator program were to completely crater and FSU were to rip off a dozen wins in a row at some point in the series, the Seminoles wouldn’t have a prayer of catching up in that head-to-head in the lifetime of anybody reading this.
But Gator fans reading this should know that it’s actually even easier to counter that FSU bragging point than by going into any of that. The fact remains that Bobby Bowden, the man who built that dynasty from 1987-2000 that Seminole fans are so proud of, went to his grave with a losing record against the Florida Gators.
And that’s just how to counter FSU fans’ arguments. Florida Gators fans have more than enough ammo to go on offense in these smack-talk debates. Common points of attack should include:
The Florida Gators crushed FSU for the 1996 national championship
It’s the ultimate bragging right, and it lasts forever. It’s even notated in our new logo. As I mentioned above, this win serves as the tiebreaker for the fact that both teams have won three national championships. Yes, FSU beat Florida earlier that year… by three points. Florida won the rematch by 32. That’s a net of +29 for Florida.
Even if FSU surpasses Florida in either the national title count or the head-to-head series, 52-20 still packs quite a punch because of its stage. Beating your rival for a national championship is such a devastating blow in any argument, it tops pretty much everything else your adversary can say unless they have you beat in every other major category.
2004: Ron Zook Field
Even when the setting is decreased from a national title game to a regular season game, there are some bragging rights that never go away. Case in point: 2004. FSU wasn’t in national title contention, but they were still a top ten team and chasing a BCS Bowl berth to cap another strong season. The Florida Gators, meanwhile, were struggling so badly that they’d already fired head coach Ron Zook.
So the Seminoles decided their rivalry game against Florida was the perfect chance to rename their field after Bowden. But Zook- the dead man walking- had other ideas. His Gators desecrated Bobby Bowden Field by handing the Noles a 20-13 loss that Gator fans will always remember as the Ron Zook Field game.
2021: The Whiff At The Griff
What could be worse than losing to a head coach who’s already been fired? Well, maybe nothing. But losing to a fired head coach’s interim replacement is pretty close! After Dan Mullen was fired before the season finale in 2021, interim coach Greg Knox- who, suffice to say, was not very high on Gator fans’ Christmas card lists- took over for that one game in a coaching battle against Mike Norvell, then in his second season.
Knox didn’t exactly help Florida out. Only after Emory Jones had thrown three interceptions and nearly threw a fourth to begin the third quarter did Knox pull him in favor of Anthony Richardson. The man then known as AR-15 took full advantage of his opportunity, leading Florida to seventeen straight points in the second half. FSU rallied back to cut the deficit to 24-21 with under a minute left and was forced to attempt an onside kick. The key word there is “attempt.”
FSU kicker Parker Grothaus trotted up to the ball, swung his leg, and barely grazed the football with his instep, knocking it off the tee and not an inch further. Because the ball traveled 9.99 yards short of the required ten yards, Florida took possession of the ball, ran out the clock, gave Greg Knox a Gatorade bath, and relegated FSU to its couches for bowl season for the third time in four years.
The 6+ loss streak
For all the jokes from FSU about Florida suffering four-win seasons in 2013 and 2017, and for all the bragging about how Floridda has never had an undefeated season (which isn’t even true; Florida went undefeated in 1911), I’m a little surprised about how little traction this nugget has gained through the years: from 2017-2021, the Florida State Seminoles lost six games or more. The Florida Gators have never done this. As in, ever. In the history of ever.
There has never, in Florida Gators football history- which FSU fans like to point out is much longer than FSU football history when it’s convenient for them- been a stretch of five seasons in which Florida lost six games or more. I will repeat: NEVER. FSU just did it, only finally breaking that streak this season.
And secondarily, FSU suffered through four losing seasons in a row from 2018-2021. Florida hasn’t done that since a paltry stretch from 1935-38, which got both coaches responsible (DK Stanley and Josh Cody) fired.
The Florida Gators own FSU in other sports, too
I wasn’t able to put together a 2022 version of the Florida-FSU chart I’m now apparently famous for because I was getting the new version of this website ready for launch and just didn’t have the time. (Rest assured, it will be back in 2023.) But with Florida owning FSU over the past twelve months, the Florida historical domination you see in last year’s chart has only grown more lopsided.
Among the highlights: the Florida Gators own FSU head-to-head in football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, softball, men’s swimming, women’s swimming, men’s tennis, women’s tennis, and volleyball, aka nine of the eleven sports that both schools sponsor (and track and field does not have a head-to-head record, it’s all aggregate.) And Florida has more national championships than FSU in men’s basketball, baseball, softball, track and field, men’s swimming, women’s swimming, men’s tennis, and women’s tennis.
Another way to say that: the Florida Gators own FSU head-to-head in every single sport that both schools play aside from women’s soccer and baseball, owns more national championships in every single sport that both teams play except for women’s soccer, football (which is a push, but as mentioned earlier, Florida has the tiebreaker) and women’s basketball (another push).
So when you add that all up, it’s clear to see that the Florida Gators, regardless of what happens on Friday night, have the bragging rights over FSU- and will continue to have them for a long, long time. Happy Thanksgiving!
