It wasn’t exactly the prettiest clinic of fundamental football, but eventually, a 2-9 team being a 2-9 team took its toll and the Florida Gators smashed rival FSU, 31-11, in Tallahassee to conclude its regular season. And thus, off came the Seminole head– literally and figuratively.
This is the kind of win that requires two sets of breakdown and analysis. On the one hand, Florida made a lot of mistakes and left plenty to be desired, and only won because FSU is just that bad. On the other hand: we just beat our archrival, and it’s party time!
Let’s do the fun stuff first: the Florida Gators’ postgame party. Analysis of the game will come later.
As the game wore on and frustration mounted on both sides, it became clear this was not your average football rivalry game. Florida players routinely performed mocking Tomahawk Chops during the contest, including after tackles for loss and touchdowns. Players from both sides were barking at each other throughout, and when Florida landed the coup de grace– a beautiful touch pass from DJ Lagway to Tony Livingston– Florida players alternated between the Tomahawk Chop (followed by a thumbs down) and a Gator Chomp.
Then Florida recovered the fifth fumble of the night, and the celebration began in earnest. Immediately upon TJ Searcy leaving the pileup with the ball, the Florida defense sprinted down to the end zone where FSU recruits were sitting, and began another round of chomping and chopping at them, in between words of encouragement for them to consider playing for the Gators.
Moments later, Florida fan Charles Brian called Tyreak Sapp over to the front of his section of the stands at the 30 yard line, and handed him a severed Seminole head. The head was a joint effort between yours truly at In All Kinds Of Weather and Charles Brian. Earlier in the week, I called upon Gator fans to retrieve the Seminole head that Chauncey Gardner Johnson celebrated with six years ago in Tallahassee. After being informed that particular head was no more, Charles and I decided to order another one and have Charles bring it to the game. The idea was to have Florida players celebrate with it like FSU players celebrate with the gator head when they beat Florida.
But unlike with Gardner Johnson six years ago, the Seminole head that Sapp carried around was an undercard this time. Because Florida players had even more devious things in mind.
As the final seconds ticked away, Florida defensive end George Gumbs Jr. grabbed one of the Florida flags from its flag carrier. After the final kneel down, Gumbs sprinted onto the field, hoisted the flag high in the air, and then emphatically rammed it into the middle of the Seminole head logo at midfield. That was the second major flag plant of the day, after Michigan did so to Ohio State following the Wolverines’ upset of the Buckeyes.
Predictably, FSU coach Mike Norvell and his players didn’t like it, and Gumbs planting the flag touched off another brawl, with the Seminoles showing more fight defending their turf after their season was over than at any point during it. Norvell even dug the flag out of the turf– which took a little bit of work, given how deeply Gumbs had buried it into the ground– and then made the best throw any Seminole had made all year, tossing the fluttering flag a few yards through the air away from the midfield logo.Then he spent the next few minutes whining about it to Billy Napier like a four year old who just got told he couldn’t have a lollipop.
Police eventually quelled the disturbance on the field, but evidently, Florida defensive lineman Jack Pyburn didn’t think George Gumbs’ flag plant was good enough. So he jammed another flag into the turf inside the ten yard line, waved to beat reporter Nick De La Torre, and trotted away.
Then the victory cigars came out. That’s a tradition that started in the Alabama-Tennessee rivalry, but has spread throughout the sport as pictures and videos of the victorious Crimson Tidemen and Vols smoking their victory cigars made their rounds across social media. And boy, did Florida have a lot of them to dispense.
Here’s offensive lineman Austin Barber coolly smoking one without a care in the world. Here’s quarterback DJ Lagway posing for a picture with one mid-inhale. Here’s linebacker Myles Graham smoking one alongside fellow linebacker Aaron Chiles at their lockers. Here’s an action shot of Myles Graham smoking (what seems to be) another one about twenty minutes later– as he calls it, “smoking that FSU pack.” Here’s a video of a whole bunch of Gators smoking them. Here’s linebacker Shemar James smoking an “FSU flavored” one. Here’s defensive lineman D’Antre Robinson smoking two of them at the same time. And here’s a video of Billy Napier, Mr. Anti-Emotion to the end, proudly admitting that he got one himself.
In between the smoking of that FSU pack, though, more celebrations were unfolding on the field.
First: the head. Sapp posed for a few pictures with it on the field, and then, when he realized he needed to hands to hold his phone and his cigar at the same time, gestured to a Florida fan in the crowd to get ready, and then launched it into the crowd. Various Florida fans took turns posing and celebrating with it.
Second, and perhaps even more offensively to FSU, the Gators performed a postgame ritual to the Seminoles’ turf that FSU has been performing for decades. Predictably, FSU didn’t like it any more than any other school the Noles do it to.
For those who don’t know, FSU has a vandalistic tradition of ripping up pieces of grass from opposing stadiums they win games in and taking it home. The Noles did this in Gainesville a year ago, so Florida players decided to get some revenge and do it back. A number of Gators gathered in the end zone to rip up, stomp on, and dance on the garnet and gold paint in FSU’s end zone. When the dust cleared and the sun rose in Tallahassee on Monday morning, several square feet of turf on Ron Zook Field were gone.
Oh well. Luckily for FSU, they have a whole cemetery worth of other team’s grass they could simply replace it with.
As those celebrations were unfurling, Florida running back Jacobi Jackson had his own celebration in store. Someone gave him a belt, and he posed for Florida recruiting aces Bri Wade and Katie Turner to take videos of him swinging the belt— mimicking the motion of, as the saying goes, BTA.
There will be time to regroup, catch our breath, and talk about the football aspect of this night. Florida being on a three-game winning streak after wins over LSU and Ole Miss is great, but there’s a lot of stuff that needs to clean up. That, though, can wait. Because the Florida Gators have defeated the Florida State Seminoles.
And in any set of circumstances related to the game of football where Florida beats FSU, anything else comes second.
