The Florida Gators need this. The South Carolina Gamecocks need this. Which team will get it? (Photo credit: Kim Klement, USA Today)
Though much about the football programs of the Florida Gators and South Carolina Gamecocks are different, the two programs share one thing in common. Both teams need a win this Saturday. And they need it badly.
This Saturday, fans will bear witness to a crucial matchup between these two teams in Williams Brice Stadium in Columbia, SC. To say that the teams are poised for an intense battle doesn’t do justice to just how badly each side needs the victory.
For Florida, the schedule is about to get much, much tougher. If the Gators lose this game to South Carolina, there’s a very real possibility they won’t make a bowl game. A loss places them at 4-3 heading into the annual showdown with Georgia, which is almost certainly going to drop them to 4-4 with four games remaining: Arkansas, at LSU, at Missouri, and FSU. To think that the Florida Gators would go 1-3 in those four games is certainly conceivable.
For South Carolina, the schedule strength is inverted. All their tough games came early in the year, with the back half being substantially easier. But a loss to Florida would place them at 2-4, and needing to go 4-2 in the final six games to make a bowl game. Though their second half schedule is easier than Florida’s, they have to go to Missouri and Texas A&M before hosting four straight games to end the year, two of which are against Kentucky and Clemson.
For both teams, failure to reach a bowl game would be an absolutely catastrophic step backward for their programs.
Florida was less than impressive in Billy Napier’s first season, but the Florida Gators did make a bowl game to avoid the ultimate ignobility of a bowl-less season. Year Two was not a year many had pegged as a championship season, but many thought that things would at least improve a little bit as Napier truly began overhauling the program. Failure to hit that six win bare-minimum bar would not only be disappointing season number two in a row, it would show that the program is headed in the wrong direction after starting off poorly under Napier to begin with.
To be clear, Napier will get a third season with the Florida Gators in 2024, but not making it to a bowl game would unleash a monsoon of criticism upon him and heighten the demands for Year Three to make up for the step backward in Year Two. So anybody thinking Billy Napier is getting fired this season can stop right there- he’s not and he shouldn’t- but if things come off the rails in the second half of this season, it could put him in a very deep hole to dig himself out of in 2024.
Things aren’t much rosier in South Carolina. The goodwill that Shane Beamer earned with an 8-4 season in 2022 that was highlighted by a 60-piece against Tennessee is slowly wearing off as losses and frustrations begin to mount. Losing to Florida at home would place the fanbase in a particularly ornery mood, given the Gators’ astounding struggles on the road and the Gamecocks’ home field dominance. Losses to Georgia, North Carolina and even Tennessee appear to have deemed tolerable by the fans because they occurred outside the state of South Carolina, but the Gamecocks are a very, very different team on their home turf.
As is the case with Napier, Shane Beamer is not going to be fired this year no matter how the rest of the games play out. But a loss that drops them to 2-4 to start Spencer Rattler’s final season, after they supposedly fixed their offensive woes by “quiet-firing” offensive coordinator Marcus Satterfield, is going to place a lot of pressure on Beamer to perform in 2024. And like Florida, South Carolina has an absolutely brutal SEC schedule next year, featuring road trips to Alabama, Oklahoma and Kentucky and home games against LSU, Texas A&M and Missouri. Not exactly conducive to winning.
While we don’t know what lies ahead, though, we do know that these teams are both very flawed. The question is which team can mask its flaws and expose the other team’s flaws.
South Carolina’s offensive line might be- and this is not an exaggeration- one of the worst in the history of the sport. In just four games against FBS competition, Spencer Rattler- who isn’t exactly a track athlete but isn’t exactly a statue, either- has been sacked an astonishing 22 times. For perspective, Graham Mertz was sacked eleven times throughout all thirteen games in 2021. Take a second to consider the gravity of that statistic. That means in four games against FBS opposition, Spencer Rattler has been sacked exactly twice as many times as Mertz was in the entire 2021 season at Wisconsin.
For as bad as the Gamecocks’ offensive linemen are in in pass protection, they’re somehow even worse at run blocking. South Carolina’s ground game easily ranks as the worst in the SEC with a paltry 87.0 yards per game, with only Vanderbilt (92.7 YPG) even within the same stratosphere. It was so bad against North Carolina in the season opener that the Gamecocks actually finished below zero, totaling -2 yards on the day. It’s gotten only marginally better since then, and it’s still nowhere near the point where Shane Beamer can trust it to maintain some drives.
For Florida, the big weakness lies on the same side of the ball, but the polar opposite way of moving the ball down the field. Graham Mertz has been fine, for the most part, although he’s never really made a crucial throw more than fifteen yards or so down the field. Whether it’s Mertz’ fault, Napier’s fault for not dialing up more deep shots, or Florida’s offensive line’s fault, receivers gaining separation deep down the field doesn’t seem to matter, as the ball just doesn’t come their way very often- and when it does, Mertz is not particularly accurate.
That’s a big problem for the Gators, who could desperately benefit from hitting the home run through the air once or twice per game. Mertz’ efficiency, which the more Pollyanna Gator fans like to point to, is certainly not a worthless statistic- especially when it’s combined with the fact that he hasn’t thrown a single non-tipped interception all year- but it’s beyond obvious now that the offense’s limitations hamper the play-calling, which is already an issue on its own.
Despite their clear offensive deficiencies, both Florida and South Carolina have been able to move the ball to some degree. The Gamecocks are averaging 399.2 yards per game, and Florida is averaging 409.7. So it’s not like we can expect a re-run of the 2010 Florida-Mississippi State game, or the 2015 Florida-Vandy game (South Carolina fans reading this- google those). But at the same time, points are going to be at a premium. Every possession is going to be precious, and that means the importance of each play will be magnified.
And now we come back to the first talking point. Both teams need this win. Or more accurately, both teams absolutely cannot afford to lose this game, for doing so would prove a major step back for their programs at pivotal junctures in their respective coaches’ tenures.
I personally am a huge fan of Napier and want him to succeed, and I feel as though about 80% of Florida fans are in that same boat- and it feels like most Gamecock fans feel the same about Beamer. The idea of Florida orchestrating yet another coaching search- which would be the fifth one since the departure of Urban Meyer in late 2010- is something that I- and Florida brass- simply don’t have interest in. As for South Carolina, the hiring of Beamer- who had never been a head coach before- reveals a willingness to invest in the new guy’s vision for the program in the long run.
So let’s be clear- neither coach is getting fired this year. Nor should they. They’re both too early in their building processes for that to be reasonable.
But for whichever program loses this game, a sizable dent will be whacked into the side wall of what they’re building- a sizable dent that will require a lot of hard work for the coach to fix.
