Escambia94,
travisduncan, & everyone ELSE who regularly joins us here:
OUCH! This one's gonna hurt for awhile...and E-, since you have stepped forward from your typically even-tempered, rational POV to take the mantle of the "Clear-Eyed, Ready-to-Bounce-Back Realistic Gator" (and E-, hats off TO ya, but I don't know HOW you can even go to the "outside sites", let alone monitor the TV shows and media pundits for their pontificating revisionism now--I just don't wanna KNOW what any of those pea-brained, loud-mouthed yahoos have to say about OUR TEAM...for a good while I will come to this sight alone, get my news and views from all of you--even had trouble clicking on THIS column's headline and did so only out of respect and appreciation for travis' work--and BTW: it's possible I did too much of my drinking today, in the aftermath, and not enough of it yesterday during the game--as I commented elsewhere, I felt EVERY bump, bruise, failure and assault in the most personal way in the course of that debacle) where was I? Oh yeah--you are for the moment the figure representing ONE Gator POV to whom I, a Gator with another POV, address my response:
Muschamp's gonna say what he needs to say that says more to his TEAM than to any of us. He makes a good point worth taking by all of us in not going overboard here, not getting too down on what is still OUR TEAM...but that is MUCH more about setting the tone for what he is and will be saying to his team, as individuals AND a group that just failed a big test, let themselves and each OTHER down.
Nothing wrong with the "effort"--but there was a LOT more than that going on out there yesterday, from the very START (2 fumbles in the first 3 plays-from-scrimmage, if you'll recall). Look, I'm not going to dwell on it, but even with so many things going against us--biggest of all the way it was "officiated", "COUNTER-officiated" is more like it, the Stripes doing more to affect Georgia positively and Florida negatively than in any one of these I have ever seen, and I've seen, let's see, maybe 40 Cocktail Parties, attending a dozen?--we just blew a bunch of chances to first dominate, then later still "steal" this game with our fumbles, INTs and other mistakes. You can talk about "things that caught up to us", but the worst of it was the way we reverted to things we HADN'T been doing this year, carelessness in the redzone, leaving points on the field...I could go on, but never mind. Effort? Not a problem...but we were the team with the jitters, who kept shooting ourselves in the foot. Yes, a lot was taken away from us, chances our defense earned for us poisoned or stolen outright over and over again--we shouldn't have HAD to be in the position we were in on that last failed-drive, with a chance to possibly tie it 'til the one UGA player who was going OFF punched the ball from Reed's hand. Yet we were fortunate to have even THAT one last hope, and even that was tainted by our player's mistake, the normally reliable, sure handed and clear-headed kid trying too much--didn't you, like myself, think "No!" as he leapt into the closing vise of those defenders inside the 5 instead of just going down and giving us the chance from there?--a final wrenching ripping-out-of-our-pounding hearts that epitomized the whole game. Effort, near TOTAL--but somehow out-of-sync too much of the time. What, if anything, can be done about that, moving forward?
As for the future you address, through next weekend right on to the FSU game and beyond into the New Year, well, I'll leave that to you and anyone else who has the stomach for it now. What I see, the only thing I can see with any clarity at all, is that we are starting over--in every way that matters. What we or anyone else expected of us at the beginning of this season is irrelevant now. We are better than even any of us thought, and although we may have been well aware of our weaknesses and potential for dedeat, so it was/is with virtually every other TEAM out there. We WERE getting steadily stronger, and things appeared to be falling our way--as you yourself put it E-, we "were on the verge of something special". We all felt it, and so did this team. The idea that we could now "salvage" an 11-and-1 season shows how far we have come and how much was torn from our growing giddy sense of hope. Well, we still have some things to accomplish this year, even if it ISN'T some ultimate magic, doing-it-with-mirrors, arriving-a-year-early "SURPRISE!" the last few weeks filled us all with.
So we start over. Play with pride and passion and go from here. Back to the grind, "One game at a time"--and see where it leads, never mind "where we're ranked" or what anyone ELSE does, let alone what BOWL "they" say we are likely to play in if this or that happens.
Play the next game, and play for and WITH each other. Let our hard work and EFFORT carry us forward. We can assess this season when we get to the END of it.
