Sort of hard to get your mind around, isn’t it?
...AND reinforces the idea that at a certain point, “The ‘experts’ are all wet!”
But on the heels of that comes the thought, “Then what are we to MAKE of all empirical data out there?”
Throw it all out the window?
Surely there is SOME validity to it all—it squares pretty closely with whatever we otherwise make of our gut-level analyses (commonly referred to as “the eye-test”, after all). Sure, it never HAS been able to avoid the inescapable discrepancy between “forbidden favorites” and inevitable “upsets” somehow slipping through—but like they say, “That’s why we play the actual games!”
Meanwhile, I’ve been turning this very thought, my suspicion (mostly just BASED on my personal “eye test”/gestalt of our evolving “game” overall as a TEAM through the course of the season thus far, as much anyway as my much-appreciated and relied upon absorption of your own thoroughly researched and reported RECORD of that data,
@Escambia94, by-the-way!) that there’s WAS this very dichotomy developing—and more and more found myself WONDERING WHAT IT REALLY IMPLIED!
I COULD launch into a long LIST of potential questions raised, paradoxes that inevitably then follow.
BUT, in KEEPING with the very same “gut-level”/intuitive/“eye-test” roots of all this to start with, it is I think more fitting to simply leave it to the actual “GAME ITSELF” to likewise ANSWER those very questions, address those issues—let the sword-of-reality slice through all the intellectual gibberish to reveal this particular “truth”, you know?
Either we will get absolutely slaughtered, OR it’ll be close, fun scoring duel and maybe either the team that does a better job of holding onto the ball and/OR gets the ball last and SCORES with it will win!
I guess that’s where OUR best hope lies. Even so, that isn’t where this GATOR PROGRAM is headed under our perfectionist Coach, don’t you agree?
No, Dan Mullen wants and expects to build another “UNSTOPPABLE SEC MACHINE”; if given the time and patient support, the day will come when it will be US that lines up 2- and 3-deep at every position, that can keep rotating in “fleets” of fresh “next-guys-up” all game, get the lead and hold it—how we want, WHEN we want, HOWEVER LONG THE GAME-FLOW SITUATION REQUIRES.
It’ll be “our time” once more.
But it won’t be as much “crazy, chaotic FUN” as this uncertain “express elevator to the STARS” is and will be RIGHT NOW?
It’s like Kevin Costner’s veteran pitcher’s smirking line in “Bill Durham” when he looks up at the opposing hitter and (in order to scare him) looks him in the eye and says, “Really: I don’t KNOW where it’s GOING.”
LOL “We don’t KNOW where it’s GOING!”
For now, that’s the most, the best we can say. And, when you step back and think about it (but not TOO much), that’s not such a BAD thing!
No, time may well come when we look back on all this with a certain irreverent, nostalgic, even WISTFUL idealism as “an innocence lost”.
After growing UP a Gator fan, I finally came BACK to Florida in the 70’s (we were named Playboy’s “Number One Party School in the Nation” my sophomore year—and you KNOW how at BEST “the world” doesn’t start hearing about such things until at LEAST a year AFTER the kinds of things that make it so have already HAPPENED! I’m told they STILL tell tales of the last unofficial “Halloween Ball”, held by the undergrads in The Quadrangle (between the library, Carrillon and GPA)—and all I’ll say now is that it was “all that and MORE”...to the point that I WOULDN’T brag on it all NOW at ALL—least of all in front of my own children, or CHILDREN’S children, ya know? In fact, when it comes to THEIR time at college, it’s probably best WE don’t know or THINK about ANY of that!
Anyway, I was of course a huge football fan (it was one of the reasons I chose to RETURN to Florida and GO TO UF!), and by ‘79 we’d gotten rid of Doug Dickey, finally, and brought in Bear Bryant protege Charley Pell...and promptly went 0-10-and-1 (!)—and the tie there at the “-and-1” was against Georgia Southern, what was then still called a “Div II- School”. But we had fun at the games, hardly paid attention to the on-field play and in general carried on like all 35,000 or so of us on “the student side” of Florida Field were one big party of fraternities and sororities during Rush Week!
For the next coupla years, when asked about our “record last year” it was common to laugh and say, “Oh, ten and one!”...get it??! Ha ha ha.
Only something funny/NOT-so-funny happened during that “next coupla years”, something my friends and I noticed and commented upon amongst ourselves:
We weren’t having NEAR as much FUN at GAMES THEMSELVES THE NEXT COUPLE OF YEARS, as we DID improve and the games quickly, more and more “MEANT SOMETHING”, as we’d had “back in ‘79”!!!
You see, there was something on the line now. The outcome began to have MEANING.
So. My POINT?
This is sort of the “FLIP SIDE” of all that, but the idea I think is to “ENJOY THE RIDE”! Revel in the uncertainty.
We AREN’T “PERFECT”—not even CLOSE! But we are GOOD—may even be days when we show GREATNESS: the “greatness”-to-COME...the greatness that they will come to display regularly out there each Saturday!
Enjoy the uncertainty, the excitement and mutual satisfaction among players and their fans, young people essentially so much like themselves, all suddenly sharing the joy of it all coming together and their hard work paying off, producing the actual “public performance” that they are in the process of demonstrating.:.
