the Lane Kiffin rejection<\/a> and quietly Googling Tulane coach Jon Sumrall, who has emerged as the frontrunner for UF\u2019s vacated head-coaching job and could be named as Florida\u2019s new coach by Sunday afternoon. In other words, the Gators were hoping to board the Lane Train and will likely end up in a Jon Boat.<\/p>\nThis was the Swamp\u2019s first home game since Kiffin snubbed the Gators \u2014 a brush-off so devastating that fans reacted like a middle-schooler being dumped via text message. You could feel it in the air; that lingering sour pit-in-the-stomach heartbreak of a fanbase forced to downshift from imagining Kiffin\u2019s swaggering arrival to debating whether the defensive-minded Sumrall is the \u201cright cultural fit.\u201d<\/p>\n
It just goes to show just how far both of these programs have fallen. Florida\u2013Florida State used to be The Game in this state. Used to be the Thanksgiving weekend feast \u2014 Steve Spurrier and Bobby Bowden trading haymakers, national titles on the line, entire seasons building toward this one glorious moment. Instead, this year\u2019s game on Saturday evening at The Swamp felt like an obligation, like jury duty with shoulder pads.<\/p>\n
This rivalry once determined the Sugar Bowl, the Orange Bowl or the national championship. On this night, it would decide whether the Seminoles would pathetically get an invitation to the Gasparilla Bowl.<\/p>\n
They didn\u2019t.<\/p>\n
Not even close.<\/p>\n
Instead, after Baugh steamrolled the Seminoles for the second-most rushing yards in school history (behind only Emmitt Smith) and struggling UF quarterback DJ Lagway threw three TD passes, FSU athletic director Michael Alford now will absorb even more backlash for deciding to stick with embattled head coach Mike Norvell. It\u2019s no secret that the only reason Norvell still has a job is because Florida State boosters collectively shook their couch cushions and came up about $53,999,982 short of covering his contract buyout.<\/p>\n
You don\u2019t want to keep a coach at $54 million. You get stuck with a coach at $54 million.<\/p>\n
But at least Norvell still has a job. Billy Napier is already a ghost haunting the Swamp, drifting silently through the hallways like regret wearing an embroidered Gator Head polo. The Gators were coached by Billy Gonzales, who until his one and only victory Saturday night has looked less like an interim coach and more like a man who just inherited a condemned house and has gamely been trying to hold up the ceiling tiles with a broomstick.<\/p>\n
Yes, Florida won, but the victory over a down-and-out FSU team still felt hollow. And this rivalry hasn\u2019t just taken a year off; it has completely disintegrated.<\/p>\n
For the second consecutive year, the two teams entered the game unranked \u2014 the first time that has happened since the mid-1960s.<\/p>\n
And the Florida win and the FSU loss was the moment when everyone \u2014 every booster, every fan, every alum, every poor soul clutching a plastic cup of warm stadium beer \u2014 probably had the same thought:<\/p>\n
Let\u2019s just get this season over with.<\/p>\n
Give the sellout crowd that filled the stadium credit for at least providing a decent atmosphere. Honestly, I expected this to be more like a candlelight vigil than a football game. I didn\u2019t expect to hear cheers and boos, I thought it would be a collective sigh of exhaustion from both fan bases.<\/p>\n
And, yes, there were actually FSU fans in the stadium, but they weren\u2019t rowdy. They were more like tourists visiting the ruins of an ancient civilization: \u201cWow, I heard they used to win championships here. Fascinating.\u201d<\/p>\n
Look, rivalries are supposed to be emotional fuel \u2014 pride, bragging rights, hatred, history. But when both teams limp into the game with losing records; when one has already fired its coach and the other can\u2019t afford to; when the most exciting storyline is which bowl game will tolerate you \u2026 the rivalry stops being a rivalry.<\/p>\n
Saturday night wasn\u2019t Florida vs. Florida State.<\/p>\n
It was Melancholy vs. Malaise.<\/p>\n
It was Existential Crisis vs. Budgetary Restraints.<\/p>\n
Florida may have won on the scoreboard, but nobody truly won on this night.<\/p>\n
And as the lights dimmed over The Swamp, you could almost feel Bowden shaking his head from the heavens and Spurrier shaking his from a stadium luxury suite, wondering how their beloved programs had turned a once-glittering rivalry into a soggy, slow-motion pillow fight.<\/p>\n
The Gators won big.<\/p>\n
But the rivalry?<\/p>\n
It\u2019s gone.<\/p>\n
All that remains is the hope \u2014 faint and flickering \u2013 that someday someone will resurrect it from this pit of irrelevance.<\/p>\n
Email me at mbianchi@orlandosentinel.com. Hit me up on social media @BianchiWrites and listen to my new radio show \u201cGame On\u201d every weekday from 3 to 6 p.m. on FM 96.9, AM 740 and 969TheGame.com\/listen
\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"GAINESVILLE \u2014 The Florida\u2013Florida State rivalry died Saturday night at The Swamp, and the body barely twitched. Oh,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":65445,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[38683,7385,2530,4975,10713,4976,139,141,140],"class_list":{"0":"post-65444","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-orlando","8":"tag-billy-gonzalez","9":"tag-dj-lagway","10":"tag-florida-gators","11":"tag-fsu-seminoles","12":"tag-lane-kiffin","13":"tag-mike-norvell","14":"tag-orlando","15":"tag-orlando-headlines","16":"tag-orlando-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65444","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=65444"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/65444\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65445"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=65444"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=65444"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-fl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=65444"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}