 | Florida Gators: Encyclopedia II - Florida Gators - Football
Florida Gators - Football
The football team plays an eight-game conference schedule, headlined by annual SEC Eastern division showdowns against Tennessee and Georgia, the latter being held in Jacksonville, Florida every year and dubbed "The World's Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party." The permanent SEC West team the Gators face every season is Louisiana State. In addition, the team has a yearly out-of-conference meeting with Florida State.
The Gators had their first taste of long-term success in the mid-1960s, when Ray Graves set the team record for wins at Florida with 70, a record that stood for thirty years. One of his best teams was in 1966, a squad led by Heisman Trophy winner, Steve Spurrier. He retired after a 9-1-1 season in 1969 to let Florida alumnus Doug Dickey to take over the reins. Dickey had some success, going 58-43-2, but it wasn’t enough to keep his job after a 4-7 season in 1978.
Charley Pell took over from Dickey, bringing the Gators back to respectability on the field, but had troubles off of it. Though he began his career with an 0-11 season, the Gators turned it around with an eight win season the following year, which set an NCAA record for win differential in a year (this has since been surpassed). He went 33-15 after the winless opening season. He was fired during his (and, at the time, the Gators’) best season in 1984 in light of major NCAA violations.
Galen Hall coached the team from the middle of 1984 to 1989 with much success, including an SEC title in 1984 and 1985, though these were to be stripped due to NCAA violations committed by Pell. Future NFL stars such as Lomas Brown and Emmitt Smith headlined the rosters. Hall went 40-18 at Florida. He had his own violation scandal, however, and was fired during the 1989 season. Gary Darnell finished the season for him.
The football team has been one of the winningest in Division 1-A since 1990, the year Spurrier returned to his alma mater as coach. That year, the Gators finished first in the SEC for the third time ever (the others being the title-stripped years of ’84 and ’85), but were ineligible for the SEC title. They won their first official SEC championship in 1991. The team played for the championship in the first ever championship game in 1992 but lost to the eventual national champions, Alabama. To date, the team has played in the most championship games of any team in either division, winning five times (1993-1996, 2000) in seven appearances.
The 1996 team, led by another Heisman winner, Danny Wuerffel, went 12-1 and won the national championship game in the Sugar Bowl, avenging an earlier loss to rival Florida State. Their other national championship game appearance was in 1995 in the Fiesta Bowl, later nicknamed the “Fiasco Bowl” for its lopsided score in favor of Nebraska.
Following the 2001 season, Spurrier left the program to try his hand at coaching in the National Football League. After a much-publicized and much-scrutinized coaching search, former Gator assistant coach Ron Zook was hired as his replacement. Zook's squads were known for their inconsistency; they handed Nick Saban's Louisiana State team its only loss in its 2003 national championship season and Georgia its only loss in 2002, while going winless against the state of Mississippi, Miami, and its bowl games. Zook was fired midway through the 2004 season, but allowed to finish out the regular season.
Urban Meyer was announced as Florida Football's new head coach in December 2004. His first season in 2005 was a respectable 9-3, including a bowl win against the Iowa Hawkeyes, but the team missed out on a chance to play in the SEC title game after a devastating loss to Spurrier's new team, South Carolina, though the team managed to sweep its three biggest rivals (Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida State) for just the fourth time in school history.
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 Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Football", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki |
