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Saturday, January 6, 2007
With a win, Gators — shudder — will rule us all
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Mark Bradley
Glendale, Ariz. — Florida, the reigning basketball national champion, can win the football national championship Monday night. No school has ever held concurrent ownership of the two biggest collegiate titles. Woe unto everybody else — Georgia fans and us neutrals alike — if it happens now. Florida has always acted as if it owns the world. If the Gators are champs in the two sports that matter most, won’t it mean they do own the world?
“Pretty much,” said Max Starks, the Pittsburgh Steelers lineman who stopped by his former school’s practice Saturday. “It would mean the Gators definitely have the edge on everyone athletically.”
Granted, there are Florida fans who aren’t insufferable. They, alas, number in single digits. And it would be different if Southern Cal or Wisconsin or some other distant school did the double because fans of those programs tend to keep their distance. Florida borders on our fair state and sends a massive number of its infernal grads across the border. And Florida, as we know, has come to own Georgia in the two major sports.
Florida is already too close for comfort. Now imagine if Florida topples Ohio State.
Jeff Dantzler has. He’s part of the Georgia basketball broadcast team and a columnist for the magazine Bulldawg Illustrated. He spoke Saturday from, of all places, Gainesville, Fla., where the hated Gators were about to beat Georgia in basketball for the sixth time in succession.
Dantzler confessed to being torn, if only slightly, about the BCS title game. “There’s a part of me that knows it would be nice for our conference,” he said. And how big a part is that? One measly corpuscle? “It’s about 5-1 [against Florida].”
Some schools can win without leaving an aftertaste. Florida is not such a school. No, it hasn’t been caught cheating in recruiting lately, but the Gators have such inherent advantages — academics, facilities, fan base, state population, even the bloomin’ weather — that they don’t need to bend rules to ruffle feathers. Said Dantzler: “They’ve definitely got a swagger. Some would call it arrogance.”
Well, yes. Steve Spurrier played and coached there. Rex Grossman smirked there. Dwayne Schintzius grew hair there. Of all the qualities that can be ascribed to Gator Nation, humility would be at the bottom of the list.
To wit: When a correspondent offered congratulations immediately after Florida’s basketball championship, here was athletics director Jeremy Foley’s magnanimous response: “Now take back all that [stuff] you’ve been writing.” (And this to the only columnist in the world who defended Foley after he hired Ron Zook.)
Part of the dislike for the Gators, Dantzler suggested, has been “the deep-down fear of how good they could become.” Sure enough, here they are, holders of a powerfully won basketball title and no worse than a touchdown underdog against unbeaten Ohio State. Going beyond Monday night, Dantzler looks to Oct. 27, 2007: “It would be gut-wrenching walking into Jacksonville with them having won 15 of the last 17 [Georgia-Florida games] and having them do the Gator Chomp and wave two national championship rings in our face.”
But the indignity of continual Gator coronations could hit home even before that. There’s a good chance Florida could become the first school in 15 years to stack basketball titles back to back, and if the football team wins in the desert the hoop Gators could, come April, be going not for a mere double but for a triple in, of all places, the Georgia Dome.
Said Starks: “That would be a great day if we could run the trifecta.”
Great for him, yes. Great for all Gators, sure. Gut-wrenching for everybody else.
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