The SEC Championship Game suddenly seems reachable for Florida.
The Gators are surging after a 14-6 win over then-No. 4 LSU on Saturday. It was their biggest win of the post-Tim Tebow era and it was the second time they beat a ranked opponent this year. At 4-0 in the SEC, they have more conference wins than they had all of last season and are tied with South Carolina for first in the Eastern Division.
The Gators, who jumped six places to No. 4 Sunday in the Associated Press poll, talked about going to Atlanta for the SEC title game last year, but that was far-fetched. Now that conversation is legitimate.
“We all think about it,” defensive tackle Sharrif Floyd said. “We’ve all got that in the back of our heads. But at the end of the day, there’s no Atlanta if we don’t play each week the way we know we can.
“In the back of my head, I’m thinking a little bit bigger, but I’m not talking about that. It’s going to be a fight each week.”
Floyd has national championship aspirations on his mind. It is too early to tell if Florida (5-0) has the firepower to make that kind of run, but the Gators will be viewed as a contender — for now, at least — after AP voters ranked them fourth. It is the highest they have been ranked since opening the 2010 season in that slot.
This time, they earned their status. The 2010 Gators started that season riding the success of Tebow’s team the year before and plummeted sharply. They were unranked by the middle of October.
As great as Urban Meyer’s six-year run was, he made it to 5-0 only twice. It is hard to forget that one of those years, 2006, was his second as head coach. The Gators seemingly sneaked up on the entire country to win a national championship that season.
While the LSU win is an enormous step in Florida’s rebuilding project, there is little time to celebrate it. The Gators head to Nashville on Saturday to face Vanderbilt (6 p.m., ESPNU).
Do not laugh at Florida coach Will Muschamp for calling this a “huge challenge.” Although Gators have 21 straight victories over Vanderbilt, the last was a 26-21 squeaker in Gainesville last season. The Commodores are 2-3 this season, but lost to South Carolina by only four points.
Beyond Vanderbilt, Florida faces critical games against the two teams that have controlled the SEC East.
In two weeks, the Gators host South Carolina, which has beaten them each of the past two years. The Gamecocks destroyed then-No. 5 Georgia 35-7 over the weekend and climbed to No. 3 in AP poll.
Then comes the annual Florida-Georgia game in Jacksonville, where the Bulldogs (now No. 14) will desperately need a win to stay alive in the division.
“We need to understand that as you continue to climb a mountain, it gets a little more dangerous,” Muschamp said after beating LSU.
“You’ve got a tough one again this week and two weeks from now. It just continues on in this league every week. You don’t want to put too much emphasis on one game, in my opinion.”
The SEC has been harsh to Florida during its down years. During the 2010 and ’11 seasons, the Gators stomped on the lowly trio of Vanderbilt, Kentucky and Tennessee and went 1-9 against everybody else.
They went 0-6 against the mighty SEC Western Division those two years, only once managing more than 11 points. Florida is done with the West this season after winning 20-17 at Texas A&M in Week 2 and knocking off LSU.
Whether the Gators can survive the second half of the SEC schedule is unknown, even to their head coach. He has been telling fans for more than a year to put on their “realistic glasses,” a caution against getting their hopes up.
But maybe Florida’s renewal is ahead of schedule.
“We’ve taken some steps forward,” Muschamp said. “I’m not going to sit there and doubt them, but there’s so many more things to accomplish.
“We’ve got to understand we have a lot of things we need to clean up within our football team and there are so many things we can work on. It was a great win, so I’m not trying to take anything away from the win. But it counts as one and we have a long season ahead of us.”
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