Florida Gators fine flying under radar: ‘We're about to shock the world’
The Florida Gators aren’t being talked about as College Football Playoff contenders. They will not be picked to win the Southeastern Conference or even their own division. When the projected order of finish comes out later this week, they may be as low as fifth in the SEC East. They’re being counted out. An afterthought.
“It definitely is a chip on the shoulder,” junior cornerback Jason Marshall told On3’s JD Pickell. “It’s a chip on the shoulder for not only myself and how I want my season to go but as well as the team. Summer workouts. Spring, we’ve been working. (We) put our heads down, working. Everybody knows it’s doubt out there. People are doubting us for real. We comin’ out and we about to shock the world.”
Senior receiver Ricky Pearsall echoed that sentiment.
“As much as we say we don’t want to worry about the outside noise, we still hear it and we still use it as motivation,” Pearsall told Pickell. “Ultimately the guys in the locker room is what really matters to us. Wanting to play for one another. I think there’s a little extra motivation going into this year, for sure.”
What can the Florida Gators prove in 2023
Billy Napier’s first year in Gainesville never got off the ground. The Gators beat a top-10 team to start the year then traded wins and losses for weeks on the way to a 6-7 season. The Gators lost a top four quarterback in the NFL Draft and a consensus All-American offensive lineman as well as two other starters along the line.
Naturally, nobody will be picking the Orange and Blue to do much of anything in 2023 with that attrition and a 12-14 record over the last two seasons.
Billy Napier was realistic when asked about his team “flying under the radar” heading into the 2023 season.
“We talk a lot about this in recruitment. In 2008 the Gators won a National Championship. That’s 15 years ago the last time the Gators won the SEC or a National Championship. The guys that we are recruiting now, they were one, two, or three years old. That’s one of the battles that we have — recent success,” Napier said at SEC Media Days. “One of the things that I respect about the place is that people care. You want a job with high expectations. You want a job where there’s alignment, commitment, and resources. We have that.”
The Gators’ schedule is a gauntlet. They’ll travel more than 8,300 miles this season and kick off the year with defending Pac-12 Champion Utah. They travel to Kentucky and LSU and, of course, have dates with Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida State. It’s a gauntlet. That’s just football at Florida. The team will have personal goals but center Kingsley Eguakun laid out the mentality of the locker room plainly.
“I’ve got a lot of personal goals. But let me start with we want to win the SEC East,” Eguakun said. “Obviously, I want to win the Rimington Award. I want to get drafted high, all that good stuff. But my main personal goal is I want to win games. That’s the bottom line. I don’t like losing, I really hate losing more than I like winning, to be honest with you.
I just want to win games. If none of that other stuff comes, but we win all our games, I’m a happy camper.”
