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Florida: Too good to ignore

Dan Wolken, USA TODAY Sports
Florida running back Trey Burton and the fourth-ranked Gators remained unbeaten Saturday.
  • Florida matched its win 2011 win total in only its seventh game of 2012.
  • More than a third of quarterback Jeff Driskel's completions were for touchdowns.
  • Steve Spurrier benched his starting QB Connor Shaw for the entire second half

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The welts started piling up last October, each one a little more tender than the next. By the end of the season, the University of Florida had become a beaten program; relegated to a second-tier bowl and basically forgotten.

It wasn't so much that Alabama and LSU had overpowered them, because they were doing that to everybody. But when Auburn, Georgia and South Carolina began out-finishing Florida, winning all the tough game-deciding battles, they finally understood. The once-dominant Gators were physically soft, mentally weak and seemingly in for a long trudge back toward their status as the Southeastern Conference's elite.

"Extremely disappointed, extremely embarrassed," running back Trey Burton said.

"We had a young ballclub last year, and we made some very young mistakes," coach Will Muschamp said.

"We were like, that's really not Florida," center Jonotthan Harrison said. "We can't accept that."

And yet, no matter badly Florida wanted to reverse what happened in 2011, no matter how much willpower and work went into this past offseason, the gap between the Gators and the true SEC contenders seemed so big that it would be impossible to close in a year.

As it turned out, a year wasn't ambitious enough. The Gators only needed seven games.

No. 4-ranked Florida may still be in the middle of a rebuild, but after Saturday's 44-11 thrashing of No. 8 South Carolina, the Gators are 7-0 and closing in on a trip to Atlanta in December to play for the SEC championship. Practically ignored this summer when all the talk was about South Carolina, Georgia and even Tennessee, the Gators can clinch the Eastern division next week with a win against Georgia just down the road in Jacksonville.

"It feels good," defensive tackle Sharrif Floyd said. "It's no mad recipe to what we're doing. It's simple. We're just playing physical and dominating the person in front of us."

It may be simple, but the transformation is difficult to fathom. From 7-6 last year to a team with a good chance of running the table.

From a team that got booed at The Swamp during its lackluster opener against Bowling Green to a team that stomped on South Carolina in every way imaginable. From a team that needed to open up the offense in fourth-quarter comebacks against Texas A&M and Tennessee in September to a team that has won the line of scrimmage against LSU and South Carolina in October.

"We have a bunch of guys that were there last year in Columbia and were at Auburn and in Jacksonville and all those places, and we've drawn motivation," Muschamp said. "You do that as a coach. You find out what motivates your guys. They rally around that a little bit."

It wouldn't be fair to say Florida is overachieving, although you couldn't have guessed by the final score that the Gators' offense actually struggled for much of the game, scoring 21 points in the first half despite netting just 29 total yards on 26 plays. This isn't a perfect offense, the lack of downfield threats is glaring, and quarterback Jeff Driskel is still going to be bound by a conservative playbook until he feels more comfortable throwing from the pocket.

But sometimes a football team just finds a sweet spot of physicality, opportunism and growing confidence. With every fiber of its being, Florida now occupies that space.

The Gators are winning with a legitimate defense, tremendous special teams and an attitude that has grown by leaps and bounds from that dull opener.

Take Saturday's opening play. Muschamp said he had talked with defensive coordinator Dan Quinn at the pre-game breakfast about calling an aggressive game and coming after South Carolina quarterback Connor Shaw.

So on the first play from scrimmage, the Gators blitzed Loucheiz Purifoy from the corner. Nobody picked him up, and Purifoy got a clean shot on Shaw and jarred the ball loose, with the Gators recovering at the 3-yard line. It was pretty much off to the races from there, with Florida creating three more turnovers (two on kick returns) and taking advantage of short fields for a 21-6 halftime lead.

"We don't have a lot of margin of error here," Muschamp said. "We're a team that's playing defense pretty decent t times, pretty consistent, and offensively we're doing what we have to do to take advantage of the other team and give us an opportunity to win the game. We're playing really well on special teams and controlling vertical field position. That's really who we are right now."

And when you combine that with the toughness to run between the tackles and stop the run, which Muschamp hammered home to his players in everything they did during the offseason, the Gators have been able to completely flip the script on what teams did to them during that 0-4 run last October.

"Last year was a real wake-up call," Harrison said. "We heard about it day in, day out in the weight room, locker room, training room. Wherever we were, we heard that, and it's showing right now. It changed our mindset completely."

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