Florida football: Taking a deeper dive into the Gators’ 2024 schedule
By Will Thomas
Florida football, along with the rest of the conference, found out their SEC opponents for the 2024 season last night, which will be the inaugural season with Texas and Oklahoma in the conference.
With no divisions and an eight game conference schedule, the league will look a lot different a year from now. While this structure will likely only be around for ’24, it still presents each school with a brand new type of gauntlet.
And the Gators certainly have a gauntlet.
Let’s take a longer look at Florida’s 2024 opponents.
Florida football: Never a week off
The Gators have a tough opponent with a lot on the line just about every week in 2024, with the exception of their game against Samford. We hope.
But before I get into the SEC machups, how about Florida’s out of conference schedule?
Aside from Samford, UF’s out of conference games are Miami, UCF, and FSU. 2024 is the year that the Gators aim to take back the state.
Both Miami and UCF will be home games before the Gators hit the road to Tallahassee. But regardless of where those games are played, they will be intense.
UF-Miami always has some fire, which we saw in their game at Camping World Stadium a few years ago. If I say anything about UCF, all their fans will find me and say rude things on the internet. But we know all about them.
And the FSU game is the FSU game.
Those are three intense, high stakes games that the Gators will have to be wide awake for.
But moving past the state championship, the Gators have a tough road in conference as well.
With no divisions, there was no guarantee that Florida would play every team in the SEC East anymore. And they lost their games with all the bad ones.
Florida will not meet Vanderbilt, Missouri, and South Carolina in 2024.
Instead, they get to hit the road and play in Austin, for their first game against Texas as fellow SEC teams. The Gators also go on the road to play Missisippi State, Tennessee, and play UGA in Jacksonville.
And the teams that they play in The Swamp won’t be slouches either.
The Gators will welcome in LSU, Kentucky, Ole Miss, and Texas A&M.
The LSU game is one that I expect a lot of Gator fans to be happy that it stayed on the schedule. The Gators and the Tigers play great games whenever they meet, and I’m excited that we’ll get to keep seeing it.
Florida football also gets to keep their rivalry going with Kentucky, who has started to gain a pulse against the Gators over the past five years.
The Gators’ game against Ole Miss will be a fun one. Florida fans vs Lane Kiffin will be very entertaining on social media before the game, and the teams should matchup well.
For Florida’s game against Texas A&M, I think most Gator fans are ready to quit playing the Aggies. Not because we can’t figure out how to beat them, because we did last fall. But we’ve seen Jimbo Fisher’s squad in 2020, 2022, and now we’ll see them in 2024.
Let’s get some new opponents in the rotation, ok?
But anyways, now that we’re all pumped up and excited to see this new schedule play out, we get to wait a year and a half.
Yay.