Florida Football: ESPN confirms what we knew; Gators’ schedule is brutal

If you haven’t checked out the 2023 schedule for Florida football, you should. It is chalked full of quality opponents, and outside of a week or two, there really isn’t a dull date on the calendar.

And while we here at Hail Florida Hail have chronicled just how brutal the 2023 slate of opponents will be for the Gators, national media outlets are also taking notice of just how stacked the campaign will be.

Florida Football: Turn up the difficulty

Chris Low put out a column stating which Power 5 program he felt had the most difficult schedule in 2023.

Want to take a wild guess who he felt had the hardest road in 2023?

We have said this throughout the summer, but one of the realities of gauging the Gators in 2023 is the fact that they will potentially have five top-15 opponents on their schedule.

Georgia, Michigan, Ohio State, FSU, and Clemson won’t have more than two on their schedule when all is said and done, and some of those teams might only have one.

Add in Kentucky, South Carolina, and Arkansas making a potential appearance in the top 25, and there are only four opponents the Gators will face that we can for sure state won’t be ranked this season (Charlotte, McNease State, Vanderbilt, Missouri).

It makes the road to six wins difficult, let alone anything better than eight wins.

For what it is worth, ESPN’s FPI computer metric favors Florida in every game except Utah, Kentucky, Georgia, and LSU.

If Napier went 8-4 with this schedule but knocked off Tennesee and FSU as FPI predicts, most Gator fans would be satisfied with the end result.

Florida fans are not looking to make excuses if the Gators go 6-6 for the third straight regular season. but one must acknowledge that if Florida had a schedule like Georgia or Clemson in 2023, going 9-3 would be the expectation rather than the surprise.