Florida Football fans were relegated to watching the playoffs on TV this weekend rather than participating in them. The Gators finished their season on Friday with a win over Tulane in the Gasparilla Bowl.
But there were still things to take away from the weekend and the following are three things Gator fans learned if they were paying attention.
Tennessee is beatable in 2025
Tennessee getting the door blown off of them by Ohio State was not a great look for the SEC, especially after all the complaining the conference did about how a fourth team should have gotten in ahead of Indiana and SMU.
That's a story for a different day, though, as Gator fans start to think ahead to 2025.
As we all know, Florida should have beaten Tennessee this year, but coaching malpractice led to losing in overtime. But even though the Volunteers had the 7th hardest strength of schedule in 2024, the reality is that Florida finished with the second most wins of anyone Tennessee beat in 2024.
Translation: Tennessee is not some unbeatable juggernaut heading into 2025.
Yards don't equal points
SMU finished with more first downs than Penn State. At one point in the third quarter, the total yards for both teams were equal. But as we all know, Penn State cruised to a 38-10 victory.
In SMU's case, they were the James Franklin of getting close to the endzone but never being that close. There was just something that went wrong every single time they were on the doorstep of scoring. Ill-timed penalties and turnovers sank SMU.
It felt similar to what we see from Billy Napier's offenses at times and was on display during the Gasparilla Bowl. It also reminded us of one of Dan Mullen's infamous quotes he gave after losing to Kentucky in 2021:
“No. 382 yards. I guess that’s sputtering. We had 382 and they had 211.”
Well, Kentucky beat Florida 20-13 in that one, so...
Need to make the SEC title game to make a run in the playoffs
All four home teams won over the weekend, and as mentioned above, three of the four games weren't even close.
We aren't going to get into who should or should not have been in the playoffs, but one thing that was very clear from this weekend is that if/when Florida does make the playoffs, they need to host if they want to make any kind of run.
Three of the four games were played in freezing temperatures, and we have a feeling a bunch of Florida boys wouldn't do well in that (remember the old stat about how the Tampa Bay Bucs couldn't win when it was under 32 degrees?).
The only way to ensure hosting is to at least make the SEC title game.