Good times in Gainesville

You may remember Saturday Down South for hosting this hilarious hot take about Georgia football last season.

Welp, the calendar page has turned to a new year and SDS has gone back to the well with a new school as the next challenge.

Maybe, just maybe, Florida’s “lost decade” is over.

If it isn’t, this is the greatest false alarm yet.

The past two weeks have been the best two weeks for Florida football this decade.

First, Florida clobbered Jim Harbaugh and Michigan in the Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl, vanquishing all manner of 2010s demons in the process…

Later that week, rival Georgia lost the Sugar Bowl decisively to resurgent Texas, a sign Kirby Smart’s program might have been too impressed with themselves and what game they felt they should have been playing instead of interested in making a statement in the one they were playing.

The Bulldogs are the one program in the SEC East Mullen and Florida are definitively chasing, but that chase became a little easier over the last month of the season, at least from a momentum standpoint.

Georgia didn’t just lose the SEC Championship Game in heartbreaking fashion or stumble in the Sugar Bowl after claiming the Twitter trash talk national championship.

They lost a massive amount of production and potential production for 2019.

Justin Fields, the jewel of Kirby Smart’s best recruiting class to date, transferred to Ohio State. Days after the Sugar Bowl defeat, junior playmakers Riley Ridley and Mecole Hardmon declared for the NFL Draft. Tight end Isaac Nauta, who terrorized Florida, also declared, as did All-SEC running back Elijah Holyfield.

Then Tuesday night, in a shocking development, Georgia also lost its offensive coordinator, Jim Chaney, the quarterback-whisperer who so often seemed to have Todd Grantham’s number over the past two years, to SEC East rival Tennessee.

If you had “Chaney’s departure as the beginning of the end of Georgia’s run in the SEC East” in the office pool, go collect your winnings.  If you’re not too shocked, that is.

Look, I’m not mocking the idea that a resurgent Florida is a legitimate possibility.  Certainly if the Gators are back, they’re a credible threat — likely the most credible threat over the long haul — to any sort of dominant run by the Dawgs.  But the idea that a disappointing bowl loss, players leaving early for other opportunities (something the Gators aren’t immune to, by the way) and some coordinator turnover all add up to a return to the glory days in Gainesville does seem like something of a stretch, at least until Mullen shows he’s recruiting at the same level as Smart.

Hey, I’ll give the author some credit.  At least he didn’t resort to a cannon shot metaphor.