So your predicting a similar ending of the 1999 season
@DRU2012 ? Sad part more than likely you're right you might be right. There a chance against UM especially if Mac and company look at that Ohio State game.
I will be honest, years of Muschamp have conditioned me to call this season a success. 10 wins? SEC East champions? Top-10 recruiting, with 4* offensive players? Victory over the #3 team in the nation? Going toe-to-toe with the #6 team in the nation, using the second string QB? Things are looking up for the Gators!
First off, don't get me wrong: Overall, taken from a "how things looked coming INTO the season"- POV, this one WAS a "success"...Certainly would have seemed so had anyone from-the-not-so-far-future come back and told us what our reg season record would be. Even with a somewhat glossed-over version of what happened at QB and its eventual practical effect on said record, every ONE of us would have said, "We'll TAKE it!". And expected to move on with hope in our hearts.
But that's just it, and in turn takes us to the "second point": In the actual reality of experience, and how it all played out, the truth is that in the end we have in practical terms merely come full-circle to find ourselves BACK in the frustrating (and seeming hopeless) situation we were in the last few years under Muschamp: No QB, thin where it matters on both lines--and overall once again with (despite everything) great defense BUT ABSOLUTELY NO OFFENSE.
If anything, this nightmare/endless bad joke (choose one) for Gators everywhere may be worse than ever. I leave it to all of you to contemplate the many ways this could be so.
However, underneath it all, there does remain "hope"--but out in the real world of "Jimmys and Joes", Mac & Co. will have to excell, quickly, far and wide, in fact better have already begun to do so to a degree and on a scale beyond anything most of us are currently aware of, to bring it off in any timely way.
And it has to be "timely". As in SOON. Or 2016 is more or less lost already, a "rebuilding year" which will leave us on the far fringes: A "step back", in effect a forgone conclusion, record-wise--and without at least one, probably a COUPLE new QBs, with not even a chance of showing real results, at LEAST until Grier returns (and then only for long-view, patient fans who acknowledge this and begin the hunker-down, steal-yourselves-for-a-lot-more-of-same).
Like everyone else here, while I see and understand the reasons for what what's been happening on the field of late, and while I grasp the hard facts that E- and others have noted, examined and used to document our state and present plight, in the end I am just SICK TO DEATH of our impotency--and THAT reality was already tearing me up inside back before we finally started actually LOSING games here at the end, when we had to face decent teams again. I really can't stand it anymore.
Sick as it may be, there is a certain inherent human fascination with bearing witness to sudden catastrophe, trainwrecks and the like. But only psychotics enjoy watching torture (to anyone but lifelong deadly enemies, at any rate). So I can't imagine Gator games being an attractive alternative to anyone nowadays, either broadcasters OR viewers--least of all to most of us here. Well, at least not to ME. And that is damn near unprecedented, in my case.
So, after everything, tremendous strides taken by Mac and his staff, and, on balance, a more "interesting" and yes, "successful" season than any of us had any inkling of or right to expect coming in, here at the end, the regular season now over, in my view the weight and spotlight-of-judgment is right back squarely on the coaches', what they get and what they do with it from here--on MAC'S shoulders and actions once more:
"You're a bright, talented and resourceful guy, Coach Mac. There seems every sign that you are an extraordinary Head Coach. But now you and your people will somehow have to pull not one, but a whole BUNCH of rabbits out of your collective hat."
Sorry--but that was ALWAYS in the fine print of your job description here...
