Last night was a game that the Gators needed to stay focused on, following a close win over Tennessee and Knoxville and preceeding the meat of the schedule that includes some pretty scary matchups. I was actually never convinced prior to this game that UF was going to blow right past Kentucky last night, so when the defense was struggling against a pretty good UK offensive gameplan and Leak and co. couldn't get much going I was not that surprised.
As mentioned above, Rich Brooks and his coaching staff really came out with a good gameplan against the Gators defense. By constantly throwing quick slants and screen passes to pretty speedy wide receivers, the Wildcats found a way to neutralize that very efficient pass rush and rush defense of the Gators. It also really didn't help that once in the open field, several arm tackles were found to be ineffective. Hopefully we are not looking at a weakness in the Gators secondary in the form of inability to perform open field tackles.
Fortunately for our defense, the Wildcats couldn't find ways to punch the ball into the endzone more than once. On that same note, our offense suffered from much of the same. Over 500 yards of offense, a very balanced offense, and not as many points as you would think would come from it. A few silly turnovers halted some very good drives, something that could very well hurt the Gators in a close matchup. This is defnitely something that will need to be worked on.
While I won't go out and say that this win was impressive, I still feel that this could have been a good scenario to go through before 'Bama, LSU, Auburn and UGA come up. All of these teams will bring some tough matchups, so it is probably good to get a few more wrinkles out before the matchups occur.
I'll get into the Leak/Tebow thing in a bit. For now I just wanted to express my initial feelings after this game finished.