Florida vs. South Carolina, Game Thread: Bitters

The Florida Gators are going to lose to the South Carolina Gamecocks — and to former Florida coach Will Muschamp — in this Saturday’s game (noon, CBS — there is a God, and She is cruel but conscious of our collective despite to do other things with our Saturday evenings, I guess?) and I am as okay with that fact as I am convicted of its factuality.

Florida is bad right now — as bad as it has been in decades, worse even than when Muschamp’s 2013 team dealt with “buzzard luck” like proud prizefighters. Florida kicked field goals down multiple touchdowns last week because, as interim coach Randy Shannon later told reporters, its interim coach was thinking “Get points” at the end of offensive drives. Florida’s quarterbacks are big-armed but erratic; its defense is talented but young; its roster is emaciated, and its traveling party has to be enervated by a bizarre season that has stubbornly refused to be fun in any way.

South Carolina is good in the ways that Muschamp’s Florida teams were — solid and unspectacular and largely lacking in truly exciting aspects — and is playing at home against a team that just got whipped by two very different foes. South Carolina should win this game, and maybe easily.

But Florida’s future — even its near-term future — is not what this team’s present is, and is hardly likely to even remotely resemble what this team will be on this day. And everyone involved with Florida football knows that, so it’s very difficult to invest too much in caring about these players playing this game on this day.

South Carolina’s future might not be that far off from its present, though. And so South Carolina should take every opportunity to make Florida look as bad as possible while it can.

And if that happens — if Florida’s ex-coach’s team chucks another log on his already departed successor’s Dumpster fire of a final season — it will be a momentary embarrasment, at best.

Y’all will have time to go get a good dinner tonight. Use it.

Go Gators?