Friday Forum: Would you make The Trade when it comes to Florida and Kentucky?

Want a blast from the past? Here’s a passage from something I wrote eight years ago:

Of course, there’s also the idea that Kentucky fans worrying about a football rivalry with Florida is sort of useless, given that Florida holds a 24-game winning in the series. The Gators haven’t lost to Kentucky since 1986; to put that in perspective, my parents hadn’t even gotten married yet, and their move to Florida and my birth were still just sort of ideas.

It’s hard to get worked up for Kentucky on the gridiron, I think, because we’ve never really had to worry about the outcome of the game. (Is the most memorable Florida-Kentucky moment of the last 10 years Tim Tebow’s concussion? It is, isn’t it?) So I pose this question to you: Would you trade a football win over Kentucky for a clean sweep of Big Blue’s Wildcats on the hardwood?

That’s from a post asking Alligator Army’s readership whether it would trade a win over Kentucky in football for wins, plural, over the Wildcats in men’s basketball, and it’s from a time when Tebow’s concussion was still pretty vivid in the mind, and not possibly the reason he is making addled arguments as an ESPN talking head. (Hell, First Take was only very barely First Take back then.)

And even though the post is barely readable, you can see if you scroll down that the response was an emphatic no. (Old friend Troll2Troll: “I would cancel the basketball program if it gave UF an undefeated National Championship in football.”)

But it was also from a time when Florida’s football program was only barely removed from national prominence, when Florida’s men’s basketball team was about to embark on its second of four consecutive trips to the Elite Eight or deeper, when John Calipari had yet to win a national title at Kentucky, and when The Streak was still alive.

Now, a year after Kentucky’s first win over Florida on the gridiron in more than three decades, I wonder if things are any different.

A loss to Kentucky probably knocks Florida out of national championship contention in football — but it arguably didn’t do that a year ago. A clean sweep of Kentucky in men’s hoops probably means Florida’s a national championship contender — but the Gators are liable to be good enough in 2019-20 that losing twice (or even thrice) to Kentucky might not prevent them from striving for a Final Four appearance.

And, of course, there’s the chance that Florida might be good enough to win all of these games anyway, rendering the question itself moot.

But I ask the same question I did back then, expecting much of the same when it comes to an answer: