Florida Gators

GAINESVILLE, Fla. – Right at the start, Gators athletic director Scott Stricklin tackled the elephant in the room during a video conference call with reporters Thursday afternoon.

About an hour earlier, news started to leak that the Southeastern Conference had adopted a 10-game conference-only schedule for 2020. The plan is for the season to kick off Sept. 26. The SEC Championship Game is scheduled Dec. 19 in Atlanta. Each team will have a midseason open date and the entire conference has an open date on Dec. 12.

Those facts were public when Stricklin, from his office inside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, began with an opening statement.

"I think there's some positives to take from the news, and then there's one particular area of disappointment that I'll touch on,'' he said.

By that time, only the most novice among the group hadn't figured out what "disappointment" Stricklin had on the tip of his tongue. For the first time since 1957 when Dwight D. Eisenhower roamed the Oval Office, there will be no Florida-Florida State football game in the fall. The annual Gators-Seminoles showdown is just another victim in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, which shut down college athletics in mid-March and continues to impact everyday life across the country.

Stricklin had voiced hope to save the game earlier this month should a season come to fruition. That was not part of the final plan voted on by league presidents and announced by SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey on Thursday, snapping the rivalry's consecutive streak at 62 seasons.

The Gators are not the only ones to miss out on their marquee in-state rivalry. There will be no Georgia-Georgia Tech, no South Carolina-Clemson, and no Kentucky-Louisville in 2020.

"I made sure everyone understood that it was important,'' Stricklin said of the UF-FSU matchup. "Once you start looking at starting [in] late September, and there was a consensus that we wanted to try and play 10 conference games, you start really impacting the number of opportunities you have to play those games. And so, the league made the decision. We made the decision we wanted to move the conference championship game back a couple of weeks. We wanted to keep that Dec. 12 date available for any rescheduling that needed to occur. And once you do that, you have 11 Saturdays to play 10 conference games.

"We ran out of Saturdays."



This is when you know if your neighbor is a glass-half-full type of person or prefers the glass-half-empty approach to life. Even after Thursday's announcement, a lot must go right for the season to play out as planned. Only time will tell the final score and the league pushing back the start date bought some additional time.

"Over the last two weeks of August, we are going to have tens of thousands of people back on our campuses,'' Sankey said on "The Paul Finebaum Show" late Thursday afternoon. "We need to make sure that happens and happens well."

But after more than four months of around-the-clock speculation, COVID-19 outbreaks, political wrangling, social unrest and a squirrel in Colorado testing positive for the bubonic plague, only the most jaded fan of college football will focus on the absence of the Gators-Seminoles rivalry in 2020.

For the moment, at least, SEC football has come out of hibernation and stretching in the sun.

"The idea that we now have a direction and a date that we all can shoot for and the idea that we have a plan moving forward to try and play at the end of September, I think that's a positive,'' Stricklin said. "The longer this thing drug on, I think, there is a sense of the unknown. That is not healthy. I hope it's healthy to our athletes and their state of mind and also our coaches and everyone else, certainly our fans."

As part of the revamped plan, the Gators will play the eight league schools already on their 2020 schedule – Kentucky, Tennessee, South Carolina, LSU, Ole Miss, Georgia, Vanderbilt and Missouri. Stricklin said the goal is to keep the Florida-Georgia game in Jacksonville. Florida's remaining two SEC West opponents will be announced at a later date when the league finalizes dates and times for the 10-game conference schedule.

As for the non-conference opponents UF had scheduled in 2020 – Eastern Washington on Sept. 5, South Alabama on Sept. 19 and New Mexico State on Nov. 21 – those games are off.

"They have been very understanding and understand we're hopeful that down the road we can reschedule a game with them at some point,'' Stricklin said. "They've been good colleagues through this."

More than anything, Thursday was about a step toward a return to normalcy. If the plan the SEC announced comes off without a hitch, it's still going to look very different than what we are accustomed to. Stadiums filled nowhere near capacity. Wide-ranging health precautions inside and outside the gates. Georgia athletic director Greg McGarity said the Bulldogs will require fans attending games to wear face coverings. The list of precautions is certain to grow as we learn more about the coronavirus pandemic and whether you can play college football safely during it.

The safety of the players, coaches, staff and fans will guide the way.

The Gators are scheduled to open preseason camp Aug. 7 and are currently in the midst of a two-week period in which coaches are allowed to conduct walkthroughs after months of no on-field instruction. Stricklin was asked how head coach Dan Mullen, preparing to start his third season with a team many project to contend for the SEC title and perhaps the program's first berth in the College Football Playoff, reacted to the news of a difficult 10-game conference schedule.

"Dan's a competitor,'' Stricklin said. "He's never seemed to shy away from competition and playing 10 SEC games is going to be a challenge. If you're a competitor, that's probably not anything that worries you."

Neither should a temporary suspension of the Florida-Florida State rivalry. Or games inside less-than-filled stadiums. Or taking additional health precautions that might not be ideal but are necessary in unprecedented times.

On Thursday, if you are a fan of college football, all those concerns should have taken a backseat. Finally, the focus was on a 2020 SEC season, about playing games and keeping score on something other than which state has the most COVID-19 cases.

Sept. 26 can't get here fast enough, even if this year Saturdays in the fall require social distancing, face masks and hand sanitizer.

"What I do know is people want social engagement,'' Stricklin said. "They want to go watch sporting events. Athletes want to compete, and they want to come and be a part of our campus community. I don't think those things are going to change."