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With the most important game of the Gators’ season upcoming on Saturday and approximately half the schedule behind them, it’s natural to look ahead to the postseason. Trying to ascertain exactly which bowl game will feature the boys from The Swamp is part of the fun of watching the story of Florida football unfold each year.
This year is no different; the college football experts at ESPN — Kyle Bonagura Mark Schlabach — recently updated their picks for each of the 2020 bowl games. It’s worth taking a look at where Florida is projected to land.
Bonagura placed the Gators in the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl, facing the Cincinnati Bearcats as their hypothetical opponent. The teams have only played against one another twice, but the Bearcats are impossible to write off at this point. The Desmond Ridder-led squad has decisively conquered their schedule thus far and would present a worthy opponent, should they become the Gators’ bowl game rival.
Ridder is a remarkably elusive pocket presence and can make defenders look silly on designed runs. Those skills make him a legit pro prospect and position him as a unique challenge for the sometimes defensively-troubled Gators, who may find him difficult to contain.
Florida has a similarly scant record against Notre Dame, their Capital One Orange Bowl opponent in the scenario laid out by Schlabach. Notre Dame came away victorious in the only previous Fighting Irish/Gators matchup, besting Florida 39-28 in 1992.
Notre Dame is pegged as a team who could be held back by their quarterback when facing the best competition in the nation. Ian Book, who quarterbacks for the Irish, simply doesn’t put the pieces together often enough to hoist the team on his back when needed. Kyle Crabbs of The Draft Network blames that on a lack of feel for the game, hanging onto plays for too long and failing to use his natural quickness to get away from defenders especially quickly.
Both of these events are familiar territory for the Florida faithful. Orange and blue dominated the 2018 iteration of the Peach Bowl, hanging 41 points on Jim Harbaugh’s Michigan Wolverines while only allowing 15 points to score. Their last appearance at the Orange Bowl came even more recently; the Gators landed there last season and beat Virginia by a considerably narrower 8-point margin.
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