Tag: Pat Dooley

Looking back at the 10 top stories from Florida sports in 2021

Take a look at the 10 top stories from the past year, as told by Pat Dooley.

It was a nice winter’s day when the two men stepped into the sun at one of the entrances that lead downstairs at the Swamp. They were waiting for a press conference where Urban Meyer would be introduced as the Florida football coach.

But before that would happen, Meyer and Dan Mullen wanted to stand there and look at the stadium, visions of championships dancing in their heads. This was where they would make history happen.

And they did and the success flowed for those two coaches, even after they split up. Who could have predicted what would happen to both of them in 2021?

That moment has always stuck with me because I was sitting in the bleachers waiting to go to the third floor for the presser that day in late 2004. I thought about it a lot this year when I wasn’t binge-watching “The Mandalorian” or hammering out stories (“semi-retired”) or enjoying the two-TV set up in my office.

We thought 2020 in a full-blown pandemic was strange, but 2021 made a pretty good run at it.

The year has passed and most Gator fans are happy to see it go. It wasn’t what they hoped for, but there were some highlights.

Here are the top 10 stories of the year involving Gator sports for the year that was.

Breaking down the SEC ahead of the conference basketball schedule

Check out how the SEC looks this season heading into the conference schedule.

The pre-conference work has almost been completed. There is still the SEC/Big 12 Challenge to deal with and a few games this week, but for the most part the remainder of the SEC regular season is going to be SEC on SEC crime.

The league did well in some cases during the non-cons, terrible in others. As a result of a conference with no clear-cut favorite and a bottom that needs to have its diaper changed, the SEC starts conference play ranked fourth among the conferences by Sagarin and RPI and pretty much every other site.

Still, we look at Joe Lunardi’s Bracketology has eight teams in the Big Dance with only the Big 10 having more.

There will be a lot of cannibalizations in this conference because we know how difficult it is to play on the road. But it should be exciting, especially with the SEC Network and ESPN2 showing five SEC vs. SEC games on Wednesday (although in a strange bit of scheduling, there are four teams who do not play until next week).

Anyway, here is a look at the 14 teams and where they stand going into the conference season. There are three rankings including the Bracket Matrix that uses a combination of all the projections.

Sunday Brunch: How the Knights trampled the Gators in the Gasparilla Bowl

Pat Dooley serves up his Sunday brunch with a side of sadness.

These are a few of my least favorite things about this football team.

When the flags fly.

When the pass is dropped.

When Emory Jones is bad.

I think of a few of my least favorite things and everything seems … so … sad.

A deep dive into another terrible loss for the Gators with a special Friday Brunch:

Sunday Hash: Wrapping up week of Florida football with Pat Dooley

Get your fill with Pat Dooley’s healthy serving of Sunday Hash.

It is always a strange dynamic when a new coach comes in and parts of the old coaching staff still have one more game to coach. Are they coming, are they going? At what point does your punch code stop working and the cell phone goes dead?

If anything, Florida should be well-versed in how to hire a coaching transition seeing that the Gators have handled a lot of them this decade.

So, there certainly has been some noise around the program and Pat Dooley takes a deep dive into some of that noise in his Sunday Hash:

Good, Bad and Ugly: Florida football’s last decade of bowl games

Here’s Pat Dooley’s Good, Bad and Ugly from the past decade of the Gators’ bowl games.

Bowls have not always been good to Florida as anyone can see by a 24-22 record all-time. But there was a time when the Gators were really bad when it came to postseason play.

That was before the Gators won 10 of 14 bowl games to get that record over .500.

Heading into the Gasparilla Bowl, it’s interesting to look back on the last decade, because even though the Gators are on their fourth coach of the decade (seven if you count interims) and even though Florida fell short of a bowl game twice in the decade, UF went 5-3 in the post-Urban Meyer world in bowl games (sorry, we had to bring his name up).

There have been some great moments and some not-so-great. So, we present the good, the bad and the ugly of Florida’s last decade of bowl games.

5 reasons why the Gasparilla Bowl is a great opportunity for Florida football

Pat Dooley breaks down the five positive aspects of Florida’s in-state matchup with UCF in the Gasparilla Bowl.

Who would have thought when this season began, we would see Florida limping into a bowl game and made it to one in part because a Florida State kicker whiffed on an onside kick attempt?

Who knew before the Gators were showing up with Tampa as a possible destiny that there was such a thing as the Gasparilla Bowl?

Who had any idea that this season would look like this and that Gator fans would be raving about a coach they barely know yet?

But this is football in all its unpredictability and pathos. America’s sport is not only unscripted it is sometimes unthinkable. What just happened?

Well, Florida beat FSU to qualify for a bowl, and nobody knows who will show up and what the mindset will be for a team in transition.

Coaches will tell you how important it is and certainly the fact that the Gasparilla Bowl is a sellout already tells us that the fans on both sides are excited. And we know UCF will be amped to get a game with the mighty Gators before the 2-for-1 kicks in during the 2024 season.

How excited are the Gators? We’ll know on Dec. 23.

But is it really all that beneficial to be playing in a lower-tier bowl game in a stadium you have already played in this season?

Maybe.

Here are five reasons it is a big deal for Florida football:

Monday Brunch: Top 5 stories from Florida football this week

Pat Dooley does his run-down of the latest Gators football news in a delayed Monday Brunch feature.

Now that the regular season is over, Pat Dooley will be presenting his Florida football opinions on a regular basis every Sunday morning in a continuation of his Sunday Hash feature. However, things did not go exactly as planned this week. 

A day late and hopefully not $12 million short, the Sunday Hash comes to you as Monday Brunch this time around. Here’s a dive into the latest news on the Orange and Blue.

10 things you need to know about UF’s Gasparilla Bowl matchup with UCF

Take a look at 10 fun facts for the upcoming Gasparilla Bowl.

Here is the interesting thing about the Gasparilla Bowl – Central Florida got what it wanted, but I’m sure the Knights would have preferred one of their better teams received the chance to play the cross-state Gators in a bowl game.

Ironically, the Gators feel the same way.

UCF has had some great teams over the last decade. This isn’t one of them. They would like to show the college football world that they are ready for the Power 5 jump to the Big 12 in a couple of years. But not with this team.

And Florida would like to put little brother in his place before the Gators face them in the first of three regular-season games in 2024.

But not with this team and its skeleton staff.

Still, they must play. Just what Billy Napier needed: another rivalry game added to some of the future schedules.

Anyway, it’s still two weeks away, but here’s a quick primer on our neighbors in Theme Park City:

Take a spin on the Florida football head coach carousel over the past decade

Pat Dooley breaks down the past decade’s head coach carousel in Gainesville.

The SEC, as we all know, is different. Yes, it just means more, but it’s not always a good place to move if you want your children to spend a significant amount of time in the 14 (soon to be 16) cities and villages that make up this conference.

Maybe the new slogan could be: “The SEC. We Fire Coaches.”

This is the conference that has fired two coaches within two seasons of them feeling the sweet flutters of confetti for winning it all. Win your division? Big at the time, meaningless eventually.

It’s a cutthroat league where coaches preach loyalty but are only loyal to their paychecks. Come to the SEC and you will be set for life financially, but there is a decent chance you will have to suffer the indignation of being canned, which is always a great headline for your kids to read.

We have certainly seen it at Florida, a school on a three-coach losing streak. But it wasn’t all bad. Here’s a look at the Florida careers of the last three coaches, a little more than a decade of dysfunction since Urban Meyer left:

A long look at Florida football’s history with interim head coaches

Pat Dooley takes a look at the many faces of the interim head coach carousel dating back to the 1980s.

What would a modern-day Florida-FSU game be without interim coaches?

It would have been a smoother transition if Dan Mullen didn’t punt his love for loyalty and stuck with his seniors for one more game. But this is the Mullenade that is being served for the final regular-season game and possibly the last game of 2021 period.

Both teams need wins to be bowl eligible and FSU has seen this before. The difference is that the Seminoles have won five of their last seven games after an 0-4 start while Florida has lost four of its last five.

The Gators have the interim coach this time around – the third interim from the two schools in the last five meetings and a fourth was close with Jimbo Fisher leaving after the Florida game in 2017 – although I’m not sure what a game between a pair of 5-6 teams will do for anyone’s resume.

Rather than give you the often-recited history of the Florida-FSU series, we thought we’d remember the long list of Florida interim coaches through the years: