Florida Football beat the South Carolina Gamecocks, 38-6. Anthony Richardson cooked in his final home game (presumably, he will be going to the draft this year), having over 200 scrimmage yards. Richardson also had 2 passing touchdowns in his possible finale in the swamp.
Montrell Johnson Jr had a spectacular day running the ball. Johnson ran for 161 yards on 24 carries. That is an average of 6.7 yards per carry. Additionally, he had 1 rushing touchdown. Trevor Etienne had 100 yards on 8 carries. That is an average of 12 yards per carry. Additionally, he ran for 1 touchdown.
The game started with Gators’ fireworks, as they scored a touchdown on their first drive. South Carolina’s offense struggled and punted in three plays. Anthony Richardson cooked again, and the Gators found pay-dirt once again.
Although Florida Football slowed down in the second half, this was the same story for the entire game. South Carolina’s offense struggled a lot. Their only successful drive came near the end of the second half when a fake punt lead to a touchdown pass from Kai Kroeger to Dakereon Joyner.
Florida Football beats South Carolina as Gamecocks offense sputters
The Gamecocks’ offense only had less than 200 yards in the air and only 44 yards on the ground. This was not a good day for them. Rattler only had 145 yards in the air. Jahiem Bell led the way for the Gamecocks on the ground with a small 30 yards on 12 carries.
This continues a very bad stretch for the Gamecocks. Two weeks ago, they lost to Missouri due to the offense not having a lot of production. While the offense improved the week after against Vanderbilt, they weren’t really playing that high-quality opponent in Vandy.
The Gamecocks will struggle in their next two weeks against higher-quality opponents. They play Tennessee in a game that will be a blowout for the Vols. They end the season against Clemson. That game will be a blowout, but it will probably look better than the Vols game because of Clemson’s QB situation and Clemson having less talent than Tennessee
This season was not a success for the Gamecocks. Going into this season, I thought they would be a sneaky good team this year that might win 8 or even 9 games (if things went their way). That hasn’t happened. While Carolina will still be going to a bowl game, they will need that win to make their season a good one and match their win total from last year.
For Florida Football, this win gets them bowl-eligible. I expect them to beat Vandy next week, even though the Commodores do have a shot against them. I think they will lose their final game against Florida State this year. While Florida State is certainly not heavy favorites, they will be most likely riding a five-game winning streak.
The Seminoles have taken care of everything besides the top of the ACC (Clemson, NC State, and Wake Forest; Wake Forest was at the top of the ACC going into the game). While the Wake loss looked better at the time, all of those losses are against good teams. The ACC has weaker play and Florida State looked horrible in their week 1 win over LSU, but I think Florida State has proven to be a good team this year.
I would expect Jordan Travis and the rest of the Seminoles to beat Florida, who has been an average team at best this year. At times, it looked like Florida might be back. After this season, you can safely say they still have some work to do before being good, not even great.
Overall, this was a semi-weird season for the Gators. In week 1, the Utah win happened. But then the Gators lost to Kentucky, barely beat the worst program in college football the week after (USF), and got blown out by the Vols, and that was just September.
After destroying Eastern Washington in a tune-up game, they barely beat Missouri and fell to their feet in the fourth against LSU. It looked like they were going to get blown out by Georgia, made a fake comeback and they got blown out for real by the Bulldogs. In their last two games, they got to bowl eligibility by beating two offensively challenged teams (South Carolina and Texas A&M).
They will end up with six wins and a bowl game but this was a weird season that had some real highs (Anthony Richardson was a Heisman candidate at one point) and real lows (see LSU loss). In a weird kind of way, this season was quite similar to Anthony Richardson’s individual season. Just really inconsistent.