In the larger run of any sports season, some losses are more meaningful and devastating than others. Yet, you don’t have to think too hard to realize that in football, each individual loss is far more significant and weighty than in other team sports.
Great baseball teams will still lose 60 games a season.
Great basketball teams will lose 20 times a season, and probably five to six more times in the playoffs (if not more).
It’s only in football where “the one loss” stands out to a greater degree, and college football clearly trumps the NFL in this respect. Unless the 2007 season or some other outlier season is being discussed, you can’t afford more than one loss if you want to be in the playoff (formerly Bowl Championship Series) discussion. In order to win a division in the SEC or in other leagues with eight-game schedules, you can’t expect to win your division with three or more losses. You might get lucky once in a while, but you can’t count on it. (Losing three times in a nine-game league schedule can still lead to a division title — ask 6-3 UCLA in the 2012 Pac-12 South race.)
It’s clear that single losses are never more magnified in team sports than they are in college football. Therefore, after a prolonged SEC slugfest on an electric Saturday night, it’s easy to think that the Florida Gators might be gutted after competing so well yet coming up short against the LSU Tigers. Conversely, you might think that LSU is soaring on the wings of ecstasy and is going to use this result as a springboard in 2015.
Both inclinations are reasonable, and might contain fragments of truth. However, if viewed in a much larger context, Gators-Tigers feels like a contest in which the winner has reason to be concerned, and the loser should actually feel even better about its long-term prospects.
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Andre Agassi (not the first or the last person to utter the statement) said, “Image is everything.”
So is context.
Had Florida produced this result — a 35-28 loss in Baton Rouge — without Will Grier, it might have been a much more bitter pill to swallow. As it was, getting a competent (interception-free) performance from Treon Harris — who struggled late in the game but showed that he belonged on the field — should relieve a lot of fears about the next month and a half.
The Gators’ offense was not seamless or fluid, but it came up with its fair share of big plays. Florida was able to erase a 28-14 deficit in one of the SEC’s and college football’s toughest night venues for visiting teams. The Gators’ receivers displayed considerable playmaking chops. Florida outmaneuvered LSU in a number of short-yardage situations with runs to the left side of the line, outside the tackle box. This offense was fundamentally functional.
A looming game against Georgia in the Cocktail Party seems more manageable now than ever before, and if Florida does indeed win that game, it will almost surely win the SEC East and go to Atlanta, making the 2015 season an absolute triumph. Playing the SEC West champion in the Georgia Dome would give the Gators house money. Jim McElwain would be able to enter a high-stakes game with no downside in the event of a defeat. An upset victory would represent one of the more remarkable stories in recent SEC football history.
Losing is never fun, but if a single loss in a short college football season could ever be said to be tolerable, this is just such an example for Florida.
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For LSU, a win is certainly valuable. The Tigers remain one game ahead of Ole Miss and Alabama in the SEC West. Should either of those teams stumble, this win enables LSU to get to Atlanta without having to win each of those road games. Only a split in Tuscaloosa and Oxford would suffice, granted that the win comes against the opponent involved in a season-ending tiebreaker. Naturally, this result relieves pressure for the weeks ahead. LSU is still playing with some margin for error.
Yet, the bad news is that while a win was tucked away, the Tigers remain very much a mystery beyond their Heisman Trophy contender, Leonard Fournette.
The first half was extremely encouraging for the Bayou Bengals. Brandon Harris, a quarterback who has to deliver the goods on a consistent basis in order for this team to be special, guided his teammates to a 28-point second quarter and a large halftime lead. The passing game which is so desperately needed to supplement Fournette showed up in the first half. LSU looked imposing in that second quarter, which is worth noting because a season generally needs to be imposing in order for a team to reach the top tier of the sport.
Some weeks don’t have to feature authoritative performances, but over a 12-game schedule, scoring several lopsided wins — which enables starters to be rested late in games — enables a team to conserve energy and resources in the long run. LSU was halfway there, and so with Florida playing a backup quarterback, the Tigers had a chance to show the rest of the SEC that they could make a clean kill of the Gators.
Just the opposite.
The Tigers’ special-teams unit, dreadful for much of the night, surrendered a punt return for a touchdown. The pass rush was decent (and great at the end of the game), but the secondary sprung several leaks. The passing game, which had been crisp, deteriorated. Fournette was still Fournette, but almost everything else around him crumbled.
It’s true that flawed performances, in moments of victory, can be perfect teaching moments for coaches. Yet, this deep into a season, the continued presence of breakdowns and generally uneven play becomes more and more a source of concern. Performances such as this one in September can be viewed without too much alarmism. If LSU continues to display these bad habits, it’s not going to make it through November with only one loss in the SEC.
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LSU won and Florida lost, but on a number of levels, the Gators have more reason to be confident about their ability to achieve what they want to achieve this season. Results don’t often work that way, but as the people on both sides of the Florida-LSU series can tell you, little about this clash has ever been conventional…
… including the Les Miles fake field goals which keep burning the Gators, and did so again on Saturday night.