When I was in high school I had the same routine every Saturday in the fall. I’d wake up and watch film from my school’s football game the night before and get a light workout in. Then I’d go home, eat something (usually chocolate milk and dunford chocolate donuts), take a shower and plop down for a nap. I was pretty wiped out usually, so those Saturday naps could go on for a while. But I always made sure I woke up in time for the SEC football game on CBS.
Growing up in Salt Lake City I’d got to as many University of Utah or BYU football games as I could. As loud as those stadiums can get, and they both get pretty loud, I could only imagine how much crazier the atmospheres were in the South. When I was in high school, no stadium seemed more electric than the Swamp.
I didn’t get to visit the South in person until my senior year of college. My family did a mini road trip through Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. Despite their protests, I made my family take a detour through Gainesville so I could see Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. Luckily it was open and I just got to walk in somehow. for a kid from Utah I couldn’t believe how much bigger it was than any stadium I’d been in before.
That was in March so I was the only person there, and I didn’t mind having the whole place to myself. When the University of Utah scheduled a series against Florida a couple years later though, I knew I was going to have to make it back to Gainesville.
Cut to September 3rd, 2022 and I’m back in Gainesville for the first time since 2017. Let me tell ya, Gainesville in September is a completely different town than it is in March. Even in the outskirts you could feel the gameday energy. We walked through neighborhoods where the only part of the houses not obscured by the Spanish Moss was the blue and orange Florida flags basically everyone had.
Walking to the stadium felt like I was walking through a greenhouse, but one that had frat parties and vulgar Kappa’s cursing at you from fourth floor balconies. We survived both the humidity and the Florida students and made it to the massive tailgate party at the O-Dome parking lot where the Gator Basketball teams’ play.
When I tell you I’ve never seen so much blue and orange in my life, it was like I was in one of those sensory overload experiments. Florida has some vibrant shades of blue and orange as well; like an aggressive, up in your face type of orange. It works though because Gainesville is so overwhelmingly green it really makes the blue and orange pop at the tailgates.
We had just enough time for a little cornhole before we made our way into Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. I’ve written before about how there’s nothing cooler than walking from a stadium concourse through the gate when the field slowly comes into view, and then bam! You’re engulfed by the grass and music and atmosphere. The beautiful thing about football, and any sport, is those two or three seconds once you leave the concourse are unique to any stadium you go to. At Florida, it’s a pretty unreal two to three seconds.
We came into the stadium from the East side so we were looking at the Florida sideline when we walked through the concourse. As I walked through the tunnel I saw nothing but a wall of seats, I must have forgotten how big it really was in person since my last visit. Eventually the seats turned into the giant pressbox welcoming us to Steve Spurrier Florida Field. When I was growing up and getting into football, Steve Spurrier was just the coach at South Carolina who would make fun of Georgia. I didn’t realize until much later that Spurrier coached at Florida before going to South Carolina, or that he played at Florida and was actually the school’s first Heisman winner; even kicking a field goal in their game against Auburn.
Thirty years after Spurrier won Florida their first Heisman Trophy he coached the Gator’s second Heisman winner, Danny Wuerffel, to Florida’s first national championship. Spurrier is the only person ever to win the Heisman as a player and a national championship as a coach.
Growing up I felt like ESPN talked about the coach from South Carolina way more than they should, now I don’t feel like we talk about him enough! Florida made sure everyone in attendance knew that Steve Spurrier was a massive part of the history of Florida football.
You couldn’t take ten steps without seeing a statue or banner honoring either Spurrier, Wuerffel, or Florida’s favorite son Tim Tebow.
Tebow is the person responsible for Florida’s third and final Heisman trophy, and a big reason for their other two other national titles in 2006 and 2008, mostly 2008 is we’re being honest.
Now I haven’t been to every school with multiple Heisman winners, but I’ve been to a lot of them. No school honors their Heisman trophy winners quite like the University of Florida. As a first time visitor and long time admirer of Florida football, and the Tebow era specifically, it was really cool to see everything honoring Tebow and also learn more about Spurrier and Wuerffel’s place in Gator football history.
Everything about Ben Hill Griffin stadium seemed to reinforce the idea that the best players in the country played, and currently play, for Florida. Watching Florida warm up certainly didn’t do anything to change my mind about that. Every player was huge! Especially the secondary. I don’t know how tall they actually are but they all seemed to be 6’2” and like they knew exactly where the weight room was at. That was my first in-person “oh this is the SEC” moment.
When the teams headed into the locker room after warmups I took a lap around the stadium before the players came back out. One of the few things that wasn’t dedicated to a Heisman winner or a national championship was a sign honoring Leonard George and Willie Jackson.
George was the first African-American to sign a football scholarship with the University of Florida on December 17th, 1968; Jackson signed his scholarship letter three days later. On September 26th, 1970 George became the first black player to score a touchdown for the Gators, scoring on a one yard touchdown run in Tuscaloosa. Jackson also served as a civil rights activist while on campus, and George came back to UF after graduation and earned his law degree.
I got back to my seats just in time for the players to run out of the tunnels. I’d wanted to see a game at the Swamp ever since I got into football, and I’d had this game circled on my calendar for years. Finally being there in person was surreal, and it somehow exceeded my hyped up expectations. It was far and away the loudest stadium I’ve ever been in. The Gators had a goal line stand where they stuffed Utah from like the three yard line on four straight plays and the place erupted, just a deafening wave of noise that felt like it was crashing on top of me.
The Gators fanbase is an absolutely wild one. They never sat down, never stopped cheering, never seemed to take their eyes off the game. The only permitted distraction was between the 3rd and 4th quarters when “Won’t Back Down” by Tom Petty came on the stadium speakers. The vibe instantly changed from an SEC football game to an outdoor music festival.
The game atmosphere was the closest thing I’ve seen in the States to a European soccer game. It felt like the entire city of Gainesville was packed into the stadium, and the capacity at Ben Hill Griffin is legitimately about 67% of the population of Gainesville so it wasn’t even that far off.
The two-thirds of the folks in Gainesville that made it to the game did not leave disappointed. Florida defender Amari Burney ended the game with a goalline interception, which had Utah fans heading for the exits pretty quick. When the Florida fans finally decided to take their celebration outside the stadium they sure let the Utah fans hear it.
Naturally you had your “S-E-C” chants, a couple one-off unoriginal Mormon jokes here and there. Really the only thing they were chanting in unison, and I mean all of them in unison, was their “It’s great to be a Florida Gator” chant.
That chant, and Won’t Back Down by Tom Petty, have been stuck in my head since opening weekend. I’m hoping to get that chant out of my head by Christmas at least; but I hope I never forget how wild it was getting to watch the Gators in the Swamp.
-By Jake Cowden