A Clearly Biased Review of Gator Gameday

I went to my first Gator game this past Saturday. It was a vast, orange and blue mess along University Avenue. It was slightly cool with a crisp breeze. I was not used to this type of weather for a November game at night. You see, every autumn between 2002 and 2008, I was a regular attendee of Lane Stadium in Blacksburg, VA. A night game in November would have been oppressively cold. This was different. I couldn’t help but compare my experience in and around Ben Hill Griffin Stadium to the games at Virginia Tech. Naturally, I have a bias toward my alma mater, so this comparison is clearly not objective. I’ll tell you before I even start that I have a heavy lean towards VT. Either way, here’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

The scene before the game was great. If you had blue and orange on, you were welcome everywhere. The neighborhood behind University Avenue was saturated with people throwing footballs around, playing drinking games. If I had to compare, and dare I say it, the tailgate scene in Gainesville was better in some respects than VT’s. Everyone was friendly and welcoming. However, there was much less talk about football in the tailgates than in Blacksburg. The game, at least from what I heard, was less important than other topics. Granted, UF was playing Vanderbilt. While Vandy is a fine school, football isn’t quite its thing.

As I entered the stadium, I couldn’t help but notice the sheer amount of people who were in the stands. This was the Vanderbilt game, but every seat was full. Nearly 100,000 people stacked high on top of each other; if I was on Vandy’s football team, I couldn’t help but be intimidated by the size of the stadium and the masses of people rooting against you.

I bought a turkey leg. At Lane Stadium, the turkey legs are the best stadium food I’ve ever had. They are massive. They are delicious. Florida’s turkey leg was no match for Virginia Tech’s, but I knew that the battle for Best Turkey would be a battle that Florida could not possibly win. Maybe this isn’t the fairest point of comparison. Perhaps I should compare VT turkey legs with UF gator bites. Unfortunately, I did not find a concession stand with fried gator, so sorry UF: you lose the food wars.

I was surprised at how quiet 100,000 people were. I wasn’t sitting in the student section, which seemed somewhat rowdy, but I was certain there would be much more noise in the stadium overall. Vandy’s linemen never jumped pre-emptively and the team never had to call timeout because the crowd noise made hearing the snap count impossible. Some people yelled, but not until Vandy was almost finished with their snap count. Hokie fans would be yelling throughout the opponent’s huddle, all the way through to the snap. This is true for both games against Duke-level competition and Miami-type juggernauts.

Florida’s defense was dominant. Vandy always had to check down to running backs on passing plays, and running plays, if they went anywhere, went in the wrong direction. If UF wins a third national title under Urban Meyer, it will be on the strength of its defense.

An odd thing happened in the fourth quarter. Early in the fourth, people started leaving. Not an odd occurrence at most stadiums around the country, but as the quarter went on, I was surprised that so many people left. There were empty seats everywhere by the midpoint of the fourth quarter. I have never seen so many people get up and leave this early. Was the football game less important than the post-game tailgating? I was shocked.

The tailgating was great. The football game itself was entertaining. The stadium crowd, however, was disappointing overall. There were certainly pockets of die-hard Gators who were loud and stayed in the stadium for the entire game, but most seemed to treat the football game as an interruption to their tailgating. When comparing UF and VT, Florida is clearly the more dominant football team. Over the last five years, they have been the dominant team in all of college football. When it comes to the gameday atmosphere, however, my vote goes to the Hokies.

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