GatorCountry brings you a new podcast as we continue to preview the Florida Gators vs. Colorado State on Saturday afternoon in the Swamp.

Andrew Spivey and Nick de la Torre break down how Colorado State has been on both offense and defense this year, plus who their star players are.

Andrew and Nick also break down what Dan Mullen had to say on Monday and what the Gators can do to fix last week’s mistakes.

TRANSCRIPT:

Andrew:​What’s up, Gator Country? Your man, Andrew Spivey, here with Nicholas de la Torre. Nicholas, on Wednesday, here we go. Colorado State week. Things got to get better for the Gators. Mullen said as much on Monday. I think he might have listened to the podcast when he said the team needs to get more physical.

Nick:​I think he just watched the game. I mean, that’s something, the physicality is something we’ve talked about probably since Muschamp, since Will Muschamp left. I think you can question it some when Muschamp was there, the physicality with the offensive line. How many games did we talk about with Muschamp that the offensive line was just bad? That’s exactly what it is now. I say this, Nick, and, again, I never question anyone’s effort or want to or anything like that, but at some point or another that does have to come into question. Playing physical, blocking your butt off, making tackles, it all becomes a mental standpoint of wanting to do it.

Mullen said something that I think you and I had talked about on Sunday, and that was when you miss tackles it becomes a mental breakdown. He said that they mentally have to get that going. He said it’s not like they don’t coach it. He said the guys have tobuy into that. My thing to that, Nick, is I now question how much the guys have actually bought into what Mullen is talkingabout. All summer and fall we’ve heard about how the team’s really bought in. Now it seems like he’s backtracking on that.

Nick:​To me, the difference between buying in, you can buy in and you can just not be there, but that’s kind of the question that I had for you on Monday, on the Monday podcast. What is the missed tackling? Is it effort? Is it technique? Is it buying in? It’s not like when we get towards the end of the year and some guys look like they’re making business decisions. Guys that are NFL eligible, Draft eligible, you’re like it looks like he made a business decision not to try to tackle somebody there, want to stay healthy. At this point, you’re not talking about that.

It’s just concerning. We saw it against Charleston Southern, and then it just kind of kept going, and it happened again. We asked about it all week, because we knew Kentucky had a strong running back in Benny Snell, and a quarterback in Wilson that could run, so we asked about it all week. Is tackling being emphasized? Are you going to be able to tackle? Really, it’s still an issue. If it’s an issue again this week, this is a Colorado State team that just beat Arkansas.

Andrew:​Yeah. Listen, this is a Colorado State team that has a couple guys that were former big-time signees. When you look at the quarterback, Carter Samuels, when you look back at Preston Williams, he’s a guy that signed out of high school with Tennessee. You have a bunch of guys on this team that have some big-time experience. You can’t go in and lay down.

​Before we get into talking about Colorado State, Nick, I just think we need to go back and focus a little bit more on what Mullen said. I guess, some of the things that stuck out to me that was worrisome for me, Nick, is when he said he didn’t know how his team was going to respond. Nick, maybe I’m looking at this wrong, but, to me personally, it kind of looked like Mullen kind of expected what happened on Saturday to happen, based off of what happened last week in practice.

Nick:​We never hear that, throughout the week. You never hear that we had a bad week at practice until after a loss.

Andrew:​Right.