Podcast: Previewing the Florida Gators opener against FAU

GatorCountry brings you our Friday prediction podcast for the Florida Gators’ season opener against FAU at home on Saturday night.

Andrew Spivey and David Soderquist breakdown the keys for both teams as we look at the ways the Gators have the advantage in this game against the Owls.

Andrew and David also give you three players to watch for the Gators on Saturday, plus we predict several games around the country.

TRANSCRIPT:

David:               What’s up folks of Gator Country? This is your boy, David Soderquist, along with Andrew Spivey. Andrew, man, gearing up for FAU, the first game of the season. I’m pretty pumped and pretty excited. I’m excited to get down there, mainly to tailgate and to watch the game. I’ll be sitting down there where the Gators come out and taking a few videos. I’m pretty excited. I’ve never had seats there, so I’m ready to get down there.

Andrew:           Dan Mullen said something on Wednesday. I knew it, but it didn’t really resonate with me that you really haven’t had a full crowd since the Orange Bowl.

David:               Right.

Andrew:           That’s over 600 days. Is the crowd going to be rocking and sold out for FAU? Absolutely not, but I think it’s going to be a good crowd on Saturday night in the Swamp. Dan Mullen said, “You can’t simulate that.” There’s no crowd noise you can pump into the stadium. I’m excited. I’m excited for football in general. You have Tennessee-Bowling Green on Thursday, and then you obviously have Miami and Alabama before the Florida game on Saturday. While Florida’s playing, you have Georgia-Clemson, and then you have Notre Dame that’s going to put the beatdown on FSU on Sunday night. That’s a little primetime football. Welcome to TV, FSU.

David:               Welcome to mainstream TV. It hasn’t hit you in a while, has it?

Andrew:           Yeah. Will we see the teacher with his book is the question?

David:               I don’t know. He’ll probably slap them around a little bit with it.

Andrew:           There’s a lot of good stuff. People always say, do you really want a tune up game, or do you want a top 10, top 25 matchup to start the year? There’s arguments both ways. There really is. For me personally, I love to see those top 25 matchups to start the year. Even Florida-Miami Week 0 two years ago I thought was good. Florida-Michigan a few years back when it was in AT&T; stadium. I like it. I think it’s good for football. Nobody wants to watch Florida-FAU 50 times around the country.

David:               When you’re starting the football season, you obviously want to have good games lined up on the slate. That’s usually what they try to do every year is get two or three of those good games in there. What I love about the first game of the season, and I mentioned it last week, you get games on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. It’s Labor Day Weekend too, so you get an extra day off to watch all those games too.

Andrew:           We’re taping this on Wednesday, and my man, Bill Clark, up at UAB going to kick off here in a little bit. That’ll be a good one. It wouldn’t be game week though if you didn’t have the depth chart that comes out.

David:               The depth chart. The dreaded depth chart that everybody loves to hate, and some of the smarter people out there just already know what’s going to happen. It’s like when Steve Spurrier talked about how sometimes he would look at practice, and he’d be like, I’ll just pencil him in here. I’ll just pencil him in there. That’s kind of really what Dan Mullen does, right? He kind of just pencils somebody in there, and then tomorrow it could be somebody else. You might even see Demarkcus Bowman out there this week. You may not. He may release another depth chart before the game.

Andrew:           You’re saying he must put all the names in a hat and shake it up and draw it.