Gators could lose to Vanderbilt

Look out Florida Gators, Vanderbilt is coming to town. It’s a classic trap game with the Gators coming off a win over their rival Georgia and no expectations for Vandy to compete. All the pressure is on Florida to win this game. Add in Brandon Spikes missing the entire game for his finger pointing incident and the Commodores have a shot to……wait…who am I kidding? The Gators are going to stomp Vandy.

This blog is brought to you by the number 18. Why? Because 18 is the number of times, in a row, that Florida has walked off the field with a win against Vanderbilt. What makes winning 19 any different?

Vanderbilt is dead last (0-5) in the SEC – not just the East, but the entire SEC. The Commodores have only managed to score 39 points offensively during SEC play. Their starting quarterback, Larry Smith, is out for the rest of the season with a hamstring injury. The redshirt sophomore will be replaced by Mackenzi Adams. The senior, Adams, was obviously not good enough to start over sophomore Smith, which makes you guess the offense will struggle even more.

So what do the Gators have to worry about? Well, controversy of course. The decision for Spikes to sit out the entire game should ease a lot of questions about character. I’m going to go ahead and predict the “Criticism for the Week” following the Vanderbilt game – Urban Meyer left Tim Tebow in the game too long. Every week it’s something different. Let’s just go ahead and have the discussion now, so next week everything is all cleared up and Florida can prepare to take on the Old Ball Coach and his Gamecocks.

Florida Vandy Preview and Prediction

The Florida Gators are set to host the Vanderbilt Commodores this Saturday November 7 at 7:15 PM on ESPN.  The Gators defense will take the field without defensive leader Brandon Spikes for the eye gouging incident in the Florida Georgia game and taking a full game suspension so the team can focus on the game rather than the media blowing the incident out of proportion.  He’s sorry, he knows it wasn’t right, now let’s get over it.

Vandy takes the field at a very impressive 2 – 7 while maintaining winless in the SEC at 0 – 5.  It’s kind of hard to win games when your starting QB has only thrown 4 TD’s all year while throwing 7 INT’s.  Larry Smith is under 50% for completion percentage this year and rocks a solid 88 QB rating.  I think it’s safe to say that Brandon Spikes sitting this one out will not affect us in the least bit.

Tim Tebow picked up a little bit last week against Georgia in the throwing game and I think you’ll see a quick gun slinging offense this week against a Vandy defense that allowed a Georgia Tech team to put up 56 against them.  Their low scoring games were against teams like Mississippi State and Army.  So don’t worry Gator Nation, we should see a good show of fireworks this Saturday as well as see Brantley get some action in the 2nd half.

Brantley has an amazing 73.3 completion percentage with 4 touchdowns on the year putting his QB rating at a whopping 182.3.  Obviously with more time in there and more throws it would be diluted a little bit and closer to Tim’s rating (153.7) and stats.

I don’t think you need a crystal ball to see that I’m picking the Gators to win like old in this game.  Gators 52 – Vandy – 16