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"John Brandon, who wrote the excellent novels Arkansas (2008) and Citrus County (out this past July) teaches down at Ole Miss these days, and he'll be filing dispatches on all things SEC football throughout the season. Check out all of his posts here. This week, he's handed off the column to Bob Morris, a fiction writer living in Florida (who, like Brandon, is a UF alum). His most recent book is Baja Florida.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nAt 4-3, the Florida Gators still have a shot at a semi-respectable season if they win their five remaining games. But let's get real. These just aren't those kind of Gators. These are the kind of Gators who can't beat Mississippi State. At Florida Field. For homecoming.\n\nThese are the kind of Gators who must now wonder \"What if?\" as their former backup quarterback, Cam Newton, makes a run for the Heisman and a national championship with undefeated Auburn. (Let's see, the Gators booted Newton off the team because he stole a laptop computer from another student\u2014but they re-instated Chris Rainey, who stalked his ex-girlfriend and threatened to kill her? Sure, that's logical.)\n\nThese are the kind of Gators who are eminently capable of losing to Vanderbilt, Appalachian State and definitely South Carolina, which wouldn't bother Gator fans all that much because we still like Steve Spurrier more than we do the amazingly lifelike Urban Meyer. (Note to the Florida coaching staff: Can someone please hide Urban's meds for the rest of the season? Manic Meyer is much better at winning.)\n\nThese are the kind of Gators for whom redemption can no longer come in the form of a winning season or a bowl game. (Come on, who are we gonna play? UCF? In the AutoZone Liberty Bowl? Do we have to?)\n\nNo, for these Gators, salvation is theirs only if they can win the following two of their five remaining match-ups: the Nov. 27 game against Florida State and this weekend's face-off with Georgia. Yes, from the perspective of this longtime Gator fan\u2014our family has held the same four seats at Florida Field since 1939\u2014I will happily endure a loss to the likes of Appy State as long as we don't lose to the 'Noles and the Dawgs.\n\nMy expectations for this weekend are pretty meager. Still, I'll go out on a shaky limb here and say the Gators' chances of beating Georgia are (slightly) better than they were in 1946, when my father, fresh out of the infantry and the Battle of the Bulge, took my mother, an Oklahoma girl and his bride of two months, to Jacksonville for her first Florida-Georgia game. It was also the first time she ever saw the Atlantic Ocean, which turned out to be a lot more thrilling than the game. The Gators, who went into the contest 0-7, kept a blemish-free record and slinked on to a winless season after falling 33-14 to a Georgia team that wound up 11-0.\n\nMy father, no doubt fueled by the flask of bourbon that he carried to every game, left the game singing. Thing is, the song was to the tune of the chorus of \"The Battle Hymn of the Republic\" and included the lyrics: \"To hell, to hell, to hell with Georgia/'Cause we're from Flo-ri-da!\" My father always claimed he was sucker punched and that's why he wound up at the bottom of a pile of pugilistic Georgia fans. All I know is that when the cops arrived they found my mother atop the pile, a high-heeled shoe in each hand, pounding the daylights out of 'Dawg heads. My college-football-loving self could not have had two better role models.\n\nAfter that, my mom and dad didn't miss a Florida-Georgia classic for nearly 50 years, until they moved the game to Gainesville and Athens for back-to-back seasons while the \"neutral-site\" stadium in Jacksonville was being remodeled for the advent of the NFL Jaguars. During most of those years, Florida was rarely very good and often quite bad. Used to be, in the not-so-long-ago, a 7-4 season was a triumph. We're talking a school that didn't win its first SEC championship until 1991.\n\nSo what I'm saying is, when dismal seasons come along, as dismal seasons surely will, it helps to have this sense history. The Gators suck this year. But we don't suck nearly as badly as we did in 1946. And we are a whole lot less sucky than when we went 0-10-1 in 1979.\n\nCold comfort? Yeah, OK. But it's the only comfort we've got.\n\n\"To hell, to hell, to hell with Georgia...\"\n\nFlorida by 3. And we don't have a field goal kicker.\n\n\u2014BOB MORRIS"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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