Florida Football: The emerging arms race between Gators and Tennessee

The SEC East has been a one-team division for the last two years. Tennessee and Florida football are in an arms race to change that.

It’s no secret that, with the emergence of Kirby Smart in Athens, the SEC Eastern Division has been dominated by the Georgia Bulldogs. In fact, those Dawgs have a chance to do something this Fall that no team in the history of the division, nay conference, has been able to do heretofore: Go undefeated in the division three years in a row. The Florida Gators and Tennessee Vols, however, have begun an all out arms race to change that narrative, and flex a little.

One of the tired axioms in college football is that “recruiting is the lifeblood of a college football team”. And while it is tired and hackneyed, it still rings true like an ice cream truck jingle on a South Georgia summer day. It gets your attention. And you better believe it when you hear it, and act on it, because if you’re late, you don’t get any.

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Same with recruiting.

And frankly, Tennessee and Florida haven’t been getting any lately. Florida has won the SEC East three times in the last decade, but haven’t won an SEC Championship since 2008. Tennessee hasn’t won the division since 2007, and don’t have a conference title since that wondrous 1998 National Championship year.

Now, there are many reasons for the struggles of each: Poor AD hires, poor head coach hires, etc. The result of all of those things, though, has been less than average to average recruiting.

Recruiting site 247Sports produces a composite ranking every year based on “team talent”. This, of course, is driven by data they collected and published, and is still an opinion, although a quantifiable one. From that, we learned, as of 2019, Georgia has 14 five-star and 45 four-star players. Tennessee has four five-star and 33 four-star players, while Florida has zero five-star and 37 four-star players currently on their roster.

You don’t have to be Benjamin Banneker to figure that one out and see the disparity.

And this gets me to the point. While Kirby Smart and staff have put together the 3rd, 1st, and 2nd rated recruiting classes since 2017, Tennessee and Florida hired new coaches and started over. That isn’t to say neither has dudes. They do. But, starting over is starting over.

And here is the hook. Both the Florida Gator and Tennessee Vol fan-bases are hyper-expectant and proud. Neither will be comfortable for long being 2nd in the SEC East.

And one thing is most certain: Neither fanbase will ever accept being a perennial third in the division. For the foreseeable future, that Tennessee vs. Florida game is massive, as is the myriad of head-to-head recruiting battles between them. It is this humble writer’s opinion that, if one of those coaches loses to the other consistently, it won’t matter what they do in the other games. The fans will run them.

Both Jeremy Pruitt and Dan Mullen are fantastic coaches, and have each put together impressive staffs. One reason the SEC East is getting better, on the whole, is because the quality of coaching has improved recently.

Make no mistake about it, though. Georgia has a head start on these teams, and is literally getting better with each ridiculous recruiting class. The pressure to not finish third will determine who lasts and who goes in Knoxville and Gainesville. The head coach who can “close the talent gap” the quickest, and the most completely, will be there when the smoke clears.

Next. College Football 2019: 5 teams on upset alert in Week 1. dark

Tennessee and Florida are in an arms race and it starts in 2019. Third place is first loser and will be looking for a new gig in few short years.

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