As Florida place kicker Chas Henry’s potential game-tying field goal sailed wide right, two teams occupied completely different ends of the emotional spectrum.
Mississippi State players spent the next 15-20 minutes celebrating with the 4,000 Bulldog fans that made the trip to Gainesville, while the Florida players and coaches returned to the drawing board in the middle of a disappointing season.
For Urban Meyer and the Gators, losing three consecutive games is a new low for a program that has won two national titles in the last four years.
“We’re not very good right now,” Meyer said repeatedly in his post-game press conference.
For Dan Mullen and the Bulldogs, the 10-7 victory gave the MSU fan base reason to be excited in mid-October, a rare occurrence for most of the last decade in Starkville.
The Bulldogs now sit at 5-2 overall (2-2 SEC), with the chance to become bowl eligible with a win over UAB on Saturday.
“If you really work as hard as you can, you can achieve some great things,” Mullen said. “That is what our team did tonight.”
The win also meant a return to the national Top 25, which the Bulldogs have been absent from since 2001. MSU is now ranked 24th in the USA Today Coaches Poll, the Associated Press Top 25 and the Bowl Championship Series rankings. The only poll the Bulldogs were left out of was the Harris Interactive Poll, which factors into the BCS standings.
The Gators fell out of the national polls after the loss, something that has not happened since the Urban Meyer era began in 2005.
The game itself was a low-scoring, control-the-clock contest that saw Mississippi State run the ball 24 consecutive offensive plays at one point. Quarterback Chris Relf only attempted nine passes the entire game.
Florida was able to gain 210 yards through the air, but due to two Gator turnovers and key defensive stands, the Gators were held to only seven points on the night.
The conservative play calling from Mullen led to the Bulldogs running the ball 49 times for 213 yards.
Junior Vick Ballard rushed for 98 yards, while Relf rushed for 82 yards and MSU’s only touchdown in the game.
The scoring was opened with a 31-yard field goal from MSU kicker Sean Brauchle on the Bulldogs’ first offensive series of the game. Later in the first quarter, Relf’s six-yard touchdown run capped an 11-play, 64-yard drive to give MSU a 10-0 lead.
The Gator defense held the Bulldogs scoreless the rest of the game, but they were unable to get enough offense going to erase the early deficit.
Florida got on the board with 4:15 left in third quarter after a five-yard touchdown run by Omarius Hines cut the Bulldog lead to 10-7.
The Gators’ final chance to tie or win the game came in the 4th quarter when they got the ball on their own 4-yard-line with two minutes remaining in the game. Quarterback John Brantley was able to get Florida in field goal range after working the ball down the field against the MSU defense.
However, the 42-yard attempt from Chas Henry went wide right, giving the Bulldogs their first victory in Gainesville since 1965.
For the Bulldog defense, senior Chris White led the way with 11 total tackles, 2.5 sacks and 4.5 tackles for loss. After the game, White said there was intense pressure on both teams to win Saturday night’s contest.
“I don’t know if they were pressured, but they wanted to win the game just as bad as we did, there’s no doubt about it,” White said. “We knew they were going to come out swinging, so we had to come out swinging back.”
Of course, winning in The Swamp is nothing new for Mullen, who was Florida’s offensive coordinator during the 2006 and 2008 national championship seasons. The ball-control offense played by Mississippi State kept the crowd of 90,517 a non-factor for most of the game.
“I have said all week that I have had success in this stadium,” Mullen said. “This is not an upset; our team expected to win this football game.”
Expecting to win games is part of the culture change Mullen has brought to the Mississippi State program, and after winning four games in a row, expectations have been raised a significant amount since the 29-7 debacle in Baton Rogue.
When the final seconds ticked off the clock in Gainesville, the Top 25 rankings and bowl game conversation started to swirl.
For the first time in a long time, a MSU football team will be facing high expectations midway through the season, which is right where Mullen has wanted his program to be.
“A lot of these kids that are playing, when we went to recruit them, they believed in something to come to school here,” Mullen said. “We had a vision of what we could make this program in the future.”
Saturday night’s victory in The Swamp was another step in making that vision a reality.