Florida-Miami: An old rivalry renewed, with massive implications for 2 proud programs

GAINESVILLE — Florida and Miami will meet for the 57th time Saturday in Gainesville, the first meeting since 2019, when the Gators nipped the Hurricanes 24-20 in a Week 0 game in Orlando.

While the Gators and Hurricanes haven’t met annually since 1987, the absence of a yearly rivalry game hasn’t made the heart grow fonder.

If anything, the bitterness has hardened, buoyed by disputes over why the storied programs stopped playing yearly in the first place.

The factual evidence suggests Florida halted the annual rivalry in January 1988 when the SEC increased the number of conference games from 6 to 7. Needing to play 6 home games to fund the rest of their athletic department, and already committed to a neutral-site game against Georgia and mandated by the Florida legislature to play rival Florida State, the Gators dropped the Hurricanes out of necessity.

Ask a Miami fan, though, and they’ll regurgitate an apocryphal tale about how the Gators were tired of losing to the powerful Canes, winners of the first 3 of their program’s 5 national championships in the 1980s. No matter that the Gators were 3-3 against the Hurricanes in the 1980s, including walloping Miami 28-3 in the Canes’ 1983 national title winning campaign. The Gators, the south Floridians will insist, are sissies, afraid of mixing it up with the big, bad U.

The factual evidence suggests that Steve Spurrier, shortly after being hired in 1990, convinced athletic director Bill Arnsparger to renew the rivalry with the Hurricanes. Spurrier thought the game was an invaluable recruiting tool. An old Marine whose glare would scare a water moccasin and who didn’t like the notion that his athletic program was afraid of anything, Arnsparger obliged Spurrier, and a contract was made for the schools to play annually again beginning in 1992. Unfortunately, the SEC expansion intervened again, and thanks to a new 8-game league schedule and conference title game, the Gators terminated the contract.

Miami fans never forgave the slight, of course, and pointed out that had Florida wanted to, they could have moved the Georgia game to home-and-home to preserve the rivalry. One Miami alumni even took the cause to the Florida legislature, trying to secure a similar mandate for a game as the state required for Florida and Florida State. He failed, but Miami fans remembered.

While the Gators won in 2019, Miami has won 5 of the other 6 meetings since the rivalry stopped being played annually, including a 41-16 rout of Florida in Gainesville in 2002, 1 of the 5 worst home losses suffered by Florida this century.

Saturday’s contest will be the first held on campus since the Gators clobbered Miami 26-3 in their national title winning 2008 season, though that statistic is a bit harsh to the Hurricanes, who host exactly 0 games on their own campus, opting instead to play “home” games 22 miles north in Miami Gardens, sharing revenue with the Miami Dolphins in exchange for the right to use Hard Rock Stadium.

When the Gators visit the Hurricanes at Hard Rock in 2025, though, things may look different for both programs.

Will Billy Napier be at Florida?

Just 11-14 in his first 2 seasons in Gainesville, Napier now faces perhaps the most difficult schedule in the history of college football in 2024 as he tries to steady the ship in his third year at the helm. Not only do the Gators play in the rough and tumble SEC, they will also play Miami and Big 12 foe UCF in Gainesville and visit defending champion Florida State in November out of conference. Program power brokers and reasonable outsiders always understood that Napier’s rebuild in Gainesville would take time, but if Florida suffers a 4th consecutive losing season, will patience become unreasonable?

Given Florida’s brutal schedule (8 opponents are ranked in the preseason Top 25, including No. 19 Miami), the Gators cannot afford to squander opportunities like Saturday, when they have the opportunity to play as a home underdog in a rivalry game.

All offseason, Florida’s players — and credible program insiders and visitors alike — have pointed to the juice in Florida’s program despite the national doubt. ESPN Bet set the Gators’ over/under win total at 4.5.

“There’s no question this is a deeper football program than when (Napier) arrived,” program legend and college football analyst Kevin Carter told media this week. “They have some real dudes, and there’s more of them, from an eye test standpoint, than I’ve seen here in a while.”

Other visitors agreed. Take national champion coach Billy Donovan, who spoke to the team during fall camp.

“There’s a genuine love for each other in the room, which is critical to any winning team. A willing to sacrifice for the person next to you. It doesn’t guarantee success. And it has to continue through adversity and when things get hard. But you sense it is there and it is a requirement to any team that hopes to have success,” Donovan told SDS.

Still, there are questions.

Will a Florida defense that finished 124th in the country in yards allowed per play in 2023 be improved?

Will the offensive line, which hemorrhaged pressure in 2023 after being one of the best units in the SEC in 2022, reclaim its footing?

Can an offense that moved the ball consistently in 2023 become more explosive in 2024?

How many more offseasons of excitement and “buy in” can Napier and his staff preach before players abandon the mission because there’s no genuine proof of concept? If Florida loses Saturday, does an entire offseason of good will and loving one another melt away in a moment or, as a pregame Swamp video mantra suggests, do the Gators knock the grin off adversity’s face?

Florida isn’t the only program entering Saturday’s contest in the sold-out Swamp with questions.

In 2022, Miami boosters forced hometown son, Manny Diaz, out of town despite 3 bowl appearances, in favor of another native son, Mario Cristobal, signing him to a 10-year, $80 million dollar deal that includes, according to reports from the USA Today, at least $64 million in guaranteed money.

Thus far, Cristobal has failed to deliver. He is 12-13 in 2 seasons — 1 win better than Napier, to be sure, but a downgrade from Diaz’s first 2 seasons, when the Hurricanes went 14-10.

In fairness, Cristobal, like Napier at Florida, has massively raised The U’s talent level.

The Hurricanes have shown prowess on the recruiting trail not seen in 2 decades under Cristobal’s leadership, and sit just outside the top 10 in the 247 composite high school recruiting rankings for 2025 less than year removed from inking a top-5 class.

Unlike the Gators, the Hurricanes also came out of the gate strong in the NIL era, quickly becoming one of the premier brands offering big bucks in the new era of college athletics. Miami attorney John Ruiz, dubbed the “NIL King” by ESPN, spent millions on NIL deals in multiple sports, and while his largest company, Life Wallet, reported a net loss of $211 million in an SEC filing, multiple sources told SDS that Ruiz has “never missed a payday” for a Hurricanes athlete.

The result has been the best talent acquisition operation at Miami in decades, with The U not only recruiting the high school ranks at an elite level but also utilizing NIL to bank back to back top-10 transfer portal classes. This year, for instance, they added touted QB Cam Ward.

The formula hasn’t led to more wins for the Hurricanes, much to the dismay of their long starved fan base, who haven’t celebrated a conference title since winning the Big East for the last time in 2003. Miami has only reached the ACC Championship Game once.

Cristobal’s support among program high rollers remains high, but to outsiders, he’s shown little accountability for what’s gone wrong on the field in his first 2 seasons. Cristobal blamed his first year failures on Diaz, even though Diaz won 2 more games that year than Cristobal did after taking over. A season later, Cristobal waited 72 hours before taking the blame for his horrendous decision to not take a knee and seal a win over Georgia Tech. Anyone reading knows what happened next, and how the Yellow Jackets managed to get the better of the Hurricanes in the end.

Perhaps most telling, Cristobal has had a preseason All-ACC quarterback on his roster in each of his first 2 seasons at Miami, but last year’s team went just 2-3 in true road games, averaging .5 yards fewer in road games with a success rate of just 44.2% away from Hard Rock, one of the worst marks in the ACC (11th).

Cristobal has remained optimistic, of course, and he now points to a veteran football team that is battle-tested as a reason for optimism.

“When we started here, there weren’t a ton of rising juniors and seniors that were the caliber of player you need to compete for championships,” Cristobal told SDS at ACC Kickoff.

Perhaps, but if not now for the Hurricanes, when?

One team will win Saturday’s game and leave the game still desperate but with a pep in the step and an injection of needed momentum.

The other will lose and see just how quickly the goodwill of “one more chance” turns into the grumbling of “get out of here.”

Saturday’s Swamp showdown, then, sets up as a battle of championship programs desperate to win again.

While there are other games bigger from a national standpoint, there isn’t one more meaningful from a long term health of the program standpoint.

Miami fans will tell you that it’s high time their program won a game like this one.

Florida fans will tell you the same thing.

On that one issue, Gators and Hurricanes fans finally agree.

Neil Blackmon

Neil Blackmon covers Florida football and the SEC for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.