by Cindy Spence (BSJ '82, MAMC '17)

The Gators roll into Jacksonville the weekend of Oct. 29 ready to play a landmark 100th game against the Georgia Bulldogs.

For the Bulldogs, no biggie. They celebrated the 100th game last year (with a win).

In the words of sportscaster Verne Lundquist, this rivalry is so intense, these two teams can’t even agree on how many times they’ve played.

Whether it’s 100 or 101, the Florida-Georgia game in Jacksonville is Florida’s longest rivalry by far. The dispute boils down to a game in 1904, says UF historian Carl Van Ness. Georgia claims the game in its stats, Florida doesn’t (ahem, Georgia won).

“In 1904, we weren’t in Gainesville, we were in Lake City,” Van Ness says. “We weren’t even the University of Florida at that point.”

For UF, recordkeeping begins in 1906. The Buckman Act of 1905 established the modern University of Florida, and UF moved from the campus of its precursor institution in Lake City to the campus in Gainesville and fielded its first official football team in 1906.

“Therein lies the problem,” Van Ness says.

Van Ness points out that UF also doesn’t count the presidents of its predecessor institution or games played against Auburn or other schools prior to 1906. He says the coach of that now-defunct school was an ambitious fellow and started scheduling games with teams the Gators weren’t ready to play.

“We don’t claim those games,” says Van Ness, noting, “we lost them all.”

The 1904 game was in Macon, Georgia. Since 1933, the game has been held in Jacksonville, except for two years in the 1990s when it was played home and home on each campus, when the aging Gator Bowl in Jacksonville was being renovated for the expansion NFL Jaguars.

Today, the game is one of only a handful of neutral site rivalries remaining in college football, something Georgia coach Kirby Smart told reporters at SEC Media Days in July he would like to change. The schools can’t bring recruits to road games, so schools miss out on using the Florida-Georgia drama as a recruiting tool.

Although the rowdy rivalry game became known as the “world’s largest outdoor cocktail party” in the 1950s when a Jacksonville sportswriter coined the phrase, that term has fallen out of favor in the last two decades.

Both teams have had streaks, but none like the Gator Glory of the Steve Spurrier era, when the Gators were 11-1. In his Heisman-winning year in 1966, Spurrier’s Gators lost to the Bulldogs, and when he arrived as the Gators’ coach with that chip on his shoulder, the record stood at 43-22-2.

He noted that one Florida tradition — “getting your tails whipped by Georgia every year” — needed to change, and he did just that. Since Spurrier’s first year in 1990, Florida is 22-10-0.

There’s still some work to do for the Gators. Before kickoff, the series stood at 53-44-2. Something to work on for the next 100 years. (Or 99, as Georgia would say.)