Florida fans are making hotel reservations in Atlanta. Media members – including yours truly – are talking about No. 10 UF’s spot in the SEC Championship Game as a foregone conclusion. But before the Gators can truly claim the division crown, they need to win one more SEC game, with the first opportunity Saturday against Vanderbilt (3-5, 1-3 SEC).

“The way they handle this week is really going to be interesting to me, because obviously with homecoming and a ton of distractions from the standpoint of people coming back, and no school on Friday,” Florida coach Jim McElwain said at his Monday press conference. “To me this is an opportunity to see how far we’ve come as an organization.”

Homecoming hasn’t gone well for UF in the past two years, and the first-year coach made note of it on Monday.

“We’ve had a bunch of guys that have been on this football team two years ago that played these same guys, I think, in a homecoming that probably did not come out real favorable for the Gators,” McElwain said. “There’s a lot of things there. There’s a lot of reasons that we might not play good this week.”

Not real favorable for the Gators is an understatement.

Two years ago, Vanderbilt dealt Florida a devastating homecoming upset. The Commodores snapped a 22-game losing streak to the Gators with a 34-17 win in The Swamp.

“Everyone knows that we had a 4-8 season that year,” junior DT Joey Ivie said. “It was real disappointing for a lot of us. For a lot of us who played in that game, who were on that team, we want to come out here with some redemption and a chance to get that pride back.”

One current Gator has a completely different take on that day.

“It was like our Super Bowl,” QB Josh Grady said.

The Florida quarterback said “our” because in 2013 he was a Commodore. Grady, who graduated from Vanderbilt in 2014 and transferred to Florida, grew up a Gators fan in the Tampa area. In a surprising turn of events, he could be one snap away from facing his old team. With freshman QB Will Grier suspended until Oct. 2016, Grady has become the de facto backup for QB Treon Harris.

Grier’s last game was against Missouri, another recent homecoming spoiler. Last season, the Tigers came into The Swamp and delivered a 42-13 beatdown while barely needing a functioning offense. When the Gators faced MU earlier this year, they had payback on their minds.

“That was probably the lowest point of the year,” DE Alex McCalister said in Week 6. “That was homecoming. We came in and just let that team take everything from us. It was a big game on my calendar, going to Missouri and really taking it back from them.”

Florida went up to Columbia and claimed a 21-3 victory over the two-time defending SEC East champion, and returned the favor by spoiling MU’s homecoming.

The Gators’ win over Missouri symbolically suggested that they were ready to reclaim their place as the top team in the SEC East. If McCalister and Ivie can get their teammates to channel their frustrations over the last two homecomings into Saturday’s performance against Vanderbilt, Florida should be able to make it official.