There’s no room for moral victories at the World’s Largest Outdoor Cocktail Party.

The 1980 Florida Gators don’t get credit for leading for the bulk of that game before Buck Belue found Lindsay Scott and Larry Munson delivered the most perfect radio call in the history of college football.

The 2002 Bulldogs might have been Mark Richt’s greatest team in a terrific tenure in Athens. But going 13-1 feels different when you let Rex Grossman drive the Gators 89 yards on a sprained knee for a fourth-quarter touchdown to steal the Cocktail Party and one of Richt’s best shots at a national championship.

There’s no participation ribbon in Cocktail Party festivities, either.

The runner-up in the annual Brubaker family and friends “Cocktail Party Chili Cookoff” doesn’t get an invite to stay in the winner’s condo on Amelia Island for the Fourth of July. If you finish second in the Georgia-Florida Golf Classic on Jekyll Island, yes, you win a prize, but you don’t get your name engraved for posterity on the trophy like the winners. And back when my Uncle Chuck’s Friday night clambake was a part of Cocktail Party life for hundreds of Florida and Georgia fans alike, you didn’t win anything for being the last to show up at the party or the first to leave, bleary-eyed and not so bushy tailed for the game the next morning.

No, the Cocktail Party celebrates winners, a “to the victor goes the spoils and probably, a trip to Atlanta” football game for three decades, and a meaningful college football rivalry for many decades prior to that.

Of course, this season, with Florida coming into Jacksonville 4-3 and a great Tennessee team in Knoxville, there’s no SEC East crown on the line like in so many seasons past. But even considering this year’s circumstances, Steve Spurrier’s pronouncement that, “If you want to go to Atlanta and win the SEC and maybe play to win more than that, you have to make sure you win in Jacksonville” is still southern football gospel.

The game matters a great deal to Georgia. The Bulldogs need to win to assure that even if they lose to Tennessee or in the SEC Championship Game, the Playoff committee has no other flaw to point to in evaluating Georgia’s résumé. There’s irony in that, of course, given there aren’t moral victories at the Cocktail Party. In the SEC, being second-best, either in a division or in Atlanta at the conference championship game, isn’t a death sentence. You can still win the national championship in those situations, provided you win games like the Cocktail Party.

Saturday marks Billy Napier’s first Cocktail party and his first go at his former colleague, Kirby Smart.

Now a national championship head coach, Smart has built Georgia into one of the nation’s top 4 programs (Alabama, Ohio State, Clemson) by recruiting, developing and dominating the SEC East. Georgia is 33-5 against the SEC East under Smart, and his losses to Vanderbilt and Tennessee came in Year 1. Smart, 4-2 in the Cocktail Party, understood Spurrier’s adage entirely, suggesting that “the game we have to consistently prepare and win for is the Florida game, because of its implications in our division, in recruiting, and obviously because of what it means to our fans.”

Napier needs to adopt this approach.

Coaches are correct when they say every chance to compete is a privilege. They are insincere, however, when they suggest things like, “This game is important because it’s our next game.” Rivalry games, to borrow a phrase, just mean more. Rivalry games are not, respectfully, just another game. The Cocktail Party, one of the greatest spectacles in our sport, is anything but just another game. Napier’s first taste of it matters, and given Napier’s SEC and southern coaching background, it’s unlikely he doesn’t appreciate that reality.

The other reality, and the one Napier has to deal with like it or not, is that Georgia, the nation’s No. 1 team, is likely to defeat his Gators on Saturday. The real question is how decisively. Georgia is better in almost every possible way. They have more talent, ranking 2nd in the 247 Team Talent Composite to Florida’s 5-year low rank of 13th. Georgia has the nation’s 2nd-ranked offense (Tennessee), 7th-ranked SP+ efficiency offense and even bests the Gators in Florida’s best statistical category: yards gained per play, ranking 4th nationally at 7.3 yards per play to Florida’s 7.2.

Defensively, the teams are hardly even comparable. Aside from having the nation’s top 2 ranked Power 5 linebackers, per PFF, in Georgia’s Jamon Dumas-Johnson and Florida’s Ventrell Miller, there’s nowhere on the football field where Georgia isn’t better defensively. Considering no program outside of Alabama has fielded more top-10 and top-20 nationally ranked defenses this century than Florida, the focus of Billy Napier’s rebuidling task is obvious. That knowledge won’t help Florida Saturday, as the Gators take a defense ranked 65th in SP+ defensive efficiency, 109th in total defense, and 105th in yards allowed per play up to Jacksonville to try to slow Georgia’s powerful attack. Spoiler alert? That’s not likely to go well for the Gators.

The greatest coaches in this rivalry, Spurrier, Vince Dooley, Urban Meyer and Smart, have won these games by consistently being prepared to play and exploiting the opponent’s weaknesses to death.

Take last season, when Smart showed first-time starter Anthony Richardson a host of exotic blitzes and press coverage early in the game, confusing the young man until he finally broke in a tight game late in the second quarter. Smart and his offensive coordinator, Todd Monken, have to be salivating the film room at the chance to have Stetson Bennett attack Florida’s flailing safeties, who, despite a talented free safety in Rashad Torrence II, grade out as the worst defensive position unit in the SEC, per PFF.

The challenge, then, for Napier, is a formidable one. And success won’t come in the form of a moral victory.

What needs to happen instead is the Gators need to exceed expectations Saturday. Maybe in the end, that looks a lot like Kirby Smart’s first Cocktail Party as a head coach, a 24-10 Florida win that could have gotten away from Georgia, but never did. Smart’s defense played well, limiting the Gators to just 290 yards and forcing the game’s lone turnover. They were just outplayed by Florida’s top-5 national defense, which held Georgia to 164 yards of offense, a total of 8 first downs, and 4-for-16 on third and fourth down conversions. After the game, Smart, who fell to 1-6 as a player/grad assistant/assistant/head coach in Georgia-Florida games, took a chess, not checkers, view at the postgame press conference.

“We didn’t play well on offense, but that was more about who we were playing,” Smart told the media after the game. “You all do a good job writing and covering this game. I always tell people that in the SEC, we have the best media too. But how often do we give a team that wins credit instead of focusing on all the things the losing team did wrong? Today, we played maybe the best defense in the country. When we talk about who we want to be at the University of Georgia, we want to be the best defense in the country. That’s the standard we want to play at as a program. Today, we saw what that looks like.”

Napier has had the Gators ready to play against top-10 teams. Florida beat No. 7 Utah to open the season and played a 38-33 thriller against then-No. 11, now-No. 3 Tennessee in Knoxville. Expect the Gators to be ready Saturday. What that looks like from a results standpoint is a different question.

A Florida team with a chance to win in the fourth quarter Saturday?

If that happens, but Georgia, as expected wins, would Florida fans consider that a moral victory?

They might. But the better view might be Smart’s analysis of the game in 2016.

A Florida loss will mostly be about who they are playing. Georgia is the type of program Florida hopes to be.

Napier will see the Georgia behemoth up close on Saturday. In the long  run, how Napier responds to seeing that type of elite program, and what he does to build Florida into one again, will matter most.