Florida defeated South Florida on Saturday night.

But put it this way: If the game was a bull fight, the matadors left the arena bloodied, bruised and battered by a group of raging Bulls.

In a bottom-line business, Florida escaping a scare with a 31-28 win over South Florida and finishing their 3-game homestand 2-1 is what matters most. Beyond grabbing win No. 2, there’s little else that’s positive to glean from what 88,496 saw live in The Swamp. The forest-for-the-trees takeway is that these Gators have a long way to go.

Florida was gashed and gored by the Bulls, with South Florida posting 286 yards rushing, a number that would have exceeded 300 but for a 15-yard loss on a botched snap on the Bulls’ final possession (more on that in a moment). It wasn’t as if South Florida arrived in Gainesville with a dominant run game — the Bulls averaged just 156 yards per game on the ground through 2 games, and managed only 107 in their only prior contest against a Division I foe (a 50-21 loss to BYU).

Florida did not recruit well consistently enough at linebacker under the prior regime, and it showed Saturday night with team captain Ventrell Miller out with a lower body injury. Miller’s backups — whether due to youth and inexperience, a lack of ideal size to play in the middle, a missed recruiting evaluation or some combination of all 3 — were woeful Saturday night. They failed to fit run gaps, took dreadful angles on ball carriers and didn’t wrap up consistently when they did get hands on South Florida’s runners. The Gators missed 12 tackles, and the number seems charitable.

The Gators’ defensive front, billed as a strength of the team when the season began, didn’t do the young linebacker corps any favors. Brenton Cox Jr. was terrific, as he has been all season. Desmond “Mount” Watson, the gargantuan human being whose snap count increased markedly, rewarded the coach’s confidence with a productive game. Beyond those 2 players, though, the Gators’ defensive linemen turned in performances ranging from poor (Gervon Dexter Sr.) to middling (Princely Umanmielen, Antwaun Powell-Ryland Jr. and Justus Boone). Florida’s pass rush is vastly improved from a season ago, but through 3 games, the Gators have been gutted on the ground twice, and Kentucky ran at will in the 2nd half (after Miller left the game). Credit South Florida for recognizing that on film, and attacking the middle for 60 minutes.

What it portends for Florida’s future is harrowing: If Miller is sidelined long term, the Gators have potentially season-wrecking problems. If Miller misses next week’s game at No. 15 Tennessee, it will get sideways in a hurry in Knoxville. The big man in the middle is that important to Florida, which is giving up 6.9 yards per rush on plays without Miller this season (against 4.0 with him on the field).

Billy Napier was eager to credit Jeff Scott, a mentor and colleague at Clemson, for getting South Florida prepared to play.

“We made it hard,” Napier said. “But I tell you what, a lot of that had to do with South Florida.”

While Scott and his staff certainly recognized Florida’s weak linebacker play without Miller, the Bulls also had a lot to do with how the Gators won the game.

South Florida hurt its defense, which contained and corralled the Gators most the night, by tossing a pick-6 in the 1st half that allowed Florida to take a double-digit lead into the break. The Bulls also blew a run gap and allowed Montrell Johnson Jr. to run untouched for a 62-yard touchdown in the 2nd quarter. Then, after driving 60 yards with ease to set up a game-tying field-goal attempt or a game-winning score, they botched 2 snaps. The first moved them out of comfortable field-goal range, the second came on the game-tying 48-yard attempt. The snap was low and forced the holder to scramble to place the ball. Spencer Shrader, a soccer player who developed with the famed São Paulo Brazilian soccer academy but elected to play American football instead, managed to kick a ball laying sideways on the ground into the air and more than 50 yards, but the line-drive kick that looked more like a set piece than a field-goal attempt squirmed wide right.

That play, along with the botched snap and Amari Burney’s diving interception at the goal line to seal an opening-night win over a top-10 Utah team, are the difference between Florida being 2-1 and being 1-2, and potentially 0-3. In other words, the Gators’ margin for error is small. That’s unlikely to change as September moves into October.

If you are an optimist, you’ll point to Florida’s ability to find a way to win 2 of these games and perhaps point to Napier’s impressive 18-3 record as a head coach in 1-score games. You might even rightly suggest that not every program survives these scares: just look at Texas A&M or Notre Dame. Really good teams have scares — just look at Arkansas Saturday against Missouri State.

But the reality is these Gators aren’t really good.

They have a long way to go, with a quarterback who now has more tackles than touchdown passes this season, a wide receiver corps that managed just 7 receptions on 14 targets Saturday night and a linebacker corps that looks at least a season away from a time when concerning becomes competent.

Florida fans will point to history a bunch this week, and the fact that the Gators have won 16 of 17 against the Volunteers, rendering a once-bitter rivalry into a strange game where one side burns with hatred for the other and the other side almost always wins.

History won’t play the game at Neyland Stadium next Saturday afternoon. These Gators will. Right now, that looks like a problem.

At least it is a problem the Gators face coming off a win, and not a mystifying, maddening loss.