The Swamp speakers blared native son Tom Petty’s song “I Won’t Back Down” and the stadium rocked and Florida fans sang, hearts in raspy throats.

The home team had just fallen behind 19-14, their defense chewed up by the Utah ground game on a 9-play, 89-yard, 5-minute touchdown drive.

In the end though, with their backs against the wall and in the shadow of their own goalposts, the Gators wouldn’t back down. They would make one more play than their top-10 opponent and secure a tone-setting win for their new head coach.

That the play came from veteran Amari Burney, a 5th-year senior whose career had mostly been defined by the frustration of playing for defensive coaches unable to find him the right position to play, a fact that shouldn’t be lost on anyone who watched the Gators on Saturday night.

It wasn’t just Florida fans that waited a long time for this, a night that felt like a new beginning.

Billy Napier waited a long time for this moment, too. Napier turned down other Power 5 job offers, waiting for, as he put it in the spring, the “right job,” the one where “the commitment to winning and the chance to win presented a special opportunity.” Unflinchingly calm, determined and exact, Napier pays attention to every aspect of the Florida football operation, from the to-a-man unique “ignition reels” of video of great players intended to inspire and motivate each individual in the program to the analytics behind 4th-down decisions to assuring roster height and weight measurements are correct to the inch.

Saturday night, in a game decided by inches and multiple Florida goal-line stands, Napier’s demand that his players understand that every little detail matters was already on full display. The result was a huge win to add to the foundation Napier is building to win for a long time.

Florida wasn’t perfect Saturday night in The Swamp. Far from it.

But they did fight and execute.

Napier stuck to his plan and his commitment to analytics and down-and-distance play-calling. Late in the fourth quarter, on a 4th-and-3 just outside Utah’s 20 and trailing 26-22, Napier elected to run clock before calling a timeout and going for it. The decision seemed curious: If the Utes stopped the Gators, Florida would have wasted precious time it could have used after getting a stop and getting the football back. But Napier, whose defense was exhausted and whose offense had only one scoring drive of less than 8 plays all night, knew that the numbers suggested his team’s best path to victory was to run clock, go for it, and find a way to score on that possession. It worked, as the Gators converted the 4th down and scored 4 plays later, leaving just 1:25 left for Utah. As it turned out — that was just “enough” time for Utah to drive the field, but not enough time for Utah to run the football in the red zone.

This wasn’t “scared money don’t make money,” though the popular Napier phrase certainly applies. It was a thoughtful, analytic look at the rhythm and flow of a ball game and the importance of the clock. That detail? It mattered.

Napier’s run game, a combination of power traps, zone reads, and the occasional counter or jet sweep, gutted the Utes for 283 yards at 7.7 yards a clip. Anthony Richardson, the über-talented quarterback making his first career start at home, accounted for 106 of those rushing yards, including 3 touchdowns. And yes, there was at least “Anthony Richardson is a create a player on Madden” moment, which came on a 2-point conversion in the 4th quarter:

 

But it wasn’t just Richardson who won the game for Florida or made the run game so potent. Instead,  it was the ability of Florida’s stable of talented running backs, from starter Nay’Quan Wright to freshman Trevor Etienne, to gain tough yards that kept the offense on schedule most of the evening and keep Utah from selling out to contain Richardson.

Florida fumbled multiple times in the run game, with one turnover leading to quick Utah touchdown drive. But Napier stuck with all the backs, even going right back to Etienne after he fumbled in the second half. Napier believes in his players who practice like they intend to play, and those players rewarded him Saturday night.

On defense, Burney and his Florida teammates bent like an old coat hanger but never broke. Utah, one of the nation’s most explosive run games (3rd in explosive rushing plays in 2021) and returning its top rusher, moved the ball effectively on the ground against the Gators, especially in the second half. Despite gaining 228 yards rushing, though, the Utes failed to punch in multiple runs in the red zone, with Florida’s defensive front coming up with a goalline stand on two occasions in the game’s first three quarters.

No goal-line stand, though, was as big as the final one in the final quarter.

Cam Rising, the All-Pac-12 Utah quarterback who turned around the Utes’ season in 2021, played beautifully in a brutal environment Saturday night. With teammates around him puking and cramping and battling 80-degree temperatures and 89% humidity, Rising was cool as the other side of the pillow, throwing for 216 yards and rushing for 91 more and accounting for 2 touchdowns. It was no surprise, then, that after Florida took a 29-26 lead with just 85 ticks of the clock remaining, Rising calmly led Utah on a 69-yard drive through the Florida defense and in spite of The Swamp’s wall of sound to the edge of the Gators’ goal-line, where it looked as if the Utes, champions that they are, would escape with a hard-fought win.

It wasn’t to be. Burney, finally playing a defined position for a new defensive staff, read and jumped a curl route, intercepting a low Rising pass in the end zone to secure the football and the win.

Was Florida’s defense perfect? Not even close. But Utah fielded a top 20 SP+ efficiency offense in 2021, winning the Pac-12 with balance and a powerful run game. Florida won’t play an offense that good again until they meet Tennessee later this month, and after that, won’t see one as efficient until the Cocktail Party. Patrick Toney and his defensive staff, then, have time to address what went wrong (446 yards allowed, 25 first downs surrendered, 8-of-13 3rd-downs converted) — but they get to do it celebrating what went right: 3 red-zone trips where the Utes mustered just 3 points and a game-winning interception.

Foundations are often forged from the fire, or, to borrow from the Petty song, “at the gates of hell.”

Florida’s been there. They’ve endured the worst 10-year post-integration stretch in the program’s proud history since the 1970s. They have lost home games in the fourth quarter when opponents stuffed 2-point conversions and when one of their own seniors threw a shoe.

Utah didn’t beat itself Saturday night, so the shoe, as they say, wasn’t on the other foot.

But Napier’s foundation involves building a program that also won’t beat itself. A program that will fight and compete and punch back and never back down. That foundation? The concrete isn’t even dry, but it was good enough to beat a top-10, Power 5 champion on night one in The Swamp.

That’s special stuff — the  kind of Saturday in The Swamp this program and its fans haven’t seen enough of lately, but will again soon.