GAINESVILLE — Another week, another brutal loss for the Florida Gators.

This one, a 19-17 defeat on Saturday to Texas A&M in The Swamp, has ratcheted up discontent toward coach Jim McElwain and his staff, particularly offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier. Florida is 3-3 and appears to be regressing in the staff’s third year at the helm. The “noise in the system,” as Ron Zook used to call it, was evident among fans in the build-up to Saturday night’s game and echoed in the media reaction.

Gators fans do not seem comforted that the college football trend is for Year 3 under a new regime to be a transitional year. Growing pains, with prior staff’s players overlapping with the current staff’s players, often generate a small regression before the program breaks through. Many Florida fans seem sour in their long-term outlook in the midst of a lost season.

Most programs wouldn’t need to remind their fans that they played for two SEC Championships in the new staff’s opening two years. At Florida, some credit that accomplishment to predecessor Will Muschamp, who went 4-8 and 6-5 with many of the same players.

As nice as the two East Division titles in McElwain’s first two seasons were, the argument goes, Florida doesn’t look like an ascendant program under this staff. The offense remains mired in the mud, the Gators just went 1-2 on a homestand and unbeaten Georgia is smelling blood in the water in Year 2 under Kirby Smart. The Gators appear stuck in neutral, or worse, falling even farther behind Georgia, Auburn and LSU rather than joining those teams in presenting a challenge, however slight, to Nick Saban’s imperious Alabama.

Florida fans are frustrated, and in their own way, like the Gators coaching staff, searching for answers and suggesting changes and solutions.

But how much of this is just life as an angst-ridden Gator fan?

Credit: Kim Klement-USA TODAY Sports

Bear Bryant once called Florida a “slumbering, wounded giant,” one that he feared would take the conference by storm if it ever found someone to lead it.

But other than small successes in the 1960s, the program spent basically 70 years in the wilderness until the schizophrenic ’80s, when half a decade of glory on the frayed edges of the rules led to a No. 1 national ranking near the end of the 1985 season, but also led to half a decade of scholarship reductions and shame under an NCAA hammer.

Florida's first official SEC championship came in 1991 under Steve Spurrier. The Gators have won eight conference crowns from 1991-2016, the most in that span (one more than Alabama).

Just how bad were things when Steve Spurrier arrived back at his alma mater as heads coach in 1990?

Three Gators teams with Emmitt Smith, one of the most dynamic running backs to ever grace the SEC, collectively won only 20 games. Gainesville was a place where potential and “next year” rolled effortlessly off the tongue, but greatness was constantly squandered.

Then came the halcyon days of the 1990s and early 2000s, when the HBC’s offenses ran roughshod through college football and revolutionized the SEC. The Gators won seven SEC titles under Spurrier, counting 1990 when UF had the SEC’s best record but was ineligible for the conference crown. They won one national title, of course, and might have won more were it not for the astonishing brilliance of rival Florida State under Bobby Bowden.

Those were the Florida teams I grew up with. Their memory — along with the nearly invincible late 2000s teams of Urban Meyer, Chris Leak, Tim Tebow and Percy Harvin which won two national titles and contended for a third — haunts the sidelines of The Swamp still. They are the standard by which every Florida team is measured, and to which every Florida coach is compared.

There’s nothing wrong demanding excellence, of course, especially at an institution with outstanding facilities, a proud winning tradition in most sports and a $1.6 billion endowment (a billion more than any other in the state).

But the heady weight of these expectations can be dizzying. Or heart and chest-pain inducing. Spurrier lamented toward the end of his tenure, when a great team fell a game short of a Rose Bowl title game against Miami, that Florida fans were spoiled. Meyer’s frustrations with the fan base’s realism are also well-documented.

And it isn’t just coaches that wither in the Gainesville pressure cooker.

Even great teams by most standards fail to meet the UF standard. Florida’s 11-2 team in 2012 was a break or two from playing for a national championship. Instead, the Gators routed a good FSU team in Tallahassee and went to the Sugar Bowl. Ask a random Gator fan about them, however, like I did Saturday, and you might get the answer I received from Tom, a citrus farmer from Fort Pierce.

“That team should have lost five games,” he told me, ignoring that it didn’t.

In 21 seasons from Steve Spurrier's arrival as UF coach (1990) to Urban Meyer's departure (2000), the Gators finished in the Top 10 of the final AP poll 13 times. In six seasons since they have done so once (2012).

Gator fans seem myopic on McElwain too, at least given present circumstances.

The Gators played Saturday night without 19 scholarship players, including two preseason All-American candidates. Lament special team breakdowns and vanilla defenses all you want, but it’s hard for a team to cover kicks when it is down 20 bodies and it’s hard to have special defensive packages with no depth at linebacker or safety. Florida is competing through the injuries, which is probably a positive.

The reality is that suspensions, injuries and yes, the failure to develop a quarterback outside of Will Grier has hamstrung this staff. And this is already the fifth season since 2010 that Florida has lost at least two home games. There were only three such years from 1990-2009.

That’s a troubling trend.

But the reality also is that, even after two agonizing losses by a total of three points, McElwain’s recruiting is on the uptick. Florida’s offensive personnel — especially at the skill positions — is the best it has been in a decade. And a young defense appears to be quickly maturing into a unit capable of meeting UF’s lofty standard.

After playing in 11 Alliance, BCS or New Year’s Six bowl games and four national title games between 1990-2009, the Gators have played in one Sugar Bowl since 2012. They lost.

Florida has spent almost a decade under three staffs searching for answers. That’s understandably frustrating for fans. And none of this is to say Florida fans should accept losing. They shouldn’t. But it might be time to acknowledge this isn’t a short rebuild. It’s Year 8 of what has been a long one, and only Year 3 of this staff’s part in that.

Florida has the resources and infrastructure to win and compete with everyone.

Does its fan base have the patience?