Before the season, Florida fans just wanted to split their first two SEC games against Kentucky and Tennessee.

The Gators won both.

After that, the orange and blue faithful just wanted to split the four games in the October gauntlet.

Florida went 3-1.

Beating the three rivals: Tennessee, Georgia and Florida State?

Two down, one to go.

Gainesville was grounded in its expectations for first-year coach Jim McElwain. They saw the man who constantly reminds everyone that he’s just a man from Montana as being thrown into Southern football fire. Instead, he’s thrown gasoline on two other rival coaches. The latest instance, a 27-3 defeat of Mark Richt’s Bulldogs, left the 15-year Georgia coach virtually speechless in the postgame press conference.

In the offseason, everyone envisioned Jacksonville as being a crossroads for Georgia potentially asserting itself in the SEC East race, and for Florida maybe forging a solid debut season under its new man. Those roles were reversed entering Saturday.

In fact, they had been flipped for some time. The Bulldogs were coming off a humiliating loss to Alabama, a gut-wrenching loss to Tennessee and a less-than-uplifting 9-6 win over lowly Missouri. Meanwhile, the Gators were 6-0 before making the only unbeaten team in the SEC scared for its life in Death Valley. Florida got a chance to show Georgia just how much the script had been flipped, and a 20-0 halftime lead took care of that.

After the win, McElwain said, “It will be interesting to see the maturity of how we handle the position we’re in.”

That may have been a concern back when RB Kelvin Taylor was celebrating a touchdown with a throat-slashing gesture, but that isn’t an issue anymore.

The team has shown its growth in the time since then, highlighted by overcoming a 13-point fourth quarter deficit against Tennessee and ravaging the No. 3 team in the nation before ascending a season-high 14 spots in the AP Poll. Then, the quarterback that they enjoyed all that success with, Will Grier, was suspended for the season after using PEDs. The Gators were headed to Baton Rouge at that time and came out of it with reason to hold their heads even higher and turn the heads of others even further.

It’s not that fans didn’t think McElwain’s success from Colorado State could transfer to Florida. After all, a guy named Urban Meyer brought a boatload from Utah. However, few thought McElwain would have enough magic to make the dark days of the Will Muschamp era disappear this quickly.

No one expected a passing game left for dead would come to life for all the big plays time after time. Entering Week 9, the Gators ranked among the top five in the SEC in QB rating while completing 13 passes of 30-plus yards, third-most in the SEC. They added two more against Georgia, including a 66-yard TD from Treon Harris to Antonio Callaway that gave Florida  a 13-0 lead and some much-needed breathing room.

We can’t ignore the fact that the post-Muschamp Florida has made even more big plays on defense, coming up with 5 turnovers on Saturday for a total of 19 in eight games.

Now, Florida can claim the East title for the first time since Tim Tebow’s senior year with a win next Saturday against Vanderbilt. In the postgame press conference following the win in Jacksonville, McElwain was asked if he expected to make it to Atlanta.

“Yeah, yeah I did. Because I don’t expect to lose.”

Before the season, that would’ve sounded like coachspeak. Now after an impressive 7-1 start like this, it seems like anything but.