The Swamp is back!

The Florida Gators turned in a dominant defensive performance in the win over the Auburn Tigers Saturday in Gainesville. Florida held Auburn to just 269 total yards, including 124 yards on the ground. Florida actually out-rushed Auburn 132-124, something many didn’t expect.

Florida’s defense was causing havoc, and the loud environment really had an impact. Auburn committed nine penalties for 70 yards.

Following the loss, Gus Malzahn had a few things to say about the Gators, via AL.com.

On the environment

“They’re a good team. The environment. The crowd did get to us. It really kinda surprised me. I don’t know how many false starts we had, but we had a couple of short-yardage deals and got backed up. Another thing that stood out is third-down-and-1-to-2. That’s usually our bread-and-butter, and I think we went 1 for 4 or 1 for 5 or something like that. It didn’t give us a chance to get first downs. Like I told the guys just a second ago, they’re disappointed and we should be. Big picture, you look at the schedule, we’re 5-1, we have a break and it’s a good time to have a break and we need to get some stuff corrected. We’re going to.”

Communication issues impacted by the crowd

“You expect that, but the disappointing thing for me is we’ve been working with crowd noise since fall camp. This isn’t the only road game we’ve got like this. We’ve got a couple of others that are going to be similar. We didn’t handle it very good. That’s disappointing and it’s really surprising to me. I don’t know how many we had, four or five, but that’s too many. You work on communication, you work on sliding protections and everything.”

Gators third down defense

“They’ve got some guys that can rush the passer and they’re leading our league in sacks, but we just didn’t execute like we can. Give them credit. I don’t mean to take any credit away from them. They are good. We just didn’t execute like we thought we would. There were some things there we felt pretty good about, but give those guys credit. They are a good team. This is one of the toughest places to play, but we just didn’t get it done.”