There once was nothing more automatic in Southeastern Conference football than the winner of the Florida-Kentucky game.
In the 31 annual meetings from 1987 to 2017, the Gators won all 31, and most of them weren’t close. Steve Spurrier’s Florida teams from 1994-96 defeated the Wildcats by a combined 180-14, and the Gators of Urban Meyer won consecutive series contests in 2008-09 by a combined 104-12.
Mark Stoops was hired at Kentucky before the 2013 season, when the streak stood at 26, and endured five straight losses, but three of them were tight. The Wildcats finally broke through in 2018 and have now won five of the past eight encounters following Saturday night’s surprise 38-7 shellacking at Kroger Field.
“When I first got here, everybody would throw that on me, and we had so much work to do just to get out of the ground,” Stoops said afterward in a news conference. “I was concentrating on getting our team right. Then we had some really close games, and I’ve acknowledged that the topic got a little heavy.
“It is what it is. Nobody is going to feel sorry for you. You better swing your way out of it. We had some tough ones where we came up short and it wasn’t much fun, but hopefully everyone enjoys the victories, because they’re hard to come by.”