Normally, I would do a piece about which parts of the Gator schedule are the most fearful to us after the past week, but too many people in Gainesville are still wiping the sweat from their collective brows.

It wasn’t that bad, yet you’d think we just got our first loss of the season the way the media and fans are reacting, so let’s take this time to discuss what there is to truly fear: Ourselves. 

What, internally, should we be afraid of?

3. Stupid Trash Talk – Look, one of the best things about the lead up to the Gator-Vols game was the eerie silence that prevailed throughout Gainesville last week, which was in complete contrast to the noise coming out of Knoxville.  Hell, the whole summer was one long Tennessee trash talk, courtesy of the man who I thought I was finished writing about, Lamey the Kif, yet we Gators held our heads up and took the high road.  You didn’t hear a peep from us, not during the cheating jabs, or the Rocky Top promises, or even when we saw the point spread creeping higher and higher.

Then, we won and comments started filtering in to the media, fueling a fire we could have let sputter.

Lane Kiffin shouldn’t be hated, he should be nothinged.  What that means is, most of the annoying people you meet in your life thrive on the reactions they can get out of you.  Some people, if they can wind you up, it’s like crack to them, and they’ll just keep doing it over and over and over.  After the game Saturday, regardless of how it was won, it was done, and then we started talking.

Why Coach Meyer?  Why?

The first mistake was when Urban took it upon himself to question whether or not Kiffin was really trying to win the game at the end.  He questioned Tennessee’s urgency in the last ten minutes, basically saying that the Vols looked like a team trying to “shorten” the game.  This was followed by the revelation that several players were isolated with flu-like symptoms before the game, even prompting team wide vaccinations on Sunday.

These things, when relayed to Kiffin, kept a 1-2 team in the headlines and Lane’s mug plastered up for everyone to see, as he fired back with, “…after we’re not excited about a performance, we’ll tell everybody we were sick.”.  This, in effect, made Urban look like a fool for opening his mouth, not only because it regenerated the trash talk that could have died off with the loss, but allowed Kiffin opportunities to get in more digs and continue to be the Lindsey Lohan of the SEC, the problem child who we just love to put on the front page.  These people need media/public attention or they go away, yet there we were, giving strength to one of the weakest teams in the SEC.

Now, we have to listen to this for the rest of the year, over the summer, and in to the game at Tennessee next year.  On top of that, it gives Kiffin, who should have been ripped apart for his offense by the media, not Meyer, the chance to come out of it smelling like roses.  He even took the time to take a dig at Coach Fulmer, stating, “…we’ve been scared of (Florida) in the past.  I think it was obvious Saturday we weren’t…”.  Should a 1-2 coach be allowed to take a shot at the legend he replaced?  A 1-2 coach?  We kept him in the headlines, it was our first mistake of the year and here’s hoping it won’t come back and bite us next season.

2. It Wasn’t That Bad – Let me repeat something: we didn’t lose Saturday.

The whole world seems in an uproar that we didn’t cover the spread, speaking as to how it exposed weaknesses in our team, even prompting some in the AP poll to rank Florida at #5 this week.  The fans here seem to be forcing smiles that are little more that gritted teeth, forgetting our 3-0 mark in favor of worrying that we didn’t slap the Vols around enough on the field.  However, as is his way, Tim Tebow seems to be there to make it all better, saying, “If we win 23-13, we’re going to take it and we’re going to be happy about it.”. 

Essentially, he was giving us the same advice Douglas Adams had for hitchhikers of the galaxy: Don’t Panic. 

The fear here is that if we put too much emphasis on the point total Vegas told us we should amass, we are losing focus of one of the tenants of any successful team in any sport.  You’ve heard it before, but here it is again:

How you win is not as important the win itself.

Who cares if it was a one point game or ten points or the foretold thirty points, what we need to realize is that we have a three in the win column, time to got beat Kentucky.  Truth be told, if we had messed up the Vols in a massacre for the ages, then we have to worry about overconfidence down the road.  We got our wake up call early Gator fans, just be happy it wasn’t a loss like last year. 

Remember this, flu or no, we saw diminished play time for Demps, Hernandez, and Thompson Saturday, all of them essential to our already thin offense.  Also, the defense played a fantastic game, whether Kif was looking to win or just get through the game.  Tennessee scored less than two touchdowns, had 210 total yards, and threw two interceptions.  We shut them down!

Lastly, and this is the most important thing, Lane didn’t do anything, Monte was the only reason they competed at all.  The offense was non-existent and didn’t look organized to win anything.  The Vols defense, however, was handing out pimp slaps left and right.  Remember, Monte and Urban have been close over the years, and Papa Kiffin has had the opportunity to be in Florida (he was at Tampa before this) and know all there is to know about Tebow.  He had a great game plan and was the reason Tennessee looked so good, taking it to Meyer in a way no one really has since he hit Florida.

Let’s not work ourselves up here about not winning like we wanted, though, let’s just sleep soundly at night knowing we won a third time.

1. Tebow + Defense Won’t Equal Championship – It was the Tebow show again on offense, as we were hampered at the WR spot and Monte, smart enough to see that, focused on the stopping the run and exhausting Tim, but to no avail. Monte said after the game, “I kept saying, ‘(Tim’s) bound to get tired… but he never did.” and Lane even begrudged, “I don’t think he’s human.  I really don’t.”.

There’s the problem for us as well, the last big fear after week 3.  We’ve become so confidant that Tebow is a superman or that he runs on limitless energy, we’ve come to take it for granted that he’ll be fine no matter what we ask of him this season.  Meyer mentioned that his QB “played as hard as he’s ever played” and he was a random fumble away from making it a 30-13 game, but that exposes the problem even more.  Without Tebow, the offense was outmatched on the field Saturday and would have been in real danger. 

This is a major issue.

If we keep asking this week after week, without striving to address our weakness at wide receiver, I don’t believe we have a National Championship team.  Boo and hiss all you want, but we tried doing this a couple years ago and lost 4 games that year.  TEBOW CAN NOT BE THE WHOLE OFFENSE. 

We’ve shown that we have an awesome defense, with a tenacity and  swagger that is not to be believed, and defense does win championships, but the entire league is getting hip to the fact that if you focus on Tebow and the run, we start to look shaky.  Monte, damn that beautiful man, gave the SEC and NCAA a blueprint to rattle the Gators’ pedestal, and if we keep riding  Tim’s expansive shoulders into the ground before the season’s over, can we really fault him if he’s got nothing left for the postseason.  We don’t need one guy to step up and be Murphy, or even Percy, we need them all to step up and help the offense win games.

We’ve been given a gift for a schedule this year and it could not have come at a better time as we are stretched as thin as can be at wide receiver, both through injury and random flu bugs.  The fear is two fold,  that a fabric stretched to thin may rip at any time, and that the more we rely on Tebow to take these risks and run into these titanic collisions with DBs,  the greater the chance we lose him to injury.  I know the stretching at wide out would have been considerably less had Debose survived to see the season, but a freshman couldn’t have been the only answer to the loss of Murphy/Harvin and the rest of these guys need to start playing like Gators, like winners.

Let’s let Tim work the pocket this week against Kentucky, I beg you.  Let him stand back there and find open guys all over the field that are ready with sticky hands, fast feed, and end zone fever.  Let him take some of the pressure off his own body and keep him healthy for the long run, because we need a whole Tim Tebow to win the National Championship, and, to tell the truth, a whole team.

Wide receivers, you have officially been called out.

Josh Bauer is a Columnist for GatorTailgating.com