Tale of two rivals: Florida is surging into 2025, Tennessee is bleeding out

The end is still raw at Tennessee, the aftermath of a soul-sucking College Football Playoff loss sudden and complete.

So while this is the last thing the Vols need to hear, they better come to terms with it.

Bitter rival Florida is in a better place heading into the 2025 season.

“Momentum is a real thing in college football,” says Florida coach Billy Napier.

In the what’s-next age of the sport, momentum is the only thing.

Somehow Florida – which could’ve fired Napier after a disastrous first half of the season – is riding high after all of eight wins in 2024.

Tennessee, meanwhile, is seemingly bleeding out.

“It’s never just one thing,” Vols coach Josh Heupel said after a humiliating 25-point loss to Ohio State in a CFP first round game. “We’ll start again and start retooling, rebuilding and grow as a football team.”

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This is where we are in the violently new landscape of college football, where one loss can change momentum and introduce doubt to the process of winning, and – more importantly – the ability to convince players (high school and transfer portal) you’re on the right path.

And where one half of a season can override two-and-a-half years of an operational mess.

On the surface, nothing about this makes sense. Tennessee has 30 wins and won the Orange Bowl in the last three years, and Florida has 19 wins and a victory in something called the Gasparilla Bowl.

Yet the Gators, with talented freshman quarterback DJ Lagway and a young roster full of rising stars, have the momentum. Forget about the coach who nearly didn’t make it to 2025, or the coaching malpractice you’ve seen for the better part of the last three seasons.

Florida is projecting strength; Tennessee is venting vulnerability. You’re either rising with what’s next or falling with what’s wrong.

“Momentum is real on game day and real throughout the calendar,” Napier said, and it’s almost as though he’s trying to convince you that one month should override everything else we’ve watched from Florida since he arrived in Gainesville in 2022.

Then there’s Heupel, who in less than 15 minutes of an Ohio State postmortem, said over and over how disappointed he was with the loss – even though the Vols were gutted with injuries to critical players.

Everything that has happened at Tennessee over the last three seasons is diametrically opposite of what has happened at Florida. Yet here we are, dealing with the idea that momentum supersedes all.

“Two years ago, I don’t know, we finished sixth in the country,” Heupel said. “There’s a standard inside our building, and we’re going to continue to grow.”

And that’s the key to this strange reality: growth.

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Florida beat LSU and Ole Miss in the second half of the season, and won four of its final five games. The Gators nearly beat Georgia with a third-string backup quarterback after they had control of the game (and a 10-3 lead) late in the first half before Lagway sustained a hamstring injury.

Tennessee, meanwhile, was embarrassed by Georgia in its only significant game over the final five of the season. The Vols backed into the CFP by disposing of a laughable schedule – Kentucky (4-8), Mississippi State (2-10), UTEP (3-9), Vanderbilt (6-6-) – while others ahead of them in the CFP poll continued to lose.

If that doesn’t underscore Florida’s momentum, the game between the teams in October should remove all doubt. Tennessee’s 23-17 overtime win was as much a Florida gift as it was a Vols victory.

But for coaching malpractice, Florida would’ve won the game in regulation — beginning with a penalty for too many players on the field during the final play of the first half. A penalty that negated three points from a made field goal.

The very points that would’ve won the game in regulation.

Nothing about this offseason of momentum makes sense. Not Florida’s second-half surge that revealed mettle and moxie, not Tennessee’s second-half shrink that exposed flaws.

But it's undeniable in Gainesville and hard to ignore in Knoxville.

“I’ve got to come harder than I did last offseason,” Lagway said. “It’s going to be a great offseason.”

During the final minutes of a bowl rout of Tulane, Napier put 450-pound defensive lineman Des Watson in the backfield for a fourth-and-short carry. He converted the first down.

Not long after that, Napier fed undersized walk-on tailback Anthony Rubio, son of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and inspirational team favorite, five straight plays until he finished the drive with a 9-yard touchdown.

Nearly the entire team ran to the end zone to celebrate with Rubio.

Florida is projecting strength. Tennessee is venting uncertainty.

Like it or not, the Vols better come to terms with it.

Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X at @MattHayesCFB.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Gators, Vols headed in different directions this offseason