Arkansas too good to be a trap

During the Summer of Stupid when we were all pining for college football and trying to come up with clever things to talk about instead of watching meaningless baseball games and waiting for the next golf major, we figured it out.

And by "we" I mean anybody as silly as me who in July was looking up the TV schedule for Florida's off week.

We could look at the upcoming UF season and pinpoint it as easily as we could tell which guy in Section 38 had the best chance of getting tossed during the Tennessee game.

Back then, this was it.

Is it now?

This was the trap game, the game that would test the vulnerability of Florida's football team especially if it went to Baton Rouge and came away with a win.

This looked an awful lot like last year's Ole Miss game.

Florida, coming off an emotional victory (Tennessee last year) playing against a team from the SEC West with a highly acclaimed quarterback who transferred in from a major football power.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the poster team for a trap game.

Except one thing. Actually two.

1. We talked so much about this being a trap game that it kind of loses that surprise factor. Can it be a trap game if you keep saying it's a trap game?

2. Arkansas is good.

"We saw this coming last year," UF coach Urban Meyer said of Bobby Petrino's club. "We've got our work cut out for us."

A year ago, that trap closed tightly and quickly. It was so disappointing that Tim Tebow offered up words when it was over that ended up on a wall.

Meyer believes in the trap game concept.

"Sure, I do," he said. "I believe in that, what you just said, absolutely."

But not this game.

"If this is Ole Miss and we know they're good but they're not playing very good (last year)," he said. "But I don't believe this falls into that. I can rant and rave about how good their kickoff return is and you flip on video tape and they're not very good.

"You flip on this one and they're real good. This is much different. There are a bunch of NFL players on both sides of the ball. This is a team that's good enough to compete for the West championship. They took undefeated Auburn and beat them in every phase of the game badly."

So Arkansas has Meyer's attention and the Razorbacks should. We all wondered if Auburn was any good because it was unbeaten before Arky put a spanking on Gene Chizik's team. The 'Backs lead the league in passing and red-zone offense and have scored 91 points in their last two games.

Still, if it looks like a trap game and smells like a trap game and Kirk Herbstreit says it's a trap game, isn't it a trap game?

Even though Florida coaches have worked to make the players understand how good Arkansas can be, these are still a group of young men who have been through an emotional gauntlet the first six weeks of the season. The weight of expectations, the nonsense that was Tennessee week, the flu epidemic, the Tim Tebow concussion.

"This whole season has been a lot of stuff," Meyer said.

Stuff being a nice way to put it. Maybe just having a normal week would be the best way for the Gators to avoid the trap.

More than that, it's games like this when you need your leaders.

"You're dealing with 18-to-22-year-olds," Tebow said. "If you don't have good leadership or focus as a team, you see it all the time in college football. Not that we're in one. It's not a trap game."

Last year vs. Ole Miss?

"That's probably making an excuse for why we lost," Tebow said. "I think we just have to show intensity in practice this week to show the younger guys how important this game is. The week of LSU, you don't have to do that because everyone is practicing with intensity.

"This isn't January. You can't rest. There's another game this week."

Maybe it's not a trap game. Maybe it's a sandwich game. Or an upset-alert game. Or a purpose game or a statement game or some other game we like to label when it's simply the next game.

On Wikipedia, a trap game is defined thusly: "A trap game often occurs when a good team beats another good team and then subsequently has to play a mediocre team. The good team is often emotionally spent and overlooks the mediocre team, hence the trap."

Arkansas is not a mediocre team.

These guys know that.

They remember Ole Miss.

Now that was a trap game.

Contact Pat Dooley at 352-374-5053 or at dooleyp@gvillesun.com and follow at http://Twitter.com/Pat_Dooley.