HOOVER, ALA. — Seven months removed from finishing 7-6 with a loss to Central Florida in the Liberty Bowl, the Georgia Bulldogs feel bold about the upcoming season.
Sophomore Aaron Murray was the SEC coaches' pre-season pick as the top quarterback in the conference. The team returns seven starters from a defense that was No. 4 in the league last year. Plus, of those six losses, four came by seven points or fewer.
Add a top-five recruiting class in February and it is clear why the Bulldogs believe they can win the SEC Eastern Division for the first time since 2005 and also break free from Florida's domination of their rivalry.
"We're not getting blown out of the water; we just didn't win," Georgia coach Mark Richt said in a ballroom of The Wynfrey Hotel at SEC Media Days. "There's a lot of reasons to be very optimistic about what's going on."
There seems to be less optimism about the Gators. When the SEC media poll is released Friday, 2010 division champion South Carolina likely will be listed first in the East. After that, expect Georgia to sit above the Gators, even though Florida has beaten Georgia five times in their last six meetings.
Georgia probably will be a top-25 team nationally when the coaches' and writers' polls come out next month; Florida is questionable.
The Gators cannot feel nearly as confident in quarterback John Brantley as Georgia does in Murray. Brantley barely held on to the starting job last season while throwing 10 interceptions and averaging fewer than 160 passing yards per game.
Florida outplayed the Bulldogs defensively last season, but has only four starters back. The UF offense - regrettably, perhaps - has seven returning starters from the team that was 10th in the SEC in total yards.
Last October, the Gators - who at 8-5 were a mere one game better than the Bulldogs - needed a field goal in overtime to get past Georgia 34-31 and save their season.
"We definitely felt like we could have won that game," Murray said. "We were right there. Hopefully this year we'll take it all.
"If we could go back and change 10 plays last year - maybe even less than 10 - we could have been a 10-win team. We felt like we were that close. It's motivating to know you were that close, and now we've just got to kick down the door."
This year's chapter of the rivalry features a new story line with first-year Gators coach Will Muschamp going against his alma mater. He played safety for the Bulldogs in the early 1990s.
Since Muschamp was hired, he and Florida have downplayed his growing up in Rome, Ga., and attending high school there, choosing instead to focus on the 10 years he lived in Gainesville as a child.
At a spring Gator Club meeting in Atlanta, he playfully guaranteed that Florida would beat the Bulldogs on Oct. 29 in Jacksonville.
When Muschamp spoke at SEC Media Days on Wednesday, he was asked how it felt to be a Georgia man coaching against his former school. "I'm a Florida guy," he replied sharply.
When Richt, a Boca Raton native, heard that the next day, he responded, "He's going to tell everybody he's Florida through and through and all that, but I'm sure there's some red and black in his veins."
That subtle barb qualifies as trash talk from Richt, who might be the conference's most polite and least controversial coach.
Despite his likability and 96 wins in 11 seasons, he is in danger of losing his job if the Bulldogs underperform in 2011. It will take more than beating the Gators to atone for going 14-12 the past two years.
"I haven't beat them since I've been here, so that's very frustrating," Georgia center Ben Jones said. "After you win a rivalry game, it's the best feeling. You have the relief. You want to have that feeling.
"But you can't just pinpoint one game and say the whole season's about Florida."
