Previous Season
Entering the season as defending national champions, the Gators went 9-4 in the 2007 season in spite of a prolific offense, primarily due to a defense depleted by graduation and departures to the NFL leading to the worst defense for a Florida team since 1971, closing out the year with a 41-35 loss to Michigan in the 2008 Capital One Bowl on January 1. Quarterback Tim Tebow became the first sophomore to win the Heisman trophy.
In the offseason, Florida coach Urban Meyer suffered the loss of assistant coaches for the first time in his tenure. Co-recruiting coordinator and safeties coach Doc Holliday left to become an assistant at his alma mater, West Virginia, running backs coach Stan Drayton took the same job with the Tennessee Volunteers, and co-defensive coordinator and defensive line coach Greg Mattison joined the new coaching staff of the Baltimore Ravens. Offensive coordinator Dan Mullen left to become the head coach of the Mississippi State Bulldogs at the end of the 2008 season.
Read more about this topic: 2008 Florida Gators Football Team
Famous quotes containing the words previous and/or season:
“There was a deserted log camp here, apparently used the previous winter, with its hovel or barn for cattle.... It was a simple and strong fort erected against the cold, and suggested what valiant trencher work had been done there.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)