If Florida football players need motivation, one poll provided a historic preseason snub

Florida football has been delivered a historic affront. Will it motivate the Gators to prove insulters wrong?

The Associated Press preseason poll was released Monday. To the surprise of no one, Florida did not make the top 25.

The insult came in the “Others Receiving Votes” category. The Gators got as many votes as Akron, UMass, Eastern New Mexico State and the Florida Institute of Dog Grooming.

Zero. Zip. Zilch. Nada.

That hasn’t happened since 1989, when the Chatsworth, Ga., pee-wee team Billy Napier quarterbacked got as many preseason votes as Galen Hall’s Gators.

Napier probably welcomed the news. It’s the ultimate piece of bulletin board material for a team that already had acres of it.

The 62 sportswriters and broadcasters unleashed a giant collective sneeze at Florida. In the rival coaches poll, UF at least got 11 votes.

That means one coach might have given the Gators a 15^th-place vote, or maybe 11 coaches voted them No. 25. Whatever the combination, it let UF save a smidgen of face.

But as much as we revere the coaches poll, primarily because it’s run by Gannett and USA Today, the AP is the grandaddy of college football popularity contests.

The impetus for its poll began in 1935, when AP sports editor Alan Gould unilaterally declared Minnesota, Princeton and TCU would be co-national champions.

That didn’t sit well with Golden Gopher fans, who hanged Gould in effigy. The next year, he decided to have a panel of sportswriters vote on a weekly top-20 poll.

It spread the blame around and helped fill Sports sections between football Saturdays.

“That’s all I had in mind, something to keep the pot boiling,” said Gould, who died in 1993. “Sports then was living off controversy, opinion, whatever. This was just another exercise in hoopla.”

The hoopla heightened in 1950 when the first preseason poll came out. Santa Clara got a vote, but Florida didn’t.

The Gators first appearance came in 1953. They appeared off-and-on until 1989’s preseason shutout. Sportswriters apparently foresaw Galen Hall getting fired after four games.

Prediction: Napier will last longer than Hall. If not, he won’t be replaced by Gary Darnell.

Even after that mess, Florida got 47 votes heading into the 1990 season under. The Spurrier era had arrived. Florida getting preseason love was as certain as Massachusetts voting for the Democratic presidential nominee.

The Gators even got votes coming off the four-win 2013 season. Monday’s news wasn’t exactly like Joe DiMaggio going hitless after 56 games, but 35 years was a nice run.

It’s okay to be disappointed, but it’s hard to argue with the AP’s Prophets of Doom. Well, one person gave Colorado a 25^th-place vote. Maybe Deion Sanders slid the voter a pair of “Prime 21” sunglasses.

I’m fairly certain that most voters don’t take bribes. Some base their votes on where they think teams will finish at the end of season.

Others vote on how good they think teams are right now. A few probably vote on how good the pregame meals are at schools.

Whatever the criteria, the preseason snubbery has had the predictable reaction inside UF’s football building.

“We know what we have in here,” safety Asa Turner said. “We’ve got a lot of talent. It might not be in newspapers or articles or anything like that, but we know what we have is great this year.”

Great? At this point, media experts can’t even foresee “Good.”

The Gators may say they’re cool with that. And the desire to prove insulters wrong won’t matter if the offensive line still can’t block or defense still can’t tackle.

But if Napier wanted a chip to put on his players’ shoulders, 62 voters just handed him one that hasn’t been seen around here in 35 years.

David Whitley is The Gainesville Sun's sports columnist. Contact him at dwhitley@gannett.com. Follow him on X @DavidEWhitley