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Florida vs. Utah: Prediction, pick, odds, spread, football game time, watch live stream, TV channel | OnlyGators.com: Florida Gators news, analysis, schedules and scores

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Florida vs. Utah: Prediction, pick, odds, spread, football game time, watch live stream, TV channel | OnlyGators.com: Florida Gators news, analysis, schedules and scores


Image Credit: Michael Nash

Looking to kick off a season with a signature win for the second straight year, the Florida Gators take an extremely rare Thursday trip to face the No. 14 Utah Utes. Florida rallied to beat Utah 29-26 last season in The Swamp, the first game of a home-and-home series that is now set to conclude.

The first of four straight night games the Gators will play to begin the campaign, Thursday’s contest marks the first time Florida will play a regular-season game on that day of the week in more than 30 years (at Mississippi State on Oct. 1, 1992). The last time the Gators took the field on a Thursday at all was when they won the 2009 BCS Championship Game to conclude the 2008 season.

Thursday’s game is also the second time in the last five seasons that the Gators’ opening game has been pushed earlier than previously scheduled. Florida saw its Week 1 game against Miami played in Orlando pushed forward seven days to Week 0 in 2019.

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This year’s marks the first nonconference true road game the Gators have played outside the Sunshine State since 1991. Florida also opening the season with a true road game for the first time since 1987. It is also the furthest West that UF has played a regular-season game in 34 years and the first time Florida has began a season against a Pac-12 team since 1983. All this as head coach Billy Napier looks to turn the Gators around in his second year at the helm.

What will go down Thursday night as the Gators visit the Utes? Let’s find out. Don’t miss our Florida football notebook covering Napier’s thoughts entering Week 1 as well as our Summer School feature wrapping up the offseason and the Week 1 depth chart.

Tale of the tape

Florida Gators No. 14 Utah Utes
Head coach Billy Napier Kyle Whittingham
Record 0-0 0-0
Conference SEC Pac-12

Injuries and absences

Questionable (3): C Kingsley Eguakun (knee), DL Chris McClellan (lower body), QB Jack Miller (shoulder)
Out (1): TE Keon Zipperer (lower body)
Out for season (2): DL Justus Boone (knee), RB Cam Carroll (knee)

Viewing information

Date: Thursday, Aug. 31 | Time: 8 p.m. ET
Location: Rice-Eccles Stadium — Salt Lake City, Utah [51,444]

TV: ESPN (Chris Fowler, Kirk Herbstreit, Holly Rowe)
Live stream: ESPN+ | SiriusXM: 133/190 | Radio: WRUF, TuneIn
Live updates: @OnlyGators on Twitter

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Game notes

» Florida is 2-0 all-time against Utah with wins in 2022 and 1977.
» The Gators are 7-5-1 all-time against Pac-12 opponents, while the Utes are 1-7 against SEC opponents.
» Utah last season was Florida’s first Pac-12 opponent since 1989, while UF was Utah’s first SEC opponent since 2008. (Florida ended up also playing Oregon State in bowl season.)
» The Gators are 7-2-1 against Pac-12 teams in the regular season; the Utes are 0-7 against SEC teams in the regular season. Thursday night will be the first time Utah hosts an SEC team in program history.
» Florida’s lone season-opening loss dating back to 1989 came in 2017 during a neutral-site contest with Michigan in Dallas.
» Napier is 2-2 in season openers as a head coach. This will be the fourth time he faces a Power Five opponent away from home to start the season.
» The Gators opens the season unranked in either of the main top 25 polls for the second straight year and third time in seven seasons.
» Florida is 17-4 against nonconference opponents since 2018 with two straight losses.
» The Gators are 7-15 against ranked opponents (2-5 vs. top five teams, 5-7 vs. top 10 teams) and 32-10 against unranked opponents since 2018. They went 1-5 against AP Top 25 teams last season.
» Florida has scored in 436 consecutive games, an NCAA record.

Prediction and analysis

Spread: Florida +5 | O/U: 44.5

The 2022 season was filled with impossible-to-pick games involving the Gators due to their tremendous inconsistency from week to week. As such, we have no idea what 2023 is going to bring. In terms of Thursday night’s matchup with the Utes, though, we do have some known quantities.

Chief among them is that Utah starting quarterback Cameron Rising is not playing, whereas Florida starting QB Graham Mertz is active for his first game but coming off a none-to-stellar collegiate career to this point. The Gators may be without their starting center — the most veteran player on the offensive line — and the Utes may be without their playmaking tight end.

Napier led Florida to a 3-point win in this matchup a year ago, but there’s no doubt UF had the advantages in that game, namely from a hosting standpoint. This year, the Gators will be facing a raucous environment playing in a stadium with an elevation of 4,265 feet above see level — higher than most major cities except Denver and Albuquerque, New Mexico.

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And yet, for Utah’s 26-game home winning streak and its back-to-back Pac-12 championships, they remain 0-7 against SEC teams in regular-season play. The Gators, meanwhile, are 7-2-1 against Pac-12 opponents in the regular season and have won all but one opening-week game since 1989. Plus, Napier will be on the road facing a Power Five opponent to open a season for the fourth time in five years as a head coach; he knows what’s ahead.

There is simply no knowing what’s to come Thursday night, and this would not be a game upon which a wager is recommended. However, we don’t have the benefit of not giving you a pick in this section. Napier went 5-0 against the spread as an underdog last season and holds a 10-1 mark in such a position over his last three seasons. With Rising playing, Utah giving a touchdown would have been the pick here; however, with Rising out, Gators’ attacking defense and strong running game should be enough to stay within the number.

There’s about two points of value here, and Florida was able to read plenty of bulletin-board material in the offseason to be juiced for this game, regardless of the travel difficulties or injury issues. Regarding the total, scoring has been down in college football through Week 0 due to the new clock rules, so we’ll start going under with the expectation of a run-heavy attack on both sides.

2022 records: ATS picks 5-8 | O/U picks 9-4

Odds and ends

» Uniforms: Florida will wear white jerseys, blue pants and orange helmets. (Fun fact: The Gators will not wear orange jerseys or pants at all this season.)

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3 most underrated signees in Florida State football's 2025 class

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3 most underrated signees in Florida State football's 2025 class


Florida State football had an embarrassing 2024 campaign where it finished with a 2-10 record. This is not the expectation of what the Seminoles are all about.

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Head football coach Mike Norvell understood the urgency as he could not allow the program to snowball into a laughing stock after a productive 13-1 season in 2023. Norvell was heading into a pivotal sixth season with his job on the line.

As a result, he went out and hired a ton of new coaches on his staff, including Gus Malzahn, Tim Harris Jr., Herb Hand, Tony White, Terrance Knighton, and Evan Cooper. This was uncharted territory for Norvell since he had never had to fire multiple coaches like that.

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Nonetheless, we were wondering how the Seminoles’ 2025 recruiting class would play out with new coaches as well as the struggling year in 2024.

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The recruiting class did well, and it finished with the 20th-best in the 247Sports Composite rankings (prospects can still sign in February). In this article, I want to highlight three of the most underrated signees from Florida State’s 2025 recruiting class.



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U.S. Amateur runner-up Noah Kent is transferring to Florida

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U.S. Amateur runner-up Noah Kent is transferring to Florida


Noah Kent is heading home.

The 2024 U.S. Amateur runner-up is transferring to Florida, he announced Saturday. The sophomore at Iowa, whose hometown is Naples, Florida, entered the transfer portal earlier this month, and he made his decision to join coach J.C. Deacon and the 2023 national champions come next fall.

Because of NCAA rules, Kent won’t be eligible to compete for Florida until the 2025-26 season, but he can finish his sophomore year with the Hawkeyes. This fall, he placed in the top 13 all four tournaments, his best finish being a T-5 at the Fighting Irish Classic.

And, of course, he has a tee time at Augusta National Golf Club in the spring.

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Kent will essentially be the fourth member of Florida’s 2025 signing class, which ranked second in the country on signing day. He’ll join a talented roster that includes Parker Bell, Mathew Kress and Jack Turner, though with new NCAA roster limits coming, there’s bound to be some unprecedented roster turnover in college golf before the start of the 2025-26 season.



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State Your Case: Do Panthers or Lightning own state of Florida?  | NHL.com

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State Your Case: Do Panthers or Lightning own state of Florida?  | NHL.com


There are two NHL teams in Florida: the Florida Panthers and the Tampa Bay Lightning.

They are separated by about 250 miles and have been fierce rivals since the Panthers joined the NHL for the 1993-94 season. The Lightning joined the League a season earlier.

Florida (21-11-2) and Tampa Bay (18-10-2) meet for the first time this season at Amalie Arena in Tampa on Sunday (5 p.m. ET; FDSNSUN, CRIPPS, SN, TVAS).

The teams have played each other 157 times in the regular season; the Panthers have gone 77-51-19, and the Lightning are 70-64-13. There have been 10 ties.

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For years, the rivalry was a parochial affair, deeply important to hockey fans in the state but under the radar nationally. Lately, though, Florida supremacy has often meant NHL supremacy.

The Panthers are the reigning Stanley Cup champions and defeated the Lightning in five games in the best-of-7 Eastern Conference First Round last season to start that title march. They reached the Stanley Cup Final two seasons ago, going on a miracle run before losing to the Vegas Golden Knights. The season before that, they won the Presidents’ Trophy with an NHL-best 122 points but lost to the Lightning in a second-round sweep, marking the second straight time that their noisy neighbors ended their season.

The Lightning won back-to-back Stanley Cup championships in 2020 and 2021 before reaching a third straight Final in 2022, losing to the Colorado Avalanche. Tampa Bay won the Presidents’ Trophy in 2018-19.

This season, each team is on course for another appearance in the Stanley Cup Playoffs and has a point percentage of better than .600.

So which team has the merits to claim bragging rights in this all-Florida showdown as the rivals face off for the first time this season? That’s the question debated by NHL.com senior writers Amalie Benjamin and Dan Rosen in the latest installment of State Your Case.

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Benjamin: Let’s lay out what the Lightning have accomplished in their 32-season history: They’ve won the Stanley Cup three times, becoming the first team from Florida to win it when they took the championship in 2004. But that doesn’t come close to what they’ve accomplished during the past 11 seasons, starting in 2013-14, when they became a powerhouse. They’ve been to the Stanley Cup Playoffs 10 times in those 11 seasons, making the Stanley Cup Final in a whopping four of them. Let me repeat that: Four trips to the Cup Final in the past 11 seasons, winning twice, in 2020 and 2021. And if that’s not enough, they made two more trips to the Eastern Conference Final, in 2016 and 2018. Forget Florida’s team. They’re the team of the past decade in the entire NHL.

Rosen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But what have you done for me lately? Florida’s team fluctuates. It was the Lightning. It is the Panthers. They’ve got the Stanley Cup. They went to the Stanley Cup Final two years in a row. Sure, a few years ago, this wasn’t even a debate. Florida’s team, the Panthers? Please. No shot. Even the top executives with the Panthers would tell you that. But things change. With success come the riches. Just think about the past three seasons for the Panthers: Presidents’ Trophy winners in 2021-22, Stanley Cup Final in 2022-23, Stanley Cup champions in 2023-24. The Lightning lost in the 2022 Cup Final, lost in the first round in six games the next season and lost in the first round in five games to the Panthers last season. Florida’s team is Florida.

Benjamin: OK, sure, you have a point. Florida has done pretty darn well lately. But let’s see how history will judge the state of Florida and its hockey teams. Hall of Famers? The Lightning have got ’em. Though Steven Stamkos has moved on to the Nashville Predators, the Hall of Fame is going to come calling, and the forward will go in as a member of the Lightning. Add in coach Jon Cooper, forward Nikita Kucherov, defenseman Victor Hedman and goalie Andrei Vasilevskiy, and you’re talking at least five future Hall of Famers on a single team. That’s not just good, that’s historically good. It’s a group whose names are synonymous with winning, with the Stanley Cup, with the state of Florida. That’s powerful. That says the Lightning win this debate, no question.

Rosen: I have a question. Is Aleksander Barkov not paving his way to the Hall of Fame? Is Sergei Bobrovsky, with a Stanley Cup ring, 400-plus wins and two Vezina Trophy wins as the NHL’s best goalie, not a lock for the Hall of Fame? Is Paul Maurice, who could finish his career with at least the second-most coaching wins of all time, along with his Stanley Cup ring, not also a lock for the Hall of Fame? In the way-too-early department, could Matthew Tkachuk and Sam Reinhart be future Hall of Famers? I lied. That’s four questions. But you get the point. You brought up the Hall of Fame and I countered. That’s why the Lightning do not win this debate without question. Could they win it? Yes, certainly, if we were having this debate in 2023. It’s almost 2025. It’s a different world. It’s the Panthers’ world, at least in Florida. The Lightning are just living in it. At least the sun is still shining on them too.

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