More than 20 years ago, on Nov. 20, 2004, Florida football rolled into Tallahassee with a lame duck coach and weary team, eager to avenge a loss to rival Florida State from the season before.

What happened on the night that Florida State dedicated the field legendary coach Bobby Bowden inside of Doak Campbell Stadium was surprising to all except those who wore Florida Gators uniforms that day.

Florida coach Ron Zook had been fired close to two months earlier following a 38-31 loss to Mississippi State, but stayed to coach the team the remainder of the 2004 season while former athletic director Jeremy Foley pursued potential candidates.

Zook wasn’t going to coach the bowl game, so this was going to be his last time patrolling the sidelines for UF.

“It meant a lot to us,” former Florida cornerback Dee Webb said. “We wanted to send him out on a winning note.”

Florida jumped to an early 10-point lead and held on to upset the No. 10 Seminoles 20-13, spoiling Bowden’s honorary night. Florida fans still delight in calling Doak Campbell Stadium “Ron Zook Field.”

Players carried Zook off the field on their shoulders following the game.

“It’s something you appreciate,” said Zook, who remains in coaching as a special teams analyst at Maryland. “But it was just the players and the coaching staff and everyone putting in the hard work. I just happened to be the guy who got picked up.”

A rocky third season for Florida football coach Ron Zook

Zook faced a monumental task replacing icon Florida football coach Steve Spurrier, who led UF to six SEC titles and the school’s first national title in 1996. Foley hired him for his recruiting acumen even though he entered the job with no college football head coaching experience.

After going 8-5 in 2002 and 2003, Zook entered 2004 squarely on the hot seat. When Florida dropped to 4-3 following a 38-31 upset loss at Mississippi State, Foley fired Zook, who agreed to stay on and coach the team rather than have UF turn the program over to an interim coach on his staff.

“It wasn’t normal from the morning after the Mississippi State game,” Zook said. “We had been a young team and we hadn’t always won, but what helped them as freshman and sophomores is that they were able to grow up and learn to deal with adversity. I think that’s a tribute to the guys.”

Indeed, after Florida lost 31-24 to rival Georgia in Jacksonville, the Gators won two straight, beating Vanderbilt 34-17 and routing South Carolina 48-14 at The Swamp before its showdown with the Seminoles.

Florida looked to avenge a 38-34 loss to FSU at The Swamp the season before, a game decided on a handful of controversial calls by officials.

“We felt like we could play with anybody,” Webb said. “Our freshman class, go back to our first year there (in 2003), we were the only team that beat LSU that year and they went on to win a national championship, probably 40 percent of them played as true freshman. It was all about being consistent.”

How Florida football upset FSU

Former Florida running Ciatrick Fason, who rushed for 103 yards and a touchdown in the win, said players didn’t know they were honoring the field for Bowden until they got to the game. Bowden, then 75, was still coaching the Seminoles in his 28^th season after leading FSU to national titles in 1993 and 1999.

“I had a pretty good relationship with Coach Bowden,” Zook said. “It was Florida, Florida State so it was always a rivalry game. The crowd was pretty hostile.”

Still, choosing to honor Bowden for the Florida-FSU game didn’t sit well with Fason and the rest of his teammates.

“We’re still the University of Florida,” Fason said. “If they were going to try a team it should have been against one of them ACC schools or something, but not us. So that was our motivation, hey, we’re fixing to spoil the moment.”

Fason recalled knocking an FSU defensive back out of the game as the ‘Noles’ defender tried tackling him early in the game after he caught a screen pass. Still, the wear and tear of leading the SEC in rushing (1,267 yards on 222 carries) led to a foot injury that slowed Fason in the first half. Fason got a shot from a trainer pregame.

“Once that medicine kicked in, that second half, man, I felt like my normal self,” Fason said. “One thing I know about myself is, I run hard. Because I hear the defenders tell me how hard I run, and I heard Florida State defenders saying, he ain’t slowing down. That kept motivating me.”

Florida built a 10-3 lead at halftime as its defense shut down the Seminoles and strong-armed quarterback Chris Rix in the first half. Webb recalled going across the field to make one of his two pass breakups in the game.

“That was one of the games where I just had a knack for the ball,” Webb said.

Fason rushed for an 8-yard touchdown to put Florida up 20-10 with 4:59 remaining in the fourth quarter.

As a Jacksonville native, Fason said he grew up dreaming of scoring in the Florida-FSU game.

“No matter what team I was playing for I wanted to score a game-winning touchdown in that game,” Fason said.

After an FSU field goal cut Florida’s lead to 20-13, Zook took a gamble, going for it on 4^th-and-inches from his own 26-yard line with 2:35 to play. Chris Leak got the first down for Florida on a quarterback keeper, and UF was able to run enough clock out to preserve the win.

The aftermath of the Florida football upset of FSU

After getting carried off the field, Zook wanted to take a picture of the scoreboard.

“They turned the scoreboard off, like, a minute after the game,” Zook said. “I was with my brother trying to get a picture and we couldn’t get a picture of the final score”

Zook gave players the option to return with the team on the bus or stay in Tallahassee overnight if they had friends there. Webb chose to stay in Tallahassee with his close friend, former Florida safety Kyle Jackson.

“Kyle Jackson, he’s actually married to his high school girlfriend and she went to Florida State at the time,” Webb said. “Her friends and were cheerleaders so we partied with them.”

The players who chose to return on the bus were greeted by Florida fans in the predawn hours at The Swamp, who cheered at their arrival. A friend of Zook’s opened Ballyhoo’s, a restaurant in Gainesville, for a postgame celebration.

“Our guys were able to get some food and refreshments,” Zook said.

Charlie Strong served as the interim coach for Florida at the Peach Bowl in Atlanta, where the Gators lost 27-10 to Miami. Foley hired Urban Meyer from Utah, who led Florida to national titles in 2006 and 2008.

Of the 22 starters on UF’s 2006 national team, 18 were players that Zook recruited.

“Coach Zook, he didn’t get a fair shot,” said Webb, who played under Meyer in 2005 before declaring for the NFL Draft. “Had he stayed, we would have gotten two (national titles).”

Zook was hired by Illinois in 2005, where he led the Illini to the Rose Bowl in 2007 but was fired after going 34-51 in seven seasons. Now 70, Zook is working at Maryland under head coach Mike Locksley, who was his running backs coach at UF in 2004.

“It wasn’t the smoothest three years but I still think that coaching at Florida is the best job in America,” Zook said. “I learned a lot about life, how to deal with people.”

Webb played two years in the NFL with the Jacksonville Jaguars and remained in pro football in the CFL and arena leagues until 2015. He’s still involved in football providing lessons for high school players in player development.

Fason played three seasons in the NFL with the Minnesota Vikings (2005-06) and Jaguars (2008). He’s remained in his native Jacksonville as the football coach at Fletcher High School, channeling the lessons he learned from Zook, Locksley and former UF offensive coordinator Larry Fedora.

“Those three guys were amazing to me and it definitely helped me in high school,” Fason said. “I learned how to recruit, to help get kids into college on the recruiting side …

“I still reach out to all three of them every once in a while, just to see how they’re doing, and you know to get an update on things or get coaching tips. I really appreciate those guys for the rest of my life.”

Kevin Brockway is The Gainesville Sun’s Florida beat writer. Contact him at kbrockway@gannett.com. Follow him on X @KevinBrockwayG1