Florida coach Billy Gonzales said his Gators are bringing energy to their preparation for their annual rivalry game with Georgia in the wake of Billy Napier’s firing on Sunday.

“They were excited about just getting on the field, getting back on the grass, and it went well,” said Gonzales, who has been promoted from receivers coach into the interim head coaching role.

“So, we’re obviously getting ready for this week’s game, and guys are working hard right now.”

Florida opened as a 7 1/2-point favorite, but the line has dipped to 7 points, an indication that the majority of the early money is being bet on the Gators in their 3:30 p.m. game against the No. 5-ranked Bulldogs on Saturday in Jacksonville.

Gonzales wasn’t shy about how Florida planned to attack Georgia quarterback Gunner Stockton, who has led Georgia to a 6-1 start that’s including a 4-1 mark in SEC play.

It’s a Florida defense that sacked Texas quarterback Arch Manning six times in a 29-21 win over a Longhorns team that was ranked No. 9 at the time of the teams’ meeting, on Oct. 4.

“I’m looking at some of the stats, you know, we just got done talking about completion percentage, and looking at his last game (Stockton) was 26 of 31 for four touchdowns, so he does a great job of making great decisions,” Gonzales said at his press conference on Monday, referencing Stockton’s performance in his most recent outing, a 43-35 win over Ole Miss.

“The main thing is for us is to hopefully be able to cause some pressure to him, and to cause pressure means being able to coverage in the back end as well.”

Gonzales knows Stockton has plenty of help, too, starting with playmaking receiver Zachariah Branch, UGA’s clear No. 1 target with a team-high 35 receptions for 362 yards.

He’s extremely explosive …. watching him on film, he’s a guy that you can get the ball and he’s quick,” Gonzales said. “He’s got a great first step, accelerates from zero to five extremely fast. A playmaker. They’ve got a bunch on the perimeter.”

It will be the Bulldogs first game without receiver Colbie Young, who suffered a fractured leg on the opening series of UGA’s win over Ole Miss and is out indefinitely.

Georgia acquired Texas A&M transfer Noah Thomas through the transfer portal and he’s considered among the top options to replace Young as a perimeter threat, despite his relatively limited production (4 catches, 54 yards) to this point of the season.

Smart indicated the Bulldogs have several other options, including the usage of additional tight ends in various alignments.

“We know about their tight ends — they’ve had some good tight ends there,” Gonzales said.

“They’ve got some great athletes.”

Gonzales also noted how Georgia backs Chauncey Bowens and Nate Frazier are of similar size and production and run behind a big offensive line.

“They’ve got some playmakers on the perimeter,” Gonzales said, “but I know we’ve got some great players on the defensive side that are excited to go against them as well.”

Authorities in the country of Georgia say they have disrupted a major nuclear smuggling attempt involving several Chinese nationals accused of trying to buy uranium on the black market, according to the Associated Press (AP).

The State Security Service of Georgia (SSSG) announced Saturday that three Chinese citizens were detained in Tbilisi while attempting to illegally purchase roughly 4.4 pounds of uranium for $400,000, according to the outlet.

Officials said the suspects were planning to traffic the nuclear material to China via Russia, the outlet reported. 

“Three Chinese citizens have been detained in Tbilisi while attempting to illegally purchase 2 kilograms of nuclear material — uranium,” the agency said, according to the AP. 

UN NUCLEAR CHIEF SAYS IRAN HAS MATERIAL TO BUILD BOMBS, BUT NO PLAN TO DO SO

Video footage released by the agency shows security officers in the Georgian capital seizing bottles containing what was identified as uranium and arresting multiple individuals at the scene.

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Two bottles identified as uranium were confiscated over the weekend in Georgia’s Tbilisi.  (State Security Service of Georgia)

According to the SSSG, one of the suspects had overstayed his visa and was living in Georgia illegally, the AP said. He allegedly led efforts to locate and acquire the radioactive substance, even bringing in experts from abroad to assist, the outlet added. Other members of the group reportedly coordinated the operation from China.

The perpetrators were identified and detained while “negotiating the details of the illegal transaction,” the security service reportedly said.

The agency did not specify when the arrests occurred or provide the identities of the suspects.

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Georgian officials escort a suspect after authorities foiled a uranium smuggling plot in Tbilisi. (State Security Service of Georgia)

The latest arrests follow a similar case in July, when Georgian authorities detained a foreign national and a Georgian citizen accused of planning to sell uranium worth $3 million. Officials said that material could have been used to construct explosive devices or carry out terrorist attacks.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Althea McBride’s Georgia home is an “Afro boho” oasis.

Her living room and hallway walls are painted black, acting as a dramatic background to her many African sculptures and art. The dining room’s burnt orange walls are decorated with vinyl records like Aretha Franklin’s “Knew You Were Waiting: The Best Of Aretha Franklin 1980-1998” to Kendrick Lamar’s “GNX.”

It’s been a year since McBride bought her home, and outside a few hiccups, like a wasp infestation and disputes over property lines, everything is looking exactly how she envisioned it — literally.

“I used Canva to help design some of it before I even moved into the house, just by looking online at the pictures that they had on Zillow,” McBride told Business Insider. “I was able to download those and remodel it how I wanted. So my living room is exactly how I pictured it.”

What she couldn’t picture years ago was being a homeowner. Growing up in Los Angeles, homeownership was not something that she thought would be possible at 34 years old — and if she stayed in Los Angeles, it still might not be.

A financial incentive to move from California to Georgia helped McBride, now 35, decide to leave Los Angeles — although it didn’t take that much convincing. She was tired of the big city’s fast-paced lifestyle and slow-moving traffic and was looking for an out.

McBride applied to a remote-worker incentive program offered by Columbus, Georgia, a city in the western part of the state that borders Alabama. She received $5,000 in cash, as well as a range of other perks like a one-year membership to the Columbus Aquatics Center and a coffee date with the mayor.

Getting a little extra cash to move to a smaller city with a lower cost of living enabled McBride to become a homeowner for the first time. She’s enjoying decorating and living in her own house, and has grown accustomed to Southern culture and the area’s slower pace of living.

After following the ups and downs of McBride’s move in a series of interviews over the course of her first year in Columbus, she told me that overall, she’s pleased with her decision.

“I don’t really miss California — not yet,” she said.

Finally a homeowner

McBride didn’t expect to become a homeowner in her 30s. “I had the typical millennial experience: Went to college, had high student loan debt, and then I went through back-to-back layoffs. I was like, ‘What am I going to do?’”

At the time, she was working as a senior paid search manager for a marketing agency and living in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles — a neighborhood one exit shy of where the Kardashians live — and paying $3,400 a month for a two-bedroom apartment.

McBride didn’t need to know all the intricacies of buying a house to quickly realize that it would have been hard to make it work in Woodland Hills, where the median sale price was about $1.2 million in August 2024. Still, she tried saving money for a down payment to buy in California, but it wasn’t enough — and she didn’t qualify for much assistance because her salary was too high. So she started looking for places to live outside California, such as upstate New York and Virginia.

Though McBride graduated from Spelman College in nearby Atlanta and has family in Columbus, Georgia, the small city with a population of about 207,000, was never on her radar as a place to live.

“I was talking to my baby cousin, DJ, and he kept saying, ‘You should come to Columbus, cousin,’” McBride said. “I’m like, ‘What am I going to do in Columbus?’”

It wasn’t until she saw the incentive program go viral on social media that she considered it.

“I looked at it and I was like, ‘Well, this is perfect,’” McBride said. “If it’s meant to be, I’ll apply and hear back from them — and that’s exactly what I did.”

That was March 2024. That May, she learned she’d been accepted to the program. In August 2024, she closed on a three-bedroom home for $175,000. Now, McBride’s mortgage costs her about $1,500 a month — less than half of her rent in LA.

The benefits of living in Columbus aren’t just financial. Her home has more space for her to enjoy her hobbies, one of which is growing her own food. In California, McBride made it work by growing produce on her patio using storage bins with holes cut in the bottom for drainage. However, if she ever wanted to expand that operation, she would need more room — and a bigger budget.

“In California, you’ve got to have the money. The homes are $500,000-plus, but you don’t get the yardage. You don’t get the land like that. So it makes it kind of hard.”

McBride never dreamed of having a greenhouse, let alone a place to put it. But in Georgia, she has plans to build one on her property. She’s already growing lettuce, blueberries, bananas, red and white onions, peppers, and eggplants, and hopes to plant even more.

If she has to put in a little elbow grease to make the home and the yard her own, so be it.

“I went in with the intention that I might have to put work into a home,” McBride said. “I may have to get in there with a hammer. I may have to get in there with some paint and fix it up the way that I want to, but at least I have that.”

Settling in to small-city life

For the first few months after moving, McBride frequently traveled to Atlanta — a nearly two-hour drive from Columbus — and used it as a crutch for social activities and shopping. (Her nearest Trader Joe’s, she noted, is in Atlanta). Although she still travels to Atlanta occasionally, now that she’s established her community in Columbus, she’s found more to do closer to home. She joined the Urban League of the River Valley as well as the Columbus chapter of the National Council of Negro Women.

“I’ve been doing all the community service events. We’ve been going to different galas. We’ve been going to all types of stuff out here in Columbus,” she said. “Every time I meet somebody random, they either know my family, they either all go to the same churches, or they grew up with each other. Everyone knows each other or knows of somebody, which is very helpful when trying to get to know people out here.”

The way McBride sees it, that $5,000 cash incentive wasn’t what convinced her to move 2,000 miles across the country, though it was a nice sweetener that helped cover her closing costs and moving expenses. It was more so the program’s promise of activities and community-building opportunities that helped lighten the social burden of moving to a new city.

“For me, the cash incentive is reimbursement — that’s like icing on the cake,” McBride said. “With this, you’re not just moving. Now it’s like there are some activities I can look forward to, there are things where I’ll be able to go out there and just meet completely different people with different backgrounds and really get a head start on my personal Columbus community.”

She’s attended program-sponsored events such as dinners with other program members and coffee with the mayor, B.H. “Skip” Henderson III, who mapped out a vision for what Columbus could look like in the future.

Now, McBride said she sees herself in that vision.

“I’m happy with my decision,” she said. “My goal is to stay here for a couple of years at least.”