Rocky top rumble: Swampcast talks Florida football clash at No. 9 Tennessee

Florida football heads on the road to face No. 9 Tennessee on Saturday (7 p.m., ESPN) in what could prove another pivotal game for the future of head coach Billy Napier.

Swampcast discusses the matchup, in which the Florida Gators (3-2, 1-1 SEC) enter as a double-digit underdog despite winning 17 of the last 19 matchups between the two schools. As of Wednesday, per BetMGM, Tennessee was favored by 15.5 points,

Brockway said Florida could be catching the Vols (4-1, 1-1 SEC) at the right time, coming off a 19-14 loss at Arkansas. Tennessee is averaging just 19.5 points in its first two conference games.

"Tennessee with a young quarterback, a redshirt freshman quarterback Nico Iamaleava, it's been a little up and down for him in SEC play," Brockway said.

Whitley said a Florida upset over Tennessee is a must for Napier to cool down talk about his job status. Napier is 14-16 in his 30-game tenure at UF.

"This is probably the most pivotal game in Billy Napier's history, career, as a football coach," Whitley said. "If he loses it will be hard to envision how they scrape together a winning record."

Later, Brockway and Whitley were joined by USA Today national college football writer Blake Toppmeyer, who discussed the topsy-turvy nature of the SEC so far this season and how it will impact the number of bids the league will receive in a 12-team College Football Playoff.

"The cleanest path to a conference like the SEC or the Big Ten stockpiling playoff bids is get as many teams to 10-2 or better as possible," Toppmeyer said. "And so, I think you want or four or five top teams to generally hold serve against teams in the middle of the pack or the bottom of the conference and we didn't see that with Alabama losing to Vanderbilt."

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

This article originally appeared on The Gainesville Sun: Rocky top rumble: Swampcast talks Florida football clash at No. 9 Tennessee