Florida at LSU: Gameday Tidbits
Saturday, October 10, 2009 at 10:25AM 
By JOHN P. WISE
One Great Season
BATON ROUGE, La. -- You know those weekly media luncheons I go to every Monday or Tuesday where the coach of the home team speaks and takes questions?
Well, the hard-working folks in the Sports Information Departments at each of these schools publish a notebook that has every fact or statistic you could ever need. Below are some of the more interesting tidbits gleaned from those documents as we await Saturday's kickoff between Florida and LSU:
+ LSU has won 32 straight home games played on Saturday nights. Coach Les Miles is 20-0 in prime-time games at Death Valley.
+ Florida leads the SEC and is among the top three nationally in total offense and total defense.
+ Saturday's game will mark the 11th time that the previous two national champs (Florida last year, LSU in 2007) have met. The defending champ is 4-5-1 in such games and has lost four in a row.
+ The winner of this game has gone on to win the last three national championships (Florida also won the 2006 title).
+ Florida coach Urban Meyer is 6-1, while at Florida, against top-five teams. Meyer, whose Gators were idle last week, also is 28-3 overall when he has more than a week to prepare for a game.
+ LSU also welcomed a No. 1 team to Tiger Stadium last year, when Alabama squeaked by with a 27-21 OT victory.
+ LSU beat Florida the last time the Gators visited while ranked No. 1, in 1997.
On another note, I seem to be telling this story a lot this week: Legendary broadcaster Verne Lundquist, who's been around for a while and has called seemingly every great sporting event under the sun, didn't call his first Saturday night game at Tiger Stadium until 2007. You guessed it, it was the Florida-LSU game.
Anyway, Tony Barnhart told spartyandfriends in the preseason that Lundquist called him up afterward and said of that game in Death Valley: "Tony, that was the most incredible atmosphere that I’ve ever seen."
If Verne Lundquist was moved by that game, I think I'm in for a real treat tonight.
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