BATON ROUGE, La. — “Theirs but to do & die, into the valley of death rode the six hundred.”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the famed British poet, wrote those words in his poem “The Charge of the Light Brigade.”
Replace “valley of death” with Death Valley and “the six hundred” with the 70-or-so players who made the trip to Baton Rouge for the Florida Gators, and the task remained the same: This game was Florida’s to do or to die.
Ultimately the Gators (8-2, 6-2 Southeastern Conference) won, 16-10, defeating No. 16 LSU (6-4, 4-3 SEC) in the most impressive win of coach Jim McElwain’s Florida tenure.