My college cult, eleven years later.

Eleven years later, my experience at the University of Florida is still eating sh — well, I think you get what this blog is about by now.

The miniseries is back for one final installment! In the first chapter, I talked about how my college classes were mostly underwhelming and functionally useless (bad). Then, I shared my journey through navigating the school’s oddly bankrupt clubs and activities (worse).

But this may be my favorite segment yet.

It’s hard to put into words, but there was one intangible quality about the University of Florida that ruined any chance of salvaging my experience. It was something so annoying and so pervasive that it made the genuine pursuit of a serious education impossible. I found it difficult to type any of this, as I’m shaking and sweating as I think about it. Just kidding. I’m laughing.

Everyone at the University of Florida was DERANGEDLY OBSESSED WITH THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA.

You think Donald Trump leads a cult? He’d shoot his daughter in the middle of Fifth Avenue for a chance to spend five minutes with Albert Gator.

I can’t help but smile, harkening back to the ridiculousness of it all. Picture it: GATOR EVERYTHING. Everywhere. All the time. All 55,000 students except me donned orange, blue, or both colors in every outfit, every day of their lives. Gator polos, Gator t-shirts, Gator jerseys, Gator sorority shorts, Gator flip flops, Gator caps, Gator wraparound sunglasses. On every person of every gender. All bags, bikes, and books were covered with Gator stickers, pins, and patches without exception.

Everyone’s dorm room? Plastered – Gator football or volleyball or basketball posters. A Gator head clock or “Parking for Gator Fans Only” novelty sign. Orange and blue Gator bedsheets and pillowcases. Gator doormats, drinkware, towels, and koozies.

I’m not talking about an odd duck fanatic here or there. This was EVERYBODY. Every single dorm. Every single apartment. The only contrast between them was the level of derangement. Freshmen, super seniors, professors, janitors, bus drivers, and all 250,000 Alachua County residents were tripping themselves to orgasm over showing UF pride.

I don’t normally have a problem with showing some school spirit or displaying team colors. This, emphatically, was NOT that.

The Gator Nation was a GD cult.

It wasn’t just the visual aesthetics, either. Professors, staff, and student leaders incorporated the colors, mascots, logos, building names, traditions, and inside jokes into lessons, exams, ice breakers, and general conversation. Gators this, Tim Tebow that. Word problems about the football team and quiz questions about the history of the campus. I understand that for tens of thousands of students, the school itself was a grand unifier. . . but I’d have rather not been unified at all. NOBODY TALKED ABOUT ANYTHING ELSE.

They say the derogatory term “NPC” is used too often, but in this case, everyone on campus was indeed a non-player character. They mindlessly went about their little Gator days, working their little Gator jobs, wearing their little Gator uniforms, eating their little Gator dining hall meals. They listened exclusively to either “Levels” by Avicii or “Tongue Tied” by Grouplove without a thought in their empty little heads (but hey, at least there were two unique choices when it came to music).

What mystified me most about this behavior was just how quickly the entire freshman class was indoctrinated. It’s not like they came to obsess over their school after, say, getting to know their professors and coursework, or finding a favorite activity and making friends. Everybody swore allegiance to the orange and blue on day one, with no thought or hesitation. The school was never expected to do anything in its own right to win its students over, and anyone who dared to show apprehension (me) was immediately outcast.

So Gator Nation was a cult, and every cult needs a brainwashing operation. In Gainesville, that brainwashing came in the form of Gator football tailgates.

Before anyone gets up in arms, I’m not saying I have a problem with football or tailgates, ordinarily. It was the psychotic culture around them that was disgraceful.

If it was a Saturday home game, a football tailgate was – quite literally – the ONLY activity going on all day, anywhere in Gainesville. Period. The city shut down completely in compliance with the Gator football dictatorship. Restaurants and businesses even in the outskirts of town were still completely devoted to the Church of the Swamp.

If you didn’t go to the game, you might as well have stayed in bed for the rest of the day or killed yourself. There was no chance you would be left with anything else to do.

By not going to the game, you were declaring to the world that you were a loner, a hermit, a loser with no friends. You were resigning yourself to never meeting anyone, to being excluded from every party and every conversation from then on, and even to being left out of class discussions in next Monday’s marketing lecture.

On the bright side, it may seem like the entire student body would have been united with the same Saturday activity. But because there were so many tailgates happening everywhere concurrently, it’s not like you’d be around anyone you knew. You’d find yourself at some random dorm lawn with that one kid you had a single conversation with in American history and a dozen obnoxious, fratty, tryhard, drunks in matching Tebow jerseys doing keg stands, screaming “let’s go!” and clapping at nothing. Unlike a party, where you could at least disappear to play with the dog, there was nowhere to hide at a Gator tailgate.

And that was all just before the game.

Once you were in the stadium, you were absolutely fucked. Sorry.

Four hours in the deadly, summer Florida humidity in the middle of the day. Jammed shoulder to shoulder with thousands of sweaty bodies, screaming out cult chants with no rhyme or reason. Too far away from the field to follow any gameplay, not that you’d want to. The cult chants? They were fun. Just kidding, they were absolutely stupid.

We were expected to bellow outdated chants at the top of our lungs with our brains turned off. We were never formally taught them, but of course, all the NPCs knew them by heart.

“WE ARE THE BOYS FROM OLD FLORIDA. . .” they roared as they swayed.

“TWO BITS, FOUR BITS, SIX BITS, A DOLLAR….” they screeched as they did the arm chomp gang sign.

“COME ON GATORS, GET UP AND GO!” they finished, exploding with perverted pleasure.

When the game was over, it wasn’t really over, of course. UF dominated almost every game for several seasons, and so the partying, screaming, drinking, and showboating continued deep into the night and the days that followed.

Now. . . perhaps it’s a little unfair to judge a maniacal display of pride when it’s connected to something as arousing as a football game; even non-sports fans could conceivably get swept up in the spirit. As embarrassing as a Gator gameday was, at least those displays were. . . understood? Expected?

By far, the most chilling example of deranged obsession came when I saw how my fellow classmates described themselves in a simple, introductory web design course.

We were learning HTML and CSS to build websites. Our professor had us go to a computer lab and show off what we’d learned with a personal website (clearly a useful lesson, just look at where you are). The sites were supposed to show off our personalities through their design and content.

I kid you not — more than half of the students in the class built websites that were solely ABOUT their love of the university. They were all orange and blue and decorated with photos of said student doing a Gator chomp or posing somewhere on campus. A bio would be like, “My name’s Sally, I’m 21, I go to UF, and I love being a Gator. In my spare time, I enjoy going to GatorNights or Orange & Brew, where I watch Gator football. I BLEED BLUE AND ORANGE!”

Many students had absolutely no other descriptors about themselves. How could a class full of college students have nothing else to say outside of pledging allegiance to the place they sit through PowerPoints?

Did no one there like talking about. . . movies? Music? Current events? Other hobbies? Anything not born and bred on the streets of Gainesville, Florida? (Actually, I take that back. Anyone who did like these things were arrogant and pretentious hipsters about them.)

I couldn’t help but draw a connection between my brain-dead classmates and another particular type of youngster: the overzealous, often-homeschooled child you may meet at a particular event, like on a cruise or at a religious retreat, who makes that event their entire personality overnight. You look at their social media and find that all of their friends are the people you both just met together. You cringe a bit and think. . . oh, I better be nice to this kid, this is all they have.

This was all they had! I am still utterly perplexed at how so many of my peers seemingly had ZERO identity outside of their UF enrollment. Weren’t these people not yet Gators just a few short years prior? Who were they in high school? Were they raving fanatics over their own high school mascot, or were they simping for UF even then?

Man, loving the University of Florida must be the most embarrassing parasocial relationship there is. You fawn over an institution that has no idea you exist and pledge your entire identity to an experience that does as little as possible to reward you back.

You think I’m exaggerating? Tell me what, specifically, UF offered that made them worth selling out your identity. A campus full of Subway restaurants? Dorms that felt like prisons? The same on-campus arts and craft activities every week? 100 percent humidity every waking moment of the day? Students that have not yet developed self-realization?

Were lecture courses that did not actually prepare you for a career worth bowing down for? What about the clubs that did absolutely nothing, if they ever did meet?

Don’t say anything about friendships, clubs, or parties. It’s not like the school was responsible for those.

You think you couldn’t have earned your exact same degree, met the exact same people, gone to the exact same events, had the exact same inside jokes, and wasted the exact same four years at FSU, Georgia, UCF, or anywhere else in the country?

Again, I don’t have a problem with school spirit, or with a university trying to make their students feel welcome. If you’re attending a school, you’re obviously likely to become a fan of theirs and want to wear their colors and decorate your living space to match.

But the school should EARN IT, dammit. You don’t just indoctrinate freshmen to bow down and glorify the institution from day one JUST BECAUSE. It’s a business: students pay money to get educational credits. Stop acting like there’s some kind of divinity at play just because some professor taught them about Pavlov’s dogs or supply and demand.

THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IS A CULT, and Sundries reported it first! ✍︎

P.S. Remember the Harlem shake? I think it was one of the worst viral trends of the 2010s, and like everyone else, UF put out their own attempt. As per the unwritten rules of the trend, after 30 seconds of the song, the video is supposed to end. Of course, the vain and insatiable Gators making the video couldn’t leave well enough alone, tacking on an additional 30 seconds of the crowd chanting and chomping and cheering just because. The video comments are full of more brainwashed zombies exalting the “epic” nature of the stunt. It really is the perfect encapsulation of the workings of the cult.

Special thanks to Ashley D'Achille and Dede D'Achille.