For an undefeated, top-ranked team, Florida needed Saturday's blowout over Georgia very badly, for all kinds of reasons. Mainly, the win was for the benefit of the revived offense, which got untracked after accounting for fewer than 24 points (its worst output en route to the national championship in 2008) three weeks in a row, and finished three long touchdown drives in the first half to break out of its recent habit of settling for field goals. For the pollsters, a 24-point blitzing of a perennial heavyweight -- even a struggling heavyweight with one of the worst defenses in the conference this year -- is bound to cut into some of the doubts that have begun to creep in over the last month.

It also did wonders for team chemistry, if you believe All-American linebacker Brandon Spikes, who admitted the locker room had begun to fray a bit after last week's tougher-than-expected win over Mississippi State -- including a "skirmish" between Spikes and Tim Tebow after the anointed quarterback served up two interceptions returned for touchdowns in the worst game of his career:

Here is the transcript of the question asked by Florida Times-Union columnist Gene Frenette:

"Let me ask you this specifically: You and Tim had a little skirmish after the Mississippi State game. You guys got it resolved ..."

Spikes replied: "Me and T's friends, brothers. It wasn't nothing. It was all positive. We came together me and him, got the team together and we kind of got things right."

"There was," Tebow admitted during his news conference, "a lot of turmoil this past week."
[...]
"We kind of know what it takes, me and Tebow," Spikes said after returning for the first time in two weeks because of an injury. "We get on guys and hold them accountable, let them know, 'What's your value to the team?' Things weren't getting done the way we expected. We had a team meeting, we may have stepped on a few toes. ..."

That may help explain why Tebow shunned the media in Starkville for the first time in his career, and why the word around the Gators all week was "frustrated." That certainly wasn't the case Saturday, during or after the game -- after getting in each others' faces, airing their dirty laundry, doing primal scream, or whatever "turmoil" in this case entails, everything was copacetic in Jacksonville.

And if the Gators run the table to Pasadena for the BCS title game in January, fully expect to hear about the "team meeting" following the low point against Mississippi State as a rougher-edged analogue to last year's overhyped, immortalized "Promise" speech following the Gators' early loss to Ole Miss. Think of "The Skirmish" as a grungier, defensively-led team's anti-Kodak moment.