It’s easy to come up with reasons that the Florida Gators will storm through the college football schedule this fall, even ones that don’t include all players on teams without Tim Tebow getting caught up in some reverse Rapture.

But it’s harder to come up reasons against. I tried my best, though.

1. The schedule is back-loaded, if it is loaded at all. Though Florida State has been down of late, losing four straight in their series, and though the game is in Gainesville, it’s an annual worry for UF supporters, and stranger things have happened in the rivalry. Further, the Gators likely won’t repeat without winning another SEC title, and Nick Saban’s Alabama squad isn’t stockpiling talent in Tuscaloosa to lose to UF. If the Gators lose this year, it will probably be too late for them to regain the ground they did after their loss to Ole Miss last year.

2. The wild West. The Gators have to travel to Starkville and Baton Rouge this year, and neither is a cakewalk for opponents. While Death Valley is always a swirling mass of purple, gold, and alcohol, and might be host to a dangerous night game, Starkville is probably the SEC’s Bermuda Triangle, a place where cowbells and hostility have heralded catastrophe for the Gators in the past.

3. Picking up for Percy. The Gators lost the best player – when healthy – in college football last year to the NFL Draft, and will have to replace Harvin’s stunning skills and colossal production (11.8 yards per touch and 17 TDs in just 12 games in 2008). The likely candidates are quarkbacks Jeff Demps and Chris Rainey, ballyhooed freshman Andre Debose, and sure-handed tight end Aaron Hernandez, but none on his own is near Harvin’s caliber. Should the offense stall, a Tim Tebow season more like his Heisman campaign of 2007 is likely: The Gators lost five games that year, and would rather not see that recur.

4. Complacency and inconsistency. As a Gators fan since the beginning of college football in the fall of 1996 (LALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU 1996 FIESTA BOWL), I can tell you that there is a storied history of teams wearing orange and blue dropping head-scratchers. Last year’s 31-30 home loss to Ole Miss is one of them; the recent Auburn voodoo has produced others; there have even been strangely flat performances against Vanderbilt and Kentucky in recent years. The Gators will probably hold an significant talent advantage over every team they face; what set apart the 2006 and 2008 title teams were swarming, angry defenses and relentlessly precise offenses. Those things are products of hard work and easily disrupted by laziness.

5. Pressure and drama. Though the Gators probably won’t get quite the deafening hype of the 2005 USC squad, which was touted as perhaps the best team in the history of college football, you can be sure the storyline will be worked over more than a few times by September. That, the absurd rumors about Urban Meyer’s future that even unambigous denials won’t quell, and the Tebow-as-gridiron-messiah narrative will heap pressure on the Gators as the figurehead of college athletics. They must rise to the occasion as they have in the past.

6. Texas. Though Oklahoma’s record-breaking offense was throttled by Florida’s defense (which returns its entire two-deep intact for 2009) in the BCS Championship Game, it was Texas that provided the blueprint to do so. Though the ‘Horns saw Brian Orakpo bolt for the NFL, they have linebacker Sergio Kindle at the ready to wreck opponents under fiery defensive coordinator Will Muschamp, who was 2-0 against UF teams coached by Meyer in 2006 and 2007 while in the same position with Auburn. Oh, and Colt McCoy, who, much like Tebow, is sort of decent at football and having an attractive girlfriend.