GAINESVILLE, Fla. _ The No. 22 Florida Gators expect a sellout crowd Saturday afternoon when No. 5 LSU visits the Swamp.
It will be the first packed house on the Gators' home field in three seasons. Coach Dan Mullen expects it to be the first of many sellouts while he is on the sideline.
"I expect it to not be an open seat anywhere in the Swamp," he said Monday. "I expect to see people on their feet. Great challenge."
Sellouts were a given at UF when Mullen was the team's offensive coordinator from 2005-08. This one will be the first since Florida State visited the Swamp in late November of 2015 and the first SEC sellout since Ole Miss visited that October.
The game will shown on CBS at 3:30 p.m.
UF has reported fewer than 90,000 fans every game the past two seasons and has not drawn even 82,000 fans in three homes games this season. The Gators exceeded the 90,000 threshold during all 27 home games of Mullen's four seasons in Gainesville and lost just twice.
Mullen believes it is a key to a program's ability to win. The 46-year-old said it begins with the student section, a big reason he met with fraternities, sororities and student groups endlessly during the offseason.
"If you look in college football, student bodies set the tempo and really set the atmosphere for everybody else out there," he said. "They come in and they're on their feet, jumping up and down, going crazy in the game, I think the rest of the crowd feeds off that.
"That's one of the things that I want us to get back to: having the student body really dominating the environment."
