For the record, Steve Addazio didn’t hear the boos that began tumbling down the Ben Hill Griffin Stadium midway through last Saturday’s loss to LSU.
But even if he had heard the jeers — the byproduct of the Gators’ anemic offensive performance, and, as bloggers and message board folks have suggested, less-than-stellar play-calling — Florida’s offensive coordinator wouldn’t have paid them much mind anyway.
“Hey, this is not a sport for the thin-skinned, now,” Addazio said this week. “This is a tough business, and I think we’ve talked about this before here — you came here for a reason. It’s high expectations. That’s why you’re here, that’s what it’s all about. You better embrace that. If you don’t embrace that, then you’re at the wrong place.”
The expectations, certainly, are there. Following a three-year stretch that has included two national titles and a Sugar Bowl victory, the expectations are probably higher than they’ve ever been, even if do-it-all quarterback Tim Tebow is now wearing a Denver Broncos uniform and the Gators are in a bit of a rebuilding mode.
It’s living up to those expectations that has proven a difficult task for this year’s offense.
You can point to a number of reasons for the Gators’ lack of offensive success through the first half of this college football season — injuries, a lack of experience at key positions, the inability to come up with “home run” plays — but the fact is that. to this point, things haven’t gone quite as expected.
Both total offense and scoring offense have dropped off significantly since last season, when the Gators ranked in the top 10 nationally in both categories, and with the possible exception of the team’s victory over Kentucky on Sept. 25, it can be argued that Florida has yet to put everything together offensively for an entire 60 minutes this season.
This year’s average of 323.67 yards per game, for instance, is more than 130 yards less than last year’s average of 457.86 yards, and the Gators are averaging nearly five fewer points per game than they did in ’09.
Not since 2006, meanwhile, has the program averaged fewer points per game, and that season, the Gators were blessed with the nation’s sixth-ranked defense.
Still, despite the cyber displeasure with Addazio’s unit — a “Fire Steve Addazio” site has recently popped up on the interwebs, and some have bristled at what they consider predictable play-calling — Florida coach Urban Meyer expressed confidence this week in the job Addazio has done.
He acknowledged that Addazio’s responsibilities as both offensive coordinator and offensive line coach can be challenging at times, but also pointed to last year’s success as evidence that the second-year coordinator can handle the workload.
“I remember hearing about it (previously) that (former offensive coordinator) Dan Mullen was taking a lot of heat,” Meyer said. “But who is he taking heat from is the key thing.”
Speaking of Mullen, the former returns to Gainesville as head coach of a Mississippi State team that enters the weekend with a 4-2 record (1-2 in the SEC). His presence comes at an interesting time, with a Gators defense struggling uncharacteristically and Mississippi State averaging a healthy 416.83 yards and 31.67 points per contest.
Addazio, for his part, seems committed to improving. He acknowledges that issues remain — from a lack of big plays to poor execution in the red zone — entering the second half of what figures to be a daunting SEC schedule.
And getting those issues corrected, he says, is priority number one.
“In every game we’re doing some really good things,” Addazio said. “I know it gets boring sometimes for me to stand here and tell you that (it does), you just like to see those good things done more consistently. And that’s evident. And … getting that right, there’s a lot of factors that go on.
“I’m not making excuses,” he added, “we just got to keep working.”
— Gator Country reporter Dugan Arnett can be reached at dugan@gatorcountry.com. You can also follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/duganarnett.