Florida’s 41-3 season opening-win against Florida Atlantic couldn’t have followed a better script. Quarterback John Brantley looked cool and composed running the offense and the Gators jumped out to an early lead to roll to an easy win in the Swamp.
That was all part of the plan for offensive coordinator Charlie Weis, who scripted the game’s first 18 plays.
“I had 12 and six, I had two sets [of plays],” Weis said. “I had a 12-play sequence followed by a six-play sequence, because I wanted to see how it went.”
Weis, who said he likes to script anywhere from 12 to 24 plays to start games, was very pleased with how his team carried out the plan he set out for them.
Aside from a minor hiccup on a bad snap to Brantley for a loss of 15 yards on the game’s opening drive, Florida stuck to the script just like he wanted.
“I wasn’t counting on the snap over John’s head,” Weis said. “I didn’t factor that one in, so [I changed] a couple plays after that.”
To make Weis’ early plans work in games, he needs a quarterback he can count on to run the offense effectively and get Florida in and out of the right runs and protections.
By all accounts, Brantley did that excellently in a game he completed 70 percent of his passes in.
“First of all, I thought he managed the team for an opener as well as you could possibly do,” Weis said. “He had only one error that I would question his mental (focus) on the whole evening.”
While the bad snap may have derailed Brantley’s confidence a year ago, the senior quarterback stuck with it and managed to complete a pass to Quinton Dunbar on the sideline to put Florida back in field goal range on the opening drive.
“That was one of our non-conversions on third down, but to me that was a conversion because that got us points,” Weis said. “For our first rattle out of the box to have minimal mental mistakes at the quarterback position, that’s a very good start.”
Brantley missed on a few throws throughout the night, but far more often he was deadly accurate on passes in the flats, leading his man perfectly in stride.
The improved accuracy and extra time in the pocket certainly didn’t go unnoticed by Florida’s offensive coordinator.
“I thought that he showed very good accuracy, he showed very good poise,” Weis said. “There were a lot of things to be pleased about.”
Still, there were things Brantley could have done better. He missed Gerald Christian badly on a post to the end zone over the middle, and an underthrown ball to Deonte Thompson in the end zone resulted in an interception.
Those are things Weis will be working with him on to improve as Florida moves closer to the heart of its schedule.
“Turning the ball over twice, that’s not what we are looking for,” Weis said. “As you know when you throw interceptions there are a number of factors that factor in on interceptions. The end result is that it goes down as the quarterback is the guy. So I’m not going to pass it off on other people.”
Florida’s players and coaches don’t expect to win many games with a -3 turnover ratio like the one they had against Florida Atlantic.
“When you have a -3 turnover ratio for the game, usually you are going to lose,” Weis said. “That’s one of our points of emphasis not just with John Brantley, but with the whole offense.”
Brantley knows he’s got work to do, and having an offensive guru like Weis in his ear about things he needs to improve on has been a huge benefit to Florida’s top signal caller.
“He has the people upstairs telling him what’s going on,” Brantley said. “Having him right there (on the sideline) and getting the feedback from him helps me out a lot throughout the game.”
The senior from Ocala will be working on a couple things this week to improve his play, but the one thing he and Weis are focusing on the most is his footwork.
That’s an area Brantley said he really wants to improve in Florida’s game Saturday night at 7 p.m. against UAB.
“I need to work on some footwork a little bit more,” he said. “It’s a little different footwork in this offense, and just need to carry that over from practice into the game. It’s always a different setting in the game. You don’t really think about that as much as you should, and I just need to work on that a little bit more.”