It’s the economy, stupid. It has to be. How else can you explain that the Florida Gators are 7-0, ranked number one in every poll that actually matters and owners of a national-best 17-game winning streak yet their national stock has taken a hit? The Gators are like that big corporation that announces a quarterly profit that doesn’t meet the higher expectations of Wall Street analysts. Just turning a profit isn’t good enough. They want more. With the Gators, winning alone isn’t good enough. The football analysts want more.
Supposedly, it’s all about the bottom line and in college football the bottom line is measured by wins and losses. If you play seven games, you can’t do better than 7-0.
“I think Lou Holtz says it best,” says Florida’s CEO, Urban Meyer. “Our job is real simple. Somehow you have to be the best team in the stadium on that day and then move on and get ready for the next one. We’ve done it seven times and I think most of them are double-digit victories.”
The Gators have been the best team in the stadium all seven games this season and six of the seven wins are by 10 or more points. Good numbers, for sure, but not good enough for so many of the college football industry’s top analysts, who have been taking their shots since week one. Florida opened its season with a blowout win over Charleston Southern of the Big South Conference. Alabama opened its season with Virginia Tech of the Atlantic Coast Conference. It’s been open season on the Gators ever since.
The Gators have survived a flu epidemic, a rash of injuries and a full two weeks of distractions after Tim Tebow suffered a concussion in their 41-7 win over Kentucky in Lexington. Even though they have yet to play a single game with a full complement of players or a lack of distractions — Dan Mullen vs. his old team was the latest one — they are still 7-0.
It’s not a pretty 7-0 nor is it a 7-0 that lends the impression that total dominance is right around the corner, but there are only seven unbeaten teams remaining in Division I football and the Gators are one of them. Perhaps they haven’t met all their team goals on a week-to-week basis, but they have met the most important goal, which is to win and advance.
Florida’s CEO, Urban Meyer, is quite happy that the Gators are 17-0 since last September 27 when they lost to Ole Miss. Since then they’ve won a national championship and if keep the streak alive seven more games, they’ll have two in a row and three in the last four years.
“We’ve had a lot of fun around here for 17 straight weeks, a lot of fun,” Meyer says. “We’ve had victory meals and it’s a lot of fun to sing that fight song in the locker room.” Listen to their many critics and you’d think Roseanne is singing the National Anthem once again.
The problem is the Gators aren’t winning big enough and it’s not for lack of opportunity. In 2008, when they were one of the highest scoring and most efficient offensive teams in the nation, the Gators got into the red zone 68 times during their 14-game schedule. Once inside the 20, the Gators scored 51 touchdowns and kicked 11 field goals, an astonishing 91.8 percent conversion rate.
Halfway through 2009, Florida is on the same pace but 36 trips into the red zone have produced only 16 touchdowns and 12 field goals. There have been four turnovers in the red zone.
Saturday night against Mississippi State, it took an element of surprise to score Florida’s one touchdown in the red zone. After four unsuccessful cracks at punching in a touchdown, the Gators lined up in the I-formation with Tim Tebow under center. Mississippi State was totally unprepared and Chris Rainey blew into the end zone from eight yards out.
“It’s something Mullen didn’t think we’d do at all,” Tebow said. “I thought it was a great call. doubt they practiced that one time all year in thinking about us in seeing us actually do a fake counter play to Rainey under center. You could see as the play developed that they were like ‘What? What is this?’ That was a really good call at that time and it worked and it was a big touchdown for us.”
It was a huge touchdown, not just because it ended a string of four straight trips into the red zone without putting the ball in the end zone but because it was something unexpected. If anything, the Gators are predictable the closer they get to the goal line. It’s Tebow left, Tebow right and Tebow up the middle. The jump pass to David Nelson that won the national championship game might still be in the playbook but it hasn’t been seen this year. The five-yard slant to Riley Cooper that was good for the touchdown that sealed the win over Alabama in the SEC Championship Game hasn’t been seen all year, either.
That element of predictability combined with the lack of red zone touchdowns had everything to do with Meyer stating after the win over Mississippi State Saturday night that he would begin re-evaluating what the Gators are doing in the red zone on the plane ride back to Gainesville. By Sunday night, Meyer said he and his offensive staff had reviewed every single red zone snap this season to determine what’s going wrong.
At first Meyer said it isn’t necessarily the play calling, which would make sense in that the Gators might be the best team in the country between the twenties. Then he threw in a comment that made it seem likely that once the Gators get the ball close, perhaps he’s leaning a bit too heavily on Tebow, who has been a short yardage battering ram the past three years.
“Sometimes we’re making a call that’s not on the call sheet and that’s my fault,” Meyer said.
The call sheet is a list of plays that should work in certain situations. It lists down and distance plus the anticipated defense in that situation. Perhaps it has become far too easy to ignore what should work to go with what’s worked in the past except that lately, opposing defenses completely sell out to stop Tebow and seemingly ignore any other possibility.
Against Mississippi State, Tebow scored on a 26-yard run but inside the 10 he carried the ball nine times for eight net yards and was 0-3 throwing the ball including a pick six that went 100 yards the other way.
Some of blame for the bad plays inside the 10 rests squarely on Tebow and some on Meyer for perhaps straying from the call sheet to go predictable. But, there is also a problem of busted assignments, an all too familiar theme this year.
“I don’t put it on Tim,” Meyer said. “I put it on the surrounding cast. I’m not blaming the receivers, not blaming it on the offensive line … I blame it on all 11 players and those three or four or five coaches, 27 coaches … whatever we’ve got. We have to do better in certain situations.”
In five SEC games, the Gators have managed only seven touchdowns in 26 red zone opportunities. They’ve kicked 12 field goals. Of the seven scoreless chances in the red zone, the Gators have turned the ball over four times and they’ve missed three field goals. The Gators should have beaten Tennessee, 37-6, but settled instead for a 23-13 win. Against Kentucky, they could have tacked on two more touchdowns. It should have been 31-3 at the half against Arkansas and if they had taken care of business against Mississippi State, it would have been a 31-0 halftime lead.
“We’re moving the ball and we’re making big plays,” Tebow said. “We’re driving down the field. The top two things for us to worry about are turnovers and scoring in the red zone, not kicking field goals but putting it in. If we keep kicking field goals, somewhere down the line it will cost us and cost us in a big way so that’s something we have to worry about, putting it in the end zone and turning the ball over.”
While it’s easy to criticize the Gators for their lack of red zone productivity, they aren’t the only team settling for field goals. That same Alabama team that so many of the critics want to anoint as the best team in the country has scored only two offensive touchdowns in the past three games while kicking 11 field goals. In the red zone, Alabama has one touchdown and eight field goals in the last three games.
Alabama is winning but so are the Florida Gators. Until Sunday, Florida’s stock had taken a hit with each ugly win but that changed after Alabama got in the red zone only one time and had to settle for four field goals to beat Tennessee, 12-10. After that less than dominating performance, Alabama, which had supplanted the Gators at #1 for one week in the Associated Press poll, returned to its more familiar #2 while the Gators returned to #1.
Perhaps Florida’s wins — just like the last three Alabama wins — haven’t been aesthetically pleasing but the Gators are 7-0 and each win gets them closer to the first unbeaten season in Florida football history. History tells us that Meyer will figure a way to get the offense untracked — he did an all-nighter back in 2005 to re-tool the offense to fit Chris Leak’s skills — but until he finds the red zone answers, he will take any win by any means necessary.
If Meyer wins seven more games in 2009, then it really won’t matter what the critics say because the Florida Gators will have won their third national championship in four years. National championships have a way of making winning good enough.