By Will Miles
Evaluating Mike White
Both in 2018 and 2019, I’ve written Gators basketball post-mortems that have preached that patience is needed for Gators fans towards Mike White.
The logic has been pretty simple. Basketball is not football. Florida basketball is not the level of program that Florida football is, despite the two championships in ’06 and ’07. And White has been bringing in high-level recruits who should start to close the gap between his teams’ performances and those of his predecessor, Billy Donovan.
Well, that hasn’t happened. Three years ago it was fair to look at White’s performance and say he was on-track with Donovan. After all, his 2016 Gators squad was better (both by record and point differential) than Donovan’s 2015 team. That point differential spiked to just below 12 points per game in 2017 and White’s team made it to the Elite 8.
That point differential of 12 is important because all of Donovan’s Final Four teams achieved at least that level of separation from its opponents.
But since that 2017 team, White has produced the following point differentials:
- 2018 – 6.6
- 2019 – 4.2
- 2020 – 5.9
- 2021 – 5.7 (thus far)
Donovan coached at Florida for 19 seasons. He only fell below a 6.6 point per game differential four times. White will have achieved that feat for the past four seasons (and 5 of 6 seasons total) if 2021 continues the way it has started.
In many ways the 2020 season was a free pass for a lot of coaches because of the COVID-19 shutdown. You can understand why fans and the administration would want to give White more time after the 2021 season as well, due to what his team has been through with the loss of Kyontae Johnson.
But at what point do we stop making excuses? I don’t expect White to replicate what Billy Donovan did. There’s a reason that his name graces the court in the O’Connell Center. But at this point, it feels like the 2014 season when Jeremy Foley decided to give Will Muschamp one more year after the football team was ravaged by injuries. That didn’t turn out so great.
Urban Meyer to the Jaguars
It’s official. Urban Meyer is the new head coach for the Jacksonville Jaguars.
Set aside whatever feelings I might have about Meyer, this is a home run hire for the Jaguars. That statement is true even if Meyer goes 3-13 for the next three years before getting fired.
This is an organization that has outsourced games to London to try and gain attention and fans. This is an organization that has lived through the Blake Bortles era and has only been over .500 twice since 2008. This is an organization that has been so irrelevant that the fan base latched on to Gardner Minshew as a potential savior just last year.
Regardless of whether Meyer wins or not, the Jaguars are relevant because they have decided to do something different. They could have gone and hired someone like Adam Gase or Jason Garrett. They could have gone with some 35-year old coordinator from the McVay coaching tree.
But instead, the Jaguars are answering a question lots of college football fans have wanted to know for a long time: can Urban Meyer win in the NFL in a way that Nick Saban could not.
I wouldn’t have watched the Jaguars in 2021. They’re not my team. I’ll be watching now. Even if Meyer doesn’t win, that’s a win for the Jaguars.
Meyer not doing Mullen any favors
The downside to Meyer being with the Jaguars is that his relationship tree is extraordinarily similar to Dan Mullen’s.
That’s to be expected since Meyer and Mullen coached together. But the degree to which there has been overlap has been pretty astonishing. Chris Ash and Charlie Strong have both been mentioned as options to help the Gators defense. Instead, it appears that both will end up with the Jaguars.
It normally wouldn’t be that big of a deal except these are defensive coaches and Florida clearly needs help on that side of the ball. The decision to keep Todd Grantham is already going to raise the heat on Mullen and the defense in 2021. To miss on potential hires because his mentor took a job just down the road only makes the turnaround on that side of the ball even more difficult.
But what I said in the earlier section about Jacksonville probably applies here as well. There is probably value in thinking outside the box and not bringing in a former Meyer assistant on that side of the ball. Someone you know is much less apt to ask why you’re doing something the way you are. They already know.
But that’s exactly what Grantham needs. Someone to question why things are being done the way they are and to suggest modifications that might improve things. And that approach has the added benefit of the assistant won’t be sniped by Meyer.
Christian Robinson returns?
Speaking of defensive assistants, news broke last week that linebackers coach Christian Robinson was going to take a job with Michigan. But then news came that Florida was trying to retain him, offering to match or even exceed the salary that he had agreed to with the Wolverines.
You can understand why Florida wants to keep Robinson. He has been a bright spot in recruiting in a way that other assistants have not. He has been the primary recruiter for Ty’Ron Hopper, Derek Wingo, Jahari Rogers and Jeremiah Williams – all top-100 recruits – that Florida has recently signed.
But I do worry about this situation a little bit for Robinson. Reports are that he had a contract in hand and just had to sign it to jump to Michigan. I don’t begrudge Robinson maximizing his earning potential when he can, especially given the volatility that he clearly should be feeling about the defensive staff at Florida. But you don’t want to burn bridges in the coaching ranks and he could be potentially doing that by backing out of his agreement with Michigan.
So that may end up being a great thing for the Gators, as they retain an ace recruiter and maintain some continuity on the defensive side of the ball. I just hope it doesn’t stunt the opportunities that come Robinson’s way in the future.
Playoff recruiting
This week on Read and Reaction, I looked at the level of recruiting that has been necessary to historically make the College Football Playoff. It doesn’t paint a pretty picture for Florida moving forward.
The average number of 5-star and top-100 recruits for playoff teams has been 8.8 and 23.5, respectively. Florida had four 5-star recruits and 16 top-100 recruits on the 2020 roster, and that includes transfers. The story gets even worse if you look at the SEC specifically, where playoff participants from the best conference in America have averaged 16.4 5-stars and 38.4 top-100 recruits.
Even if you just look at non-Alabama teams, Georgia in 2017 and LSU in 2019 still averaged 9.0 5-stars and 21.0 top-100 recruits. And the problem with eliminating Alabama from the analysis is that Alabama is in Florida’s conference.
This type of recruiting shows up when we look at overall SEC wins as well. There isn’t any team that has won more than 25 games in a 4-year span who didn’t average a top-5 national recruiting class over the same time-frame. And there were only four teams with an average recruiting class rated 10th or worse that won 20 games over a 4-year span.
Coming into 2021, Florida is likely going to have a 4-year recruiting average of around 11th. Mullen will definitely get over 20 wins in his first 4 seasons because he’s already at 19 wins, thanks in part to 10 SEC games in 2020. But eliminating the A&M and Arkansas games would have put Florida’s SEC record at 7-1 in a normal year, placing Florida at 18 wins in Mullen’s first two seasons.
That means something has to give. Either Mullen is going to blow away the record that other SEC teams have had with sub top-10 classes, or 2021 is going to be a rough year. I’m betting on the former.
But I’m worried about the latter.
Gators offense in 2021
A lot of that is going to be predicated on the Gators offense.
Dan Mullen has shown to be an offensive wizard, but replacing Kyle Trask, Kyle Pitts and Kadarius Toney is a big task. Combine that with also replacing Stone Forsythe and Brett Heggie (his best offensive linemen) and it is possible that the offense takes a significant step back.
The thing that makes me think Mullen will be able to overcome history is that he’s done it before. When Mississippi State lost Dak Prescott to the NFL, the Bulldogs went from scoring 34.4 points per game in 2015 to 30.4 points per game in 2016 under Nick Fitzgerald.
Considering that Mississippi State’s yards per pass attempt fell from 7.8 to 6.1, only seeing a drop-off of 4 points per game is a pretty significant miracle.
That miracle was possible because Mullen adjusted his offense to fit his personnel. In 2015, Mississippi State threw the ball 56.8% of the time, ranking 9th in the country. The next year, the Bulldogs threw the ball 44.6% of the time, ranking 78th in the country. Mullen did something similar in 2019 after Feleipe Franks went down.
That is an uncommon thing for coaches, who often stick to their “system” rather than adjust their system to the skill sets of their players or only recruit players who fit their system.
Emory Jones replacing Kyle Trask
Emory Jones is better than Nick Fitzgerald. But Kyle Trask was better than Dak Prescott.
That’s the conundrum that we confront when we start exploring how the Gators offense is going to go with Jones at the helm instead of Trask. To ask Jones to be better than Trask is patently unfair, considering that the only way to be better is to win the Heisman Trophy. To ask him to be just as good means we need him to be in the top-4 players in the country.
Is that possible? He certainly has the skill set.
But that wasn’t possible for Trask until he had almost a full year of starting under his belt from the 2019 season. He took a leap that not many of us saw coming in 2020, but that leap isn’t possible without the experience from the year prior.
Jones has had plenty of time in Mullen’s system. Mullen knows what he does well and what he doesn’t. And he has shown to be an explosive runner (5.6 yards per rush on 92 carries) in his career thus far.
I would have said that it was unlikely that Kyler Murray would be able to outperform Baker Mayfield after Mayfield lit up the Big 12 in 2016 and 2017. Murray won the Heisman. I would have said it was just as unlikely that Jalen Hurts would put up big numbers similar to Murray after transferring from Alabama. Hurts averaged 11.3 yards per attempt in 2019.
What do these QBs have in common? Lincoln Riley.
We’ll get to see whether Mullen has the same ability to coax elite performances consistently out of his QBs like Riley has.
Delance/Reese returning
With the announcement that Stewart Reese is coming back, the entire right side of the Gators offensive line is coming back.
I know that Reese and Jean Delance are not Gators fans favorites. Certainly there were times where they visibly struggled. But continuity is important, and so is a recognition that Florida’s offense is going to be different.
Delance played pretty well when he was asked to run block. The same is true for Reese. The Gators averaged 4.51 yards per rush attempt behind those two while only averaging 3.77 behind the left side of the line. That just wasn’t what Florida wanted and/or needed to do in 2020.
That won’t be the case in 2021, as regardless of how good Emory Jones is, the Gators are sure to feature the QB run a whole lot more. Add to that the 5-star running backs I’ll talk about in a minute, and Florida is now going to be tailoring its offense to the strengths of Delance and Reese rather than away from them.
That was the reasonable thing to do in 2020 since Trask was so good and Pitts and Toney could get open whenever they had one-on-one coverage (and sometimes when double-teamed). But I suspect we’re going to think of the right side of the line as a strength after a couple of games in 2021.
Lingard, Bowman and the running game
The Florida run game had alarmingly few explosive plays in 2020. That should change in 2021 with transfers Lorenzo Lingard and Demarkcus Bowman getting added to the fold.
Lingard was eligible in 2020 but didn’t play much at all, likely due to the absence of spring practice and a need to have running backs who could excel catching the ball and in pass protection because of Trask. That changes in 2021 with Jones.
Just look at 247Sports comparisons for these guys. They compared Lingard to Adrian Peterson(!) coming into Miami. They compare Bowman to Arkansas’ Felix Jones and project him as a second or third round NFL draft pick on his recruiting page.
That Arkansas backfield may actually be a good comparison if both of them can progress in Mullen’s system. But those teams had Casey Dick and Mitch Mustain at QB.
That isn’t to say that Malik Davis, Nay’Quan Wright and Dameon Pierce won’t have a role. But I think they proved in 2020 that none of them are a true difference maker, at least at the running back position.
Bowman and Lingard have the opportunity to be true difference makers. And those kinds of guys don’t come around too often. If Mullen is going to keep the offense humming in 2020, he’s going to need to integrate them into the offense, and early.
Wide receiver separation
There were lots of reasons to be discouraged following the loss to LSU this season.
The loss of a chance to play for a spot in the playoff. The lack of discipline on defense culminating in the shoe toss. The missed field goal with the shot to go to overtime.
But the thing that sticks with me from that game is that without Kyle Pitts in the game, the only player who could consistently get separation from a depleted LSU backfield was Kadarius Toney.
Well, Toney and Pitts are gone and I have real questions about the receivers who are stepping into the void.
Last season, I wrote about how while Florida was losing Tyrie Cleveland, Josh Hammond, Freddie Swain and Van Jefferson that Toney, Pitts, Trevon Grimes and Jacob Copeland were actually more explosive in their opportunities in 2019. The seniors accounted for 28 of 55 total explosives that season.
This year, Florida had 75 explosives and Toney, Pitts, Grimes and Copeland were responsible for 50 of them. Malik Davis contributed 6 explosives and nobody else contributed more than 3. That jives with what I saw on the field, particularly in that LSU game.
We should expect a step back in the passing game considering who Florida has lost the past two seasons. Not a lot of programs would be able to replace six NFL receivers and a transcendent tight end.
But that’s why Lingard and Bowman are so important. Florida is going to have to replace that production somewhere, and the obvious place is at running back.