By Will Miles
Friday Night Lights
Friday Night Lights has come and gone, and Florida had a relatively successful go of it.
This event is usually for recruiting classes in the future rather than the one immediately coming up, and by that metric, it did not disappoint. It certainly is nice not to have to write an article detailing why having no commitments after FNL isn’t a bad sign again.
To have two top-100 commitments for the class of 2023 a couple of days before and during FNL is a big deal, as it sets the tone for the 2023 class in a way that the tone has never been set for 2022. Especially coming off of the coaching changes in the secondary, the recruiting limitations due to rule violations by Mullen and staff, and the disappointing 3-game losing streak to finish the 2020 season, building momentum is a big deal.
We’ll see if that holds. FNL isn’t the be-all, end-all of recruiting, but it is a great place to start, and Florida got a good start this year.
Evan Stewart
Forgive me for fan-boying a little bit, but did you see any of the Evan Stewart highlights at FNL?
Stewart showed an incredible burst off the line of scrimmage, quick change of direction and an ability to go get the ball at its highest point. He also seemed to show a tightening bond with Florida QB commit Nick Evers.
Dan Mullen has built the Florida offense into a really good unit. Last season, you might have even called it great. But even last year’s offense relied on spreading the ball around quite a bit rather than just having one dominant player. Percy Harvin’s name is thrown around a lot, but the idea of knowing that Percy was going to get the ball and still knowing that the defense wasn’t going to be able to stop him is what truly transitions an offense from great to elite.
I’m not saying Stewart is going to be Harvin, but he’s a track athlete who looked really smooth on the field the other night. Whether Florida can close the deal is the big question, but all I know is that I hope Nick Evers is a great recruiter.
2023 Recruiting
The 2023 recruiting class is off to a fantastic start.
Granted the class only consists of two players, but those two players – tight end Mac Markway and wide receiver Raymond Cottrell – are both top-100 recruits with big-time profiles. Markway comes from a line of tight ends (his dad played at Iowa and his cousin plays at South Carolina), so you know he’s going to know the position coming in.
Cottrell hails from Milton, FL, which is actually closer to Tuscaloosa than it is to Gainesville. The fact that Mullen and Co. were able to pull a player so highly regarded out of the panhandle, away from both Alabama and Florida State is a big deal.
The Gators’ class now has a 247Sports average player ranking of 96.62, which is far-and-away the best ranking a Gators class has had in nearly a decade. Again, I know it’s only two players, but those two players are rated higher than anybody in Florida’s 2022 class.
It’s a big deal that they’re finally off to a fast start.
2022 Recruiting
Of course, we can’t say the same thing for the 2022 class.
Evers seems like a fantastic get. Running back Terrance Gibbs committed during Friday Night Lights and if he can overcome his ACL injury, is a high-level talent as well. But Julian Humphrey is the highest ranked player in the class, and he’s ranked 95th overall. Defense tackle Walter Nolan (2nd ranked player overall) appears to be looking at other places. Stewart is being predicted by most pundits to end up at Texas.
There’ll be a lot of chatter regarding this class and how bad it is. That isn’t really true. The 247Sports average player ranking is 89.87, which is pretty close to what it has been for the classes of 2021 (90.30), 2020 (90.74), 2019 (90.56) and 2018 (90.75) under Mullen. I suspect Mullen is going to fill out the class with players who bump up that 89.87 up into the 91-range where it has been since the beginning of his tenure.
But what this should do is put to rest the argument that winning improves recruiting over time. That just isn’t true. Instead, what we have is an interesting science experiment. Mullen is going to try to beat Georgia, Alabama and LSU with less talent, and he’s given us reason to believe he might be up to it.
OL Recruiting
Over on the Gators Breakdown discord chat, there’s been a lot of talk about recruiting, specifically about recruiting on the offensive line. The tweet below references data provided by a member, showing Florida ranking 7th for both the top-8 recruits and top-5 recruits from the 2019-2021 classes.
https://twitter.com/gatordave_sec/status/1422633853131366401?s=21
I have been a proponent of focusing energy on top-50 ranked guys and then don’t worry about whether you get players ranked in the 100s, 200s, or 600s from there on because those guys make it to the league in about equal numbers. That’s particularly true on the offensive line.
But you have to get top-50 guys to make that work. Instead, Florida is just settling for guys ranked in the 300s over and over and having similar problems up-front as South Carolina and Tennessee. Thankfully, they’ve had guys like Trask, Pitts and Toney to bail them out when the OL hasn’t been able to open up holes for running backs or hold up against blitzes and stunts.
But if you want to know why Jean Delance was in the games last year – and why I’ve defended him – this is the reason. There isn’t anyone more talented to put in there, and likely there isn’t anyone all that much better pushing from behind on the depth chart.
Christmann on preseason Groza list
Evan McPherson came under quite a bit of criticism last season, particularly after he missed a potential game-tying field goal against LSU. But McPherson was a really good kicker, with really good accuracy from far out, and he opened up Dan Mullen’s ability to be aggressive once he got into enemy territory.
That’s why it is important that Mississippi State transfer Jace Christmann steps up into the kicker role vacated by the departing McPherson. Christmann knows Dan Mullen, having committed to him at Mississippi State. However, he also lost his job at Mississippi State to Arizona State transfer Brandon Ruiz las season. This is after making 80% of his field goals in his first three years at State.
For all of the grumbling about McPherson, he made 85% of his field goals while in Gainesville, and even last year made 77.3% of his attempts. So last year’s performance is probably what we’re going to get from Christmann.
Who knows? Perhaps a change of scenery and a familiar face – along with tutelage from former Virginia Tech kicker Shayne Graham – will push Christmann into McPherson territory. But he needs to live up to the preseason Groza hype if Dan Mullen is going to be able to keep his aggression up in enemy territory in 2021.
Most important player on special teams in 2021?
I harp on special teams. A lot. The reason is that I have seen at both of my alma maters the value of special teams and the way it can change games.
I grew up watching Virginia Tech (my family is from Blacksburg) and saw how Frank Beamer’s “Beamerball” helped build that program. Then, I watched as Urban Meyer had athletes all over the field and Brandon James kept flipping the field and helped change momentum with one punt return. And while we think about Tebow, Leak and the defense in 2006, the real reason that team won the championship was the special teams play by Jarvis Moss against South Carolina.
That has been missing thus far in the Mullen era. Kadarius Toney returned a punt against Kentucky that got Florida going last year, but I don’t remember a game where special teams helped truly make a difference in a game where Florida maybe didn’t deserve to win, but was able to pull out anyway.
That’s why I’m excited to see who is returning punts this year. I think this is really a place that Nay’Quan Wright could shine. Wright showed that he can be elusive in the open field. But he also showed (3.9 yards/rush) that he isn’t going to break a ton of tackles to get out into the open field.
With the crowded backfield, there’s a chance that Wright might get phased out of the running game. But that was always the benefit of those Meyer teams. There were always guys too talented to keep off the field, but not good enough to be starters because the starters were so talented.
Hopefully we see that effect on special teams this year.
Emory Jones Accuracy
David Wunderlich took an interesting look at Emory Jones’ accuracy recently here at Gator Country. He took the over when it came to 60% completion percentage and even went so far as to suggest he expects Jones to complete around 63% of his passes.
This would make sense, given that Jones completed 61.8% of his passes his senior year in high school and that type of accuracy generally translates.
But Wunderlich also made a critical point in his article as well, pointing out that focusing on yards per attempt is likely more important than focusing on accuracy. There are a bunch of reasons to do this, but essentially a QB who dinks and dunks and completes a ton of passes is less valuable than one who can hit a big play, even if he misses a screen pass every now and then.
But I think for a player like Jones, you can even go a step further: his yards per play overall compared to his peers is critical, as he does more than just throw the ball. Take the competition up in Athens, for example. J.T. Daniels averaged 10.3 yards per attempt in his four starts last year, but he also averaged -7.1 yards per attempt when he ran the ball. In other words, he took a bunch of sacks.
The result is that he was very good, but not great, even if he was able to gain a ton of yards through the air. By contrast, Jones has averaged 5.6 yards per attempt on the ground in his career. This makes a difference.
How often do you hear commentators talk about being “ahead of the chains”? You can’t do that when you lose 10 yards on a sack. But when you have second-and-4 after a QB dive, the offense opens up.
Fall camp: How good is the left tackle?
There are a lot of changes going on in Gainesville this year and a lot of things I want to see in fall camp. I’m interested to see how Jones and Richardson look at QB. I want to see how Shelton, Newkirk and Dexter look at defensive tackle. I’m interested in who is starting at defensive back and whether Jason Marshall is getting starter’s reps.
But the place I’m hoping to get the most information is the offensive line, and specifically at left tackle.
I think some people take Stone Forsythe’s play last season for granted. Forsythe started every game last year. He was able to go up against the best pass rushers in the SEC and Kyle Trask never really had to worry about it. I mean, do you remember Trask getting hit from the blind side at all last year?
That means that while there is a ton of focus on the right tackle, there has been relatively little attention paid to the left tackle position, where presumably Richard Gouraige will be taking over. Gouraige is the highest ranked offensive line commit in the Dan Mullen era and has been up and down his first two seasons in Gainesville.
My expectation was that Gouraige moving inside to guard was going to significantly upgrade the guard position for Florida last season and in pass protection, that may be true. But Florida did not run the ball well to the left side last year at all, and some of that has to fall on Gouraige.
Still, he always came here to play tackle. He’s going to get a shot to do that this year. Normally, we hear a lot of good things about skill players during fall camp and it doesn’t always translate to the season. But we heard back in 2017 and 2019 that the offensive line was struggling in camp and we saw that translate when the lights came on.
So I’m interested in what some of the media says about the OL when camp kicks off. If they don’t notice the play, I think that’s a positive sign. But history says if they see the OL struggling, that could be a bad omen for the season.
FSU and Clemson asking to join the SEC?
New came out this week that FSU and Clemson had reached out to the SEC about joining the conference. That was denied by FSU president John Thrasher, but they’d be fools to have at least not inquired.
The fact that they are denying reaching out means that the SEC told them “no” or at least “not yet”. In some ways, that surprises me as you would figure that adding those two would push eyeballs to the SEC. Still, I think it does indicate that the SEC doesn’t want to form an NFL-like SEC, but is going to be more opportunistic about expansion.
They can do that because you can’t have a playoff without Texas, Oklahoma, Alabama, LSU, and Florida being involved in and driving the decision-making. The additions of the Longhorns and Sooners assures that the SEC will have the lead seat at the table and that wouldn’t change with the addition of the ‘Noles or the Tigers. So why share the revenue with them?
I’d love to have one league (and outlined that last week), but the problem with that is money. Even if you combined the best teams from the Big Ten and the ACC, or even the best from the Big Ten, ACC, Big 12, Pac-12 and AAC, the SEC TV contract dollars would dwarf that separate super conference.
It actually makes more sense to add Rutgers and UCLA to the conference than FSU and Clemson.