Florida won the final three quarters by a score of 26-10: four touchdowns against one touchdown and a field goal.
The Gators had 247 yards rushing against just 100 for the Tide (sacks removed from both). On a per-play basis, it was an edge of 5.88 yards per rush for UF versus 3.85 per rush for Bama. Accordingly, the good guys won time of possession by ten seconds short of three minutes.
Along those lines, Florida won the total yardage battle by more than 100 yards. It was 440-331, or 6.20 to 5.25 on a per-play basis.
Emory Jones threw for more yards per attempt (7.0) than Bryce Young did (6.9). Malik Davis and Nay’Quan Wright each rushed for more than eight yards per carry. They had a combined 17 attempts, so this wasn’t a small sample size thing. Six different targets caught passes for at least 17 yards, and no Alabama pass play went for 30 or more yards.
If offered to you during College GameDay on Saturday, would you take that? You do, right? Because that’s what you got.
The problem is that the team went down 21-3 in the first quarter. Both of Alabama’s first two scoring drives were aided by (ticky-tack) pass interference flags. Jones then sailed a pass while getting hit after Richard Gouraige and Ethan White blew the protection on a stunt by the Crimson Tide front. It became what would be the game’s only turnover, and Bama cashed in the 38-yard field for a third score.
And then, fatefully, Chris Howard shanked the extra point after the Florida offense got fully on track in the second quarter and finally found the end zone. When trying to make up for it, UF botched a two-point conversion try late.
Dan Mullen said after the game that they had a missed protection on it, and he followed by saying someone lined up wrong and someone else went the wrong way. Jones later solved half the riddle by stating that Malik Davis lined up on the wrong side of him due to a miscommunication, but he didn’t burn a timeout to fix it because of the situation.
The margins are that slim when facing a team as good as Alabama. The Tide has the most margin of error of any team in the country because it has the most talent of any team in the country. The only team on par with them is Georgia, and Nick Saban is still a substantially better coach than Kirby Smart is.
Florida has narrowed the talent gap. You can see it in the Team Talent Composite, and you can see it on the field. Gone are the days of the 2015 and 2016 SEC Championship Games where just on the eye test alone, Alabama made Florida look like a G5 team. They made it look that way on the scoreboard too.
The Gators are closer, and the last two games were decided by six and two points, respectively. It took him a while, but Mullen has gotten better at dueling with Saban too. The closest he got to beating the Tide in Starkville was his final chance in 2017, when Bama had to drive 68 yards in the final minute to get the game-winning touchdown in a 31-24 win. Mullen’s Bulldogs were one stop away from sending it to overtime that time. The Gators were any number of close plays from winning or going to overtime last year, and, well, you saw the game on Saturday.
The game showed the ups and downs of Jones as the primary quarterback. He played at a high level a lot of the night, and he has improved each week this year. He improved in some ways within this game. He uncorked a terrible back-shoulder throw that never had a shot of getting to Jacob Copeland early but put the same throw right on the money to Xzavier Henderson late. Jones remains a reliable ball carrier and has good pocket presence for being such a gifted runner; a lot of mobile QBs become some combination of skittish and antsy if they spend more than two seconds shopping the field.
He also chucked a bad pass instead of just taking a sack early, leading to an interception. He skipped some balls throughout, and he’s not hitting many receivers in stride. The two-point conversion play was the second goal line miscommunication after the QB sneak on 4th & 4 in the opener. He implied that he didn’t have time to fix Davis’s alignment, but he walked up to talk to linemen with 16 seconds on the play clock and called for the snap with nine left. There is still a cap on his big-play ability, with his longest completion being of 30 yards and longest run going for 14. The completion was five yards downfield in the air with Keon Zipperer running for the other 25.
I don’t know how the game would’ve been different if Anthony Richardson had been available as anything other than, as Mullen described him postgame, a pocket-bound backup option. Maybe Jones doesn’t get into as good a rhythm with Richardson rotating in sometimes. Maybe Richardson would make another explosive play to generate a quick-strike touchdown to erase the short-field score Alabama got, or maybe he’d make some freshman mistakes and put the team further behind the 8-ball early. We’ll never know.
As it is, it’s hard to ask for more out of UF. There are young and/or inexperienced players up and down the roster. Even so, they went blow-for-blow with the No. 1 team that sports the highest Team Talent Composite score ever, outplaying it in some ways. The Tide wasn’t continually shooting itself in the foot, either. Luck is not why Florida was in it at the end, and the Gators more than held their own on the lines of scrimmage.
This game confirms that last year’s close scrape with Bama wasn’t a fluke and sets a high floor for this year. If they can do that against Alabama, they can compete with Georgia too and should be favorites everywhere outside the Cocktail Party from here on out. The Swamp’s noise was a factor in a way that it won’t be in a more evenly split crowd in Jacksonville or Atlanta, but there is obvious room for improvement before Halloween and early December.
Gator football is in a good place. It’s getting a little better each year under Mullen. I know fans would prefer a more steady trajectory than the fits and starts so far, but the arrow is pointed in the right direction.