I don’t know how much you know about how the college football postseason awards work. You’ve probably seen various media members complaining about how there are too many Heisman voters, which is why it remains an award mostly for quarterbacks, sometimes for running backs, and once every 20-30 years for a receiver. Defensive players have no shot because a lot of people with low football IQs who only ever watch the ball have a say in the award.
I happen to have a vote for one award, the Biletnikoff for the nation’s best pass catcher. They used to say it was for the best receiver, but they opened up the description so that it could go to a pass-catching tight end. That’s how Kyle Pitts got to be a finalist for it last year.
I still don’t know how I got picked to vote for it; I just got an email out of the blue one day asking if I wanted to do it. It was before I joined Gator Country while I was writing for a publication that is now defunct. That site dropped me as a freelancer early in 2017 and died out I think over the following summer. Nevertheless, when I get my annual Biletnikoff Award banquet program in the mail every year, they credit me as a writer for that long-dead site instead of Gator Country.
All of which is to say, these awards are probably less professionally done than you might guess. They are run by not-for-profit committees that either do something else or nothing at all most of the year. They find anyone they can who seems credible and is willing to vote.
The Biletnikoff sends out three rounds of ballots: to narrow the watch list to ten, then ranking the ten to get a finalist three, then ranking the top three to find a winner. They send them by email, and then they send out reminders because sometimes people forget and because with three rounds it’s easy to think you’ve already finished voting. It feels a lot like getting repeated charity solicitations, only at the end of it someone gets a trophy and their name in every college sports publication.
All of this is to say, postseason honors aren’t super rigorous. Everyone’s busy this time of year, and a lot of votes get done by sportswriters whose time is mostly devoted to covering coaching changes and the early signing day. Even with conference-specific awards, many voters probably don’t even watch a full game of every team in the league unless it’s one with a round-robin schedule like the Big 12. And most certainly don’t have the expertise to correctly identify multiple teams’ worth of linemen on both sides of the ball.
The Florida logo should be enough to put at least one or two guys over the top among voters with overall questionable acumen. There are always a few spots where any number of players would be defensible picks, and everyone does expect excellence from the orange and blue.
So it really is notable that not a single Gator made the All-SEC teams. Only Vandy also got skunked. Even South Carolina got one, and Missouri got three.
It’s the final insult to the Mullen era when it comes to the talent issues. In the end, only one player who committed to and signed with Mullen on one occasion made a year-end All-SEC team: Kaiir Elam in 2020. Kyle Pitts made it twice in ’19 and ’20, but he first committed to the McElwain staff. And for all of the praise over the years about how Mullen used the portal, only Jonathan Greenard in 2019 made it as a transfer to UF.
The biggest complaint about the old staff’s recruiting was that they didn’t bring in enough high-end talent. You don’t have to be a 5-star to make the All-SEC team, of course; Kyle Trask was originally a 2-star and Kadarius Toney was a 3-star and both of them made it in 2020. A high rating does greatly increase the chances a player will excel, though. And indeed, Pitts was a mid 4-star and Elam a high 4-star.
Mullen did eventually sign a couple of 5-stars, but they weren’t likely to land on a postseason award team quickly.
Gervon Dexter only played two years of football in high school. He earned his fifth star on athletic potential, and the pandemic set back his development schedule. Then Jason Marshall this year was a true freshman cornerback, which made it nearly impossible to end up on one of those teams. True freshmen take some lumps at corner as it’s very hard to make the transition to covering the speed and skill of college receivers. Derek Stingley made the All-SEC team as a true freshman, but he was a third-generation football player with his grandfather a first round NFL pick and his father a longtime arena ball player and coach. And, by definition, a famous name.
So for all that Mullen tried to sell as him and his staff having skill in identifying good prospects and a top development process, he ended up with a team full of pretty good but not excellent players. Even Elam couldn’t repeat and make the team this year.
Then there’s the issue of player usage. Not surprisingly, the four running backs among the two All-SEC teams are simply the guys who finished in the top four of yards per game. They’re not in order, as the guy from Alabama who finished third in YPG leaped to the first team ahead of the Kentucky guy who finished second — remember what I said about logos mattering? — but that’s who got there.
Dameon Pierce (5.94) essentially tied first teamer Tyler Badie (5.99) from Missouri in yards per carry and was only noticeably behind UK’s Chris Rodriguez (6.20). He was a bit ahead of Texas A&M’s Isaiah Spiller and well ahead of Bama’s Brian Robinson (4.80). With a true lead back’s workload, he might’ve had a shot to sneak onto the second team. However he was more than 90 carries behind Spiller, who had the smallest carry number of the four honorees, so he never had a shot.
It will soon be time to move on to the future, but the 2021 team’s bowl still hasn’t happened yet. The postmortems on the ’21 season are still to be done, and this is part of that process. The season closed out an era, and it did so with a whimper.