It’s truly impressive how Utah squeezes every ounce of potential out of the personnel it has. It’s a testament to Kyle Whittingham and his staff, particularly given the good continuity they have there. Good, in that they are quality coaches who choose to stay and not buddies who have nowhere else to go.
They’re a highly effective team. They do not, however, demonstrate excellence.
Any time you see a coaching staff work well and then flame out, there should be at least one takeaway from the experience. If there’s one major change to the way I look at football in the wake of the Dan Mullen era, it’s that I more appreciate the difference between effectiveness and excellence. Mullen was effective, but the 2019 defense and 2020 offense were the only units that approached excellence. We saw some more contrasts of this kind over the weekend.
Take Utah’s most visible player, quarterback Cam Rising. The one truly elite skill he has is pocket awareness. He’ll stay in there to the last possible second, but not a moment longer. He will tuck it and run at just the right time to allow himself a way out and not get stuck in traffic.
But when he gets to the open field, he has good speed but not breakaway speed. And when he does throw the ball, it’s a highly variable experience. His ball placement is borderline atrocious. It’s the mirror image of his pocket awareness: just barely good enough to work on the P5 level but no better. Plenty of his passes were wobbly ducks too.
It should’ve been no surprise that the interception on a too-low throw finally came. His first touchdown pass was low, though not as low as his final toss, and he was bailed out by a nice grab from tight end Brant Kuithe. If a time came that Rising had to throw into traffic, such as a crowded end zone from a line of scrimmage inside the 10-yard-line, it seemed inevitable that his poor ball placement would place a pass in the arms of a Gator.
Anthony Richardson is different. He has the potential for excellence, and has manifestly gone a decent way down the path to get there. His combination of size and speed is truly rare, with few comparisons outside Cam Newton and Vince Young to draw from. He has a cannon of an arm to boot.
Harnessing that cannon on shorter throws is still on the to-do list. Ball placement on swing passes is too. However he’s got the ability to read a defense on most plays and do quite well.
The offense in this opener was definitely a controlled experience. Billy Napier wasn’t super conservative necessarily, but he wasn’t unleashing his quarterback either. The drive that ended in a three-and-out deep in UF territory in the second quarter was never going to work with how bland the play calling was, and it turned out to basically allow the Utes to control the clock for almost the entire period.
Richardson made it not matter, though. His 45-yard touchdown run erased the edge that Utah gained from its pair of long second quarter field goal drives. When Whittingham went for the hard count into a delay of game and field goal on 4th-and-short on the latter of those series, I couldn’t help but think about how Napier went for it on 4th down earlier and his famed “scared money don’t make money” phrase. Billy may not have let it all hang out, but the guy on the other sideline played true to form and was the more conservative coach.
There will be time to dissect every detail from this win, but from a big picture standpoint, Napier played things well. Florida’s defense performed much more poorly than I expected, and it couldn’t do much to stop the Utes in the second half. The two stops they got were 1) with literally no room to spare on a goal line stand, and 2) on an end zone interception from a play on the 6-yard-line.
So Napier kept with his ground game even when playing from behind to make sure he had some say over the control of the clock too. He judiciously used Richardson as a runner despite the fact he was easily the most consistent ball carrier. Montrell Johnson brought the hammer and Trevor Etienne has a special speed and quickness, but both fumbled. It would’ve been easy to run Richardson like Mullen would have, but Napier picked the spots well. And he stuck with Johnson despite the back fumbling it away on his first carry, though their shared history and trust from Louisiana I’m sure played into that.
All in all, it probably went about as well as it could’ve. I am still disappointed in the defense, and as almost always, I would’ve like to see more aggressiveness from the offense.
It shouldn’t be discounted, though, that Napier took over a program with little quality depth that lost some excellent players like Ty’Ron Hopper, Khris Bogle, and new Ute Mohamoud Diabate immediately to the transfer portal and still beat a top-ten team in his first game. We’ll see if Utah ends up a top ten team, but at the least I can say I’m confident they’ll win a bunch of Pac-12 games again.
The first year of a coach’s tenure is always a work in progress unless it’s an inside hire keeps complete continuity with a winner. That’s nowhere near the case in Gainesville, and yet Florida was up to the task immediately. That, as much as what was on the scoreboard, was the big win on Saturday.
UF may not have demonstrated true excellence yet, but you can see how they could get there from here. They’re something north of mere effectiveness, and I’ll definitely take that.