I’ve been saying for months that transitional years aren’t necessarily straight lines upward. I’ve compared it to stock charts, where there are down periods even during multi-year long bull runs. I’ve talked I don’t know how many times about how Nick Saban’s 2007 loss to Louisiana-Monroe happened in mid-November. November 17, in fact, or two days off from the date on which Florida just lost to Vanderbilt.
So that’s one additional thing that Billy Napier and Kirby Smart have in common: first-year losses to Vandy. And if the Commodores somehow upset a ranked Tennessee this weekend like they did in 2016, then they’ll finish with an identical record of 6-6 (3-5) to the squad that beat Smart’s first pack of Bulldogs.
I don’t have a lot of good explanations for the loss except to say that nearly everything that happened had precedent.
Favored SEC teams in general play worse at noon than in the mid-afternoon and evening time slots. There’s just something about this league that makes it hard for the better team to get up for the old Jefferson Pilot window. Florida has never been immune.
Good Gator teams have struggled with playing at Vandy. The biggest example was the 1996 national title team only winning by a touchdown. They ran up a nice lead and then nearly blew it as the skies turned gray and the air got cold. That UF team was considerably better than this year’s, and that Commodore team was a lot worse than this year’s too.
The cold air may have something to do with it as well. Florida generally plays poorly when the temperature is below the 50s or so.
I do wonder if a lot of players having cold hands played a material effect in the bad play. Kamari Wilson dropped a pick-six late in the first half that hit him in the hands. Daejon Reynolds had a bad drop late too. There were tons of missed tackles, a number of which looked like a Commodore literally slipped through the hands of a Florida defender.
I shouldn’t need to tell you about the precedent of bad penalties hurting UF. In this specific one, Vandy had a 81-yard touchdown drive that saw 30 gifted yards from Antwaun Powell-Ryland, and an unnecessary defensive hold from Amari Burney erased a third down stop on a drive that ended up in the end zone.
In some ways it was just one of those weeks. Georgia arguably had the best outing of any top five team, and they beat the Kentucky team that just lost to Vandy by a mere 16-6 score. The South Carolina team that UF just humbled blew the doors off of Tennessee. It was kind of in the air for favorites to struggle all around the country.
If you wanted me to write a script for how the Gators lose this game, all of that kind of stuff would be in it. I wouldn’t have expected some of the other stuff, though, and sequencing made a difference.
One play after Wilson’s interception drop, Jason Marshall muffed a punt that the Commodores then recovered for a score. It wasn’t just that he dropped it from cold hands, either. He misjudged the depth and tried to catch it half over his shoulder, which is a thing you learn not to do on Day 1 of punt return duty. You never, ever, ever try to catch a punt like that, especially that close to your own end zone. You blew it, man. Just let it go.
On the first play of Florida’s second drive after halftime, Anthony Richardson hit Justin Shorter in the hands on a deep throw. Shorter didn’t catch it cleanly, and the ball popping up allowed a defender to swat it away for an incompletion. Two plays later on 3rd & 10, Richardson had his circus interception. That probably doesn’t happen if it’s second down on a new set of downs because UF runs a different play and VU in turn runs a different defense.
There isn’t really much excuse for the run game to perform as badly as it did. Clark Lea is a good defensive coach, so it’s no surprise that Vandy was ready for a lot of things. It is not, however, a reason why Florida couldn’t push around the Commodore defensive front at pretty much any time all game long.
The offensive game plan from Napier was also so repetitive and uninspired that it felt like a Dan Mullen game plan for a road game at a Missouri, Kentucky, or, yes, Vanderbilt. Mullen used to come up with the most conservative plans possible in those situations to try to ensure his team didn’t give the game away, and the upshot was the opponent had a real easy time making it far closer than it ever should’ve been.
Napier wasn’t quite that bad, as there were plenty of deep shots available and taken. Richardson hanging around in the pocket too long looking for deep shots that weren’t there instead of checking down and taking off was a big problem, though.
Napier also pretty much only ever rolls Richardson out to the right, and defenses have long since caught on. If AR wasn’t such a good athlete, many plays would’ve failed because defenses predicted it. On UF’s first touchdown, Vanderbilt blitzed a linebacker directly at where Richardson would bootleg out after play action. Richardson had to jump to get the throw off.
On the subsequent two point conversion, Vandy blitzed the same guy in the same lane. He knocked down the swing pass that was telegraphed by presnap motion. And then the same linebacker broke up the second two pointer by getting into the obvious passing lane. On all three of those plays, the latter two by choice, UF lined up on the left hash and did some kind of stretch play to the right. Lea had his defense ready for all of them.
If UF had just kicked the extra point on those two touchdowns, the Gators would’ve been down just eight after the second touchdown instead of ten. I know the case for going for two more often — many teams can convert enough to make the long-run scoring rate higher than kicking PATs — but there’s a big difference of being down by two scores instead of one.
That, of course, assumes the extra points would’ve been good. In a Murphy’s law kind of day, Adam Mihalek shanked the PAT on the Gators’ final touchdown. It didn’t end up mattering, but so it went for Florida.
The defense had an okay game plan, but the players couldn’t execute it. The offense had an iffy game plan, and the execution was better than the defense’s, but it wasn’t good enough regardless. If this year’s team can’t run the ball, it can’t beat anybody with a pulse. They couldn’t run the ball, and to Lea’s credit, his team has a pulse.
It’ll be years before we know whether this game was a cautionary tale or something we’ll look back on and laugh about. For now, it feels terrible. Florida should never lose to Vanderbilt when the gap between the teams is this big. This wasn’t even 2013 when Vandy was about as good as they ever get and the Gators were in the middle of an injury plague. This was a bad, bad, bad game.