Florida has played with a lack of execution and attention to detail since its trip to Vanderbilt three weeks ago, and it didn’t show any signs of improvement in Saturday’s loss to Missouri.
The Gators felt well prepared and honed in after a good week of practices, but that didn’t show on the field.
The defense played as poorly as it had all season as it let Drew Lock have his way all game and convert on third down 11 of 18 times. Feleipe Franks continued to miss wide open receivers and throw 100 mph fastballs every single chance he got. Special teams hurt more than it helped in most situations. The list goes on and on.
“We got the players, we got the talent,” said redshirt senior tight end R.J. Raymond. “At the end of the day, it comes down to our preparation. We didn’t execute, and that’s really the bottom line. We gotta make the plays when the plays are there. We gotta hit the receivers. We gotta protect. We gotta block the right run plays. It comes down to 100 percent execution and that’s it. It’s not like we haven’t put up points before this season, so it’s all execution and that comes down to what you do Monday through Friday.”
Following the game, the theme from players was cleaning up the “little details”. But Raymond looks at it from a completely different perspective.
“There’s no such thing as little details in my opinion,” he said. “Every single thing matters. Because you might think that when you’re holding the ball, when you got the ball secured, if that ball is not completely secured when you’re running and you’re holding that ball low, you might think, ‘Oh that’s just a little detail.’ But if it’s fourth and one, the game’s on the line and you’re holding that ball low and somebody punches it out, it becomes a huge detail and you lose the game. So, every little thing has to be brought to the highest level.”
Dan Mullen took a large part of the blame for the continued lack of execution, saying it was on the coaches.
The coaching definitely could have used some work, but at this point, players have to start looking in the mirror. Florida didn’t just go from a team that can compete with some of the best in the country to one that can’t even hold its own against a mediocre Missouri in the blink of an eye.
The talent the Gators showed early in the season is still there somewhere. It might just be the drive that is missing.
Good teams find a way to pick themselves up and regroup when things go south, and Florida will either do that and finish the season strong or it won’t and have to start from square one again next year.
“When you get into November, ‘I’m tired, I’m beat up, I’m sore, I’m exhausted,’ the seasons going on and it’s been wearing down,” Mullen said. “Do I have the intensity every single day? … We have to make sure that everybody has that sense of urgency. I don’t care if it’s going to class, making sure you’re here 10 minutes early on morning meetings or in execution in third down period in practice, to covering a kickoff on Saturday. All the same. Either you’re going or you’re not. Being a champion is not a sometimes thing. It’s a way of life. You either are or you aren’t.”
We are quickly sliding back into irrelevance again. The lack of effort today was embarrassing; at home too. Franks was pretty pathetic. I’ve been a huge fan of his this year, and he was making decent progress, but the way he goes, is the way of the team. His reads, his passes, the read option. If you hand it off every play, it isn’t a read option any more. He needs to regroup on the bench while the coaching staff tries someone else. Trask should have been in a quarter earlier. That’s on the staff. I bleed orange and blue, but what I’m saying everyone in the whole stadium knew during the game. It looked to me like a lot of the kids gave up. Go Gators.