Florida’s loss to LSU still doesn’t entirely make sense to me. I can see what the Gators were trying to do on offense, and for the most part, I can’t argue with it. It’s hard to run up more than 600 yards, nearly 200 more than the opponent, and lose.
Because the defensive issues were basically the same as they’ve been all year — which is an indictment of the management on that side of the ball, not an offhand comment tossed out without a care — I focused on the offense to see what went wrong. Even as the defense had its problems, this was the first game where you could say the UF offense played a major role in the team’s downfall. This is what I found.
Run game
If you read my advanced stats review of the game, you saw that the Gators had a 57% success rate with the run outside the red zone (that’s its own section later). If the pass wasn’t also at 53%, you’d say UF should’ve ran more.
Malik Davis’s 39-yard run on a draw play is the clearest example of how LSU often depended on its defensive line to take care of the run. The Tigers have five box defenders, and the three nearest defenders outside the box look away from the backfield upon the snap. All five UF linemen stick their blocks, and Davis is nearly 30 yards upfield before a defender even touches him.
Because LSU was dropping six or seven into coverage on almost every play, UF could’ve gotten more on the ground if Trask was more of a runner. On Trask’s pick-six, he tries to jam it into a space with four defenders against three receivers on the right side of the field. To his left was a massive running lane with absolutely no one at home if he took off.
Trask did eventually keep it on a second-half drive when all seven box defenders went for Davis on either a zone read option or play fake for a designated QB run. When UF lined up the same way late in the series and Trask faked a handoff again, the backside defensive end stayed at home to account for the quarterback run. Davis then had better numbers to run against as a result. However, LSU’s emergency cornerback, true freshman Dwight McGlothern, being late to line up allowed Trask to hit Kadarius Toney on a bubble screen for an easy touchdown.
Offensive line
There’s no way around it: much of the line had a rough game. UF finally switched things up on the line after a quarter, but it didn’t fix everything.
Once the new lineup went in, the middle became a mess. Stewart Reese has been battling injuries, so that could’ve hurt his mobility and been part of it. A lack of experience playing together probably was an issue too.
Ethan White played left guard. He was a right guard last year and did work at center in fall camp. Last year he played between Jean Delance and Nick Buchanan; on Saturday, he was between Richard Gouraige and Brett Heggie. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he looked rusty from being out with injury, and you’re naturally going to have problems with a line that hasn’t worked together much.
The tackles were fine most of the time. There was a point late I’ll get to where they weren’t, but Gouraige on the left and Forsythe on the right appeared adequate to me.
LSU tried to attack the line with stunts/twists. Those are when one player goes forward and the one next to him feints forward before looping around behind. They’re not groundbreaking in any way, but they do put stress on a line in the departments of communication and cohesion. The stunts were effective far too often when it counted.
It wasn’t like the original lineup was solid, though. On the two plays at the end of the first half, LSU went with stunts on both sides of the line. The normal starting five linemen were in the game here. Heggie helped with the stunt to the right on the first play, sealing up that side. The left stunt beat Forsythe and Gouraige, but Trask rolled to his right and completed a pass. The next time, Heggie helped to the left. The right stunt then beat Reese and Delance, and that’s when the strip-sack happened.
Red zone
Dan Mullen complained in his halftime interview that Trask “missed read after read after read after read” in the red zone. You can see where some of those were.
On 3rd & Goal on the first drive, Trask fakes a run left and tries to throw a slant to the right, but an unblocked linebacker who did nothing to disguise his presence easily batted the ball down. Run it, and Trask probably gets in.
UF appears to go RPO on 2nd & Goal on the second drive; I can’t be sure but I’m assuming it was for these purposes. Trask needs to either give to Davis or throw quickly to Shorter on another slant on the right. He pulls it to throw, but the corner jams Shorter and knocks him to the ground and thereby blows up that option. At the time Trask is deciding, the linebackers shift left. UF has the numbers to run due to the shift, and Davis would’ve gotten in. Trask runs it in on the next play so it didn’t end up mattering, fortunately.
Beyond the missed reads, Florida didn’t block that well in the red zone. I didn’t see Mullen trying to force runs against unfavorable numbers. The line and sometimes Kemore Gamble at tight end just missed blocks, or a back might make the wrong cut. Trask also had an incompletion later where he tossed a tough-to-catch pass to Keon Zipperer in the end zone when he had a clear running lane directly in front of him.
The offensive line and Gamble struggling with red zone blocking allowed the Tigers to drop more defenders into coverage. It was never more clear than on the Gators’ final red zone trip with 4:30 to go in the game.
LSU did a stunt with its two interior linemen on all three downs. The stunts worked and forced a Trask throwaway that was called intentional grounding on first down and disrupted a Davis draw against good run numbers on second down. Reese finally handled the stunt on third down, but both Gouraige and Forsythe got beat around the ends.
No one was open quickly on the pass plays because LSU got to drop seven, and the line failed in pass blocking so quickly that Trask didn’t have time to shop the field to find someone getting open later.
Three-and-outs
One of the key stretches in the game came after Florida took a 31-27 lead. After the go-ahead score, it felt like the Gators were taking over. Instead, the offense went three-and-out on three consecutive drives. Who’s to blame? Was it Mullen going conservative after getting the lead? Let’s see.
On the first drive, UF runs against a favorable defensive front on first down. Gamble misses his pulling block and Toney misses blocking a safety, and Dameon Pierce only gets one yard. On second down, the tackles getting beat (Gouraige worse than Forsythe) flushes Trask to the right. A crosser to the left will come open, but it’s out of the question because Trask escaped right. LSU dropped seven again, so there’s nowhere to go with the ball and Trask throws it away. Trask has Jacob Copeland deep in one-on-one coverage on third down, but there’s a miscommunication as Trask throws it out while Copeland cuts in. Execution, execution, execution.
On the second drive’s first play, Davis gets into open space on a swing pass but stumbles and falls without anyone touching him after gaining just three yards. Davis runs against a favorable front next but cuts back directly into the unblocked backside defensive end instead of continuing up a lane to his left. He still gets four yards, though. On 3rd & 3 UF goes empty and Trask tries to hit Zipperer on a shallow cross, but the defender breaks it up. Copeland would beat LSU’s suspect freshman corner McGlothern on a slant on the left, but Trask never seemed to consider it. Execution, execution, execution.
Finally, UF started a drive on its own 1-yard-line. Surely Mullen went conservative here, right? Nope.
On first down, Trask badly overthrows Trevon Grimes on a go route up the right sideline. On second down, you might think Florida would run just to gain some yardage. Mullen used that assumption by calling play action, and it freezes a linebacker to get Toney open on an intermediate out route. Trask throws it too high and it’s incomplete.
On third down, Grimes gets behind the defense on another vertical. Trask by then was rolling out of the pocket to avoid pressure, and he throws kind of while hopping instead of setting his feet (which he had time to do). It’s underthrown, and Grimes has to make a good play to break it up and not have a third interception. Execution, execution, execution.
I have complained about Mullen’s game plans in recent weeks. I stand by those complaints.
Strategy wasn’t the problem here. The play calling, as best as I can tell, made sense for what the defense was doing. You can make the case that UF should’ve gone empty less often and used more play action, but the Gators moved the ball freely between the 20s most of the night. At some point, the blockers have to block.
The complaint that still applies is that Mullen waited until the second quarter of Game 10 to try something new with the offensive line. I’m sure the explanation, were he ever to give one, would have something to do with White not being ready post-injury until then. If so, then the bigger problem is that UF as a team only has three true interior linemen that the coaches trust (White, Heggie, and a grad transfer in Reese) in their third year on the job.
The bottom line is that this game showed how the SEC is a line-of-scrimmage league. The Tigers allowed more than 600 yards of offense, but when push came to shove, LSU’s defensive front won the day more often than not. Trask had his first bad game, and the defense wasn’t good enough to cover for the miscues the one time the offense actually needed the help. That’s how a loss like this happens.