The 2022 football season has been a tale of growing pains and poor execution for this Florida football team with week nine now in the books. Dreadful defensive play in the secondary followed by lousy tackling has continued to be costly all season. Offensively, the Gators have yet to find a consistent rhythm in the passing game.
Saturday afternoon’s loss to the Bulldogs was just another page added to the same old story. Seven penalties for 53 yards, simple missed throws, awful execution and poor decisions with the football were detrimental for the Gators. Despite forcing three turnovers, the loss to Georgia marks the third game this season the Gators have given up 500-plus yards on defense.
For what seemed to be a very beatable Georgia team Saturday, Florida went on to simply beat themselves. Constant missed tackles and poor coverage in the secondary were severely damaging once again.
“You have to lead better. Players need to play better. Simple enough. I think execution can be better,” Napier said. “I think we dug ourselves a hole in the first half against a really good football team that has good personnel, is well coached, that plays complimentary ball.”
One thing this Florida football team doesn’t do is give up. After an abysmal first half, the Gators showed exactly why they could’ve won this game in the second half.
“I think how hard you play is a reflection of what type of teammate you are,” Napier said on halftime adjustments. “When you turn the tape on, if you are loafing, if there’s a lack of effort on the film, then you are not a very good teammate. I think you start there. I told the players in the locker room just now, ‘As long as I’m coaching here, we are going to play this game for the people that we play it with.’ I think that that takes time to develop. I think that we are getting somewhere in that regard.”
Playing with heart, giving teams a run for their money and fighting back is nothing new for Anthony Richardson and this Florida football team. Execution is the one thing missing.
“That’s just us,” Richardson said on how hard this team fights. “That’s nothing new for us. We’ve been in plenty of games like that before this year and we’ve always fought through it. So, that’s just us. We like to fight and just play aggressive.”
To win these types of football games, to win in the SEC, you must be able to recruit and evaluate talent. It’s starts with recruiting and Billy Napier knows that.
“Evaluation of recruitment is always important,” Napier said. “To go where we want to go, to win an SEC Championship, to win a divisional championship, to win our conference, to win a National Championship, you got to do it all really well.”
“You got to evaluate. You got to recruit. You got to develop. You got to impact who they are as people. Those are all areas that we wake up every day and we work extremely hard at.”
Fans of teams across the country will always be disappointed after a loss, but nothing compares to the disappointment and heartache a player feels after losing.
This team plays with passion, which is evident in this teams will to win each week. Nothing hurts more than coming up short after giving it everything you have.
“We walked into the locker room with a lot of disappointed players that want to do their job for the team,” Napier said on the mood in the locker room.” There’s an old war term called a ‘foxhole guy.’ A guy that you can trust. A guy that is loyal. A guy that you can turn your back from and know that he is going to do what he is supposed to do and you’re doing the same thing on your side. I think this game, there’s no comparison military wise, but I think there’s some things that we can learn a lesson from relative to those intangibles.”
One player who never gives up until the clock hits zero is Anthony Richardson.
Despite battling through nagging leg injuries all season, Richardson left it all on the field and was aggressive using his legs in the second half.
“I was just trying to play physical,” Richardson said. “Get the ball moving, you know, get the offense rolling a little bit. Obviously, we couldn’t move it that well in the first half, so I tried to help us a little bit and tried to be a little bit more physical on the ground.”
Something had to give for this Florida football team in the second half, and it did. Late in the third quarter Richardson saw an opportunity, took advantage of it and executed.
“That’s just looking at the coverage,” Richardson said on his 78-yard touchdown to Henderson. “The call we had there was basically like a quick out to Ricky [Pearsall] and I was looking to throw that, but I saw the corner squat, and I just knew the hole shot was going to be there eventually. So I waited and I saw Xzavier there, and he just ran.”
This offense had multiple opportunities to put points in the end zone Saturday and failed. Georgia’s defense is very good but shown they can be beat this season.
“I wouldn’t say that it’s hard to break,” Richardson said on Georgia’s defense. “They just have big guys on their team. They have a great scheme. Whenever you have a team like that, it’s pretty easy for them to run their assignments and do what they do. If they have 11 people doing their job, it’s kind of hard to affect them and stop them, but they have a great defense and a great scheme.”
After a hard-fought battle, the Gators dropped to Georgia 42-20, making Florida 4-4 on the year with four more games left to play in the 2022 football season.
Entering the final stretch of the season, simple execution has been the one thing stopping this Florida football team from getting to where they need to be. The loss to Georgia now marks the fourth game this season that Florida could have won if it wasn’t for simple missed tackles, lack of execution on both sides of the football and blown coverages.
Until this football team can learn how to execute and play sound discipline football… it’ll be the same story the rest of the season for this 2022 Florida Gator football team.
Dude, you need to learn to come up with better titles for your articles. To say that we beat ourselves is total bull$hit. We lost to a better team, that did give us some chances, but they were still the better team with much better personnel. Your BS title kept me from reading the article.