Every bad habit the Gators have this year came back to bite them on Saturday night. There was some bad luck involved, but not so much that it swung the game. UF doing subpar things that have been subpar all year is what made it close enough for the Tigers to steal a victory.
Offensive line
The offensive line hasn’t been good for two years running. It’s been obvious for two years running that Jean Delance is not an SEC-caliber player. Dan Mullen finally benched him to see what a different lineup would look like, but then Stewart Reese promptly became the obvious weak link.
Reese has been battling injuries this year, so I don’t know how much of his struggles are from that or just his deficiencies. I can tell you that he’s always been on the slow side. I did a lot of close study of 2017 Mississippi State after UF hired Mullen, and he stuck out as being terrible at right tackle for the Bulldogs as a redshirt freshman that year. He has always had a better shot at success at guard, but as I cautioned Gator fans who were hyped about him coming as a grad transfer, he’s never made any All-SEC teams.
If they had tried benching Delance earlier, they could’ve then had the chance of replacing Reese too. Maybe that’s because Ethan White wasn’t ready for extensive work until now. If so, it tells me the coaches only have six or seven O-linemen they trust (depending on their true thoughts of Josh Braun), one of whom is a grad transfer and another who is manifestly not SEC-caliber. There have been times when they’ve played with four tackles at once — Forsythe, Gouraige, Braun, and Delance — and people wonder why they can’t run inside.
It’s the tenth game of their third year. There was not an offensive line exodus after last year. If the line is still bad, and it is by The Gator Standard, that’s on the coaches for their recruiting and development.
Conservative game management
I’ve been trying to tell people since Mullen was hired that he’s a conservative coach. It never seems to sink in because he has created some explosive offenses, but it’s true.
Mullen has been going pretty bland on offense and defense since after the Arkansas game, almost like he thought they’d figured everything out and just needed to keep things close to the vest before Atlanta. I struggled to find things to talk about for my offensive film study last week because it was all so basic.
He came out conservative again, running nine times against ten passes in the Gators’ first three drives. UF hasn’t been good running all year, but Mullen keeps trying to make it happen in every game. Even last week when he claimed they didn’t really try to establish the run against Tennessee, they ran six times in the first quarter including two of the first four plays.
Malik Davis popped off a 24-yarder on the second drive because 2020 LSU randomly gives up big plays with no pattern or warning, but the traditional run game didn’t do much. Davis had two random long runs; his other six carries went for an average of 3.6 yards each. Dameon Pierce averaged 3.0 per rush, and Emory Jones’s one predictable run went for just two yards.
So Mullen tried to make the run happen again early on, running it on five-of-seven plays once the Gators got to the LSU 22-yard line, and it led to the turnover on downs at the goal line (the one first down gained in that stretch was a pass). Even before Davis was stuffed on 4th down, Mullen lined up for a field goal at the Tigers’ 3-yard-line until an offside inched the ball forward. Maybe it would’ve been a fake; we’ll never know, but I doubt it.
Mullen didn’t try to really open things up and let it rip until after Kyle Trask’s pick-six, but you can’t just flip a switch. Trask did get Trevon Grimes on a 50-yard completion, but it was after he missed Grimes badly on a deep pass and took an 11-yard sack. Trask then forced a pass he should’ve thrown away and LSU got lucky with a pinball-like interception.
Trask isn’t perfect
Kyle Trask is turning in one of the all-time best performances of any Gator quarterback. He should be recognized and remembered for such.
However, he is not machine-like in efficiency and effectiveness like recent top quarterbacks like Joe Burrow, Tua Tagovailoa, and Baker Mayfield. A lot of people didn’t want to hear it earlier this year — believe me, they told me — but he sometimes locks onto receivers or just throws the ball directly to a defender. He hadn’t done the latter in a while, but he focused too much on Pitts early against Tennessee. He seemed a bit lost at times early without Pitts on the field against LSU.
His pick-six was one of those throws where he threw it right at a defender. He tried to be a hero with his second pick and arguably on his fumble, though Delance and Reese blew their blocking of a Tiger defensive line stunt so badly he had to make a split-second decision to tuck it or throw it away. I think he was trying too hard to steal a score right before the half, and he actually helped LSU get the score right before and after the half combo that UF has been doing so often.
Trask had 474 passing yards at a 10.1 per attempt clip with two passing and two rushing touchdowns. He is not the reason UF lost. But when he’s not playing out-of-his-mind good, and he didn’t with those turnovers that gifted the Tigers ten points, the rest of the Gator team isn’t good enough to win without playing its A-game. And it seldom plays a real A-game.
Same old defensive problems
Whenever Max Johnson wanted a quick slant, it was there for the taking. I’m honestly amazed that after a quarter or two the Tigers didn’t build one in on literally every pass play and dare Florida to do something different.
Soft coverage allowed easy throws. LSU got a touchdown on a coverage bust. UF struggled at times with communication and getting lined up properly and on time. It’s the tenth game of the head coach and defensive coordinator’s third season, and every defensive coach is the same as last year. There is no excuse for this. There never has been.
LSU’s first scoring drive went 11 plays and 75 yards. Its first drive out of halftime, when UF theoretically should have adjusted for what the Tigers were doing, went 63 yards in 17 plays and bled 6:31 off the clock. Their next touchdown drive went 84 yards in nine plays. True freshmen quarterbacks in their first starts on the road leading an offense decimated by injuries and opt outs shouldn’t have several extended drives. But Max Johnson did, because Todd Grantham can’t consistently get his guys off the field.
The swings swung LSU’s way
The Tigers won the turnover battle 3-0, recovering the game’s only fumble, and forced the only turnover on downs.
LSU scored a touchdown with 33 seconds to go in the first half, got a field goal after that, and scored coming out of the break. In the part of the game where Florida had been putting teams in bad spots with 14-point runs, the Bayou Bengals had a 17-point run.
Mullen shortened the game some by playing things conservatively for a quarter — including allowing Grantham to run a basic base defense that didn’t account for Johnson’s running ability well. The game shortened even more with the Tigers successfully cranking out several long drives. Shortening games helps underdogs.
In the most critical point of the game, UF made the big mistake with Marco Wilson’s penalty.
LSU made its 50+ yard field goal at the end. Florida didn’t.
The Gators are the better team and would win well more than half of the time if these teams could somehow play a bunch more times. They helped the Tigers out by being the same team they’ve been all season and not fixing their obvious flaws.
I’ve been watching football my whole life and writing about it for the better part of 14 years. That experience is why Gator Country pays me to write for them, but believe me, I’m nowhere near as good an analyst as the coaches on opposing teams. If I can suss out flaws, they can do it a hundred times better.
It’d be one thing for LSU to catch some things on film and find clever ways to exploit it. Maybe they even did. But it really did appear that they continually took advantage of things that I’ve been seeing all year long. Florida’s coaches and players either couldn’t fix the issues because of shortcomings or thought everything was fine and didn’t try.
Trask playing like a true Heisman-worthy quarterback is the only reason UF was as high as No. 6 in the polls. The one and only reason. Even that wasn’t enough when the defense made Kellen Mond look like a true Heisman-worthy quarterback, and Trask having one B- performance against a game opponent was all it took for a second loss to happen.
As you can tell, I’m frustrated. Frustrated for Trask, that he probably won’t win the Heisman now, and for the program and everyone around it, because that performance won’t translate into a trophy anyone cares about. Yes, I’m writing off a win over Alabama. No, they won’t make the Playoff even if they beat the Tide. Like Tim Tebow’s Heisman campaign, this one from Trask won’t result in the storybook winning of everything that went with Danny Wuerffel’s 1996 performance.
In hindsight I don’t think they’d ever have put up a team that could compete with the best of the best because of the personnel on hand, but they came awfully close. They could’ve come closer with literally any in-season improvement. The only noticeable such improvement was getting Kyree Campbell back. The team that lost to LSU is about the same as the one that beat Ole Miss, Campbell’s presence aside.
Mullen is going to need to show better awareness about his program to get better in the future. He can’t sit on his laurels for a month after a win like Arkansas and expect to cruise. The best ones always look for ways to improve, and there was low-handing fruit left on the improvement tree before last weekend. Mullen can’t do that and satisfy Gator fans’ wishes.