Emory Jones was born a decade too late.
He’s cut from the same cloth as a lot of the quarterbacks who came of age during the time when the spread option went mainstream in the decade from about 2006 to 2015. Call them athlete-first quarterbacks. There were plenty of them from Oregon guys like Dennis Dixon and Darron Thomas, to RichRod’s best triggermen Pat White and Denard Robinson, to countless others as you go down the line.
There was a broad spectrum of quality of these signal callers, but they tended to share three attributes: terrific athletes, strong arms, and a relatively basic ability to execute a passing offense. That’s why the defining programs of that era were not spread teams but rather Les Miles’s LSU and the 1.0 version of Nick Saban’s Alabama. They would play ball control offense geared around not taking risks and let their stifling defenses eat athletes trying to play quarterback alive.
As much as anything, the reason Saban chose evolve his offense was that, even in some Crimson Tide wins, downfield throwing from much better passers started lighting his defenses up. Spread schemes with complete quarterbacks are a different kind of beast. A much more effective kind of beast.
The most successful program that leaned on athlete-first quarterbacks was Oregon. The Ducks through that time had an advantage in Chip Kelly’s innovations, not just in scheme but also in program organization and conditioning. That’s not to take anything away from those quarterbacks, as Kelly’s really tended to be the best passers of the kind of player I’m talking about here.
Jones does not have an innovation edge on his side. Dan Mullen, like his mentor Urban Meyer, is more of an integrator than an innovator. That’s no knock on Mullen either. Integrators tend to be more flexible and don’t rigidly stick to their personal creative advances when they’re not working. Just look at the Mississippi State tenures of Mullen and RPO innovator Joe Moorhead for a stark example of how the difference can play out.
Regardless, Florida’s offense is fully up-to-date schematically. The integrator in charge began employing modern RPOs before he even got to Gainesville, and last year’s offense for Kyle Trask was as sophisticated a passing attack as exists on the college level. It’s all there.
Jones is a great runner and has a strong arm. By both his own admission and his head coach’s assessment, he’s been slow to process some throws this year. Those throws have gone directly to defenders. That’s a problem in the current era of the sport.
Top-level football is mostly a passing game now because of rule changes, the influence of analytics, and the fact defenses have had more than a decade to learn how to stop athlete-first quarterbacks. Someone who is a great runner but merely an adequate thrower is not going to challenge for national titles anymore.
Even in pre-Cristobal Eugene, the best quarterback of the bunch was the Heisman-winning Marcus Mariota. While he was a good runner, to the tune of almost 800 yards even before sack adjustments, it was his 4,454 yards through the air with a 42-4 TD/INT ratio that set him apart. Before him, Thomas’s 2,881 yards in 2010 was the most from a Kelly/Mark Helfrich quarterback. Mariota was a different kind of player.
Since 2010, which is as far back as I can check, there have been just eight instances of a player with multiple 70+ yard runs and at least one 70+ yard pass in a season. Five of them happened by 2014 in that early mainstream spread era I defined above. Michigan’s Robinson did in in 2010, and Nebraska’s Taylor Martinez did it in both 2010 and 2012. Jordan “Rust Belt Tebow” Lynch pulled it off in 2012, and the otherwise forgettable Eastern Michigan QB Reggie Bell did it in 2014 thanks in large part to getting two 70-yard runs in the same game against Buffalo.
Mullen’s best diamond-in-the-rough discovery, Nick Fitzgerald, did it in 2016. Georgia Tech’s TaQuon Marshall achieved the mark in 2017, and that makes sense when you think about the athletes that tend to run triple option attacks and the surprise passing gains that they can generate.
But that was it for three whole seasons. High-level quarterbacking has grown into a hybrid role with both the pocket statue and athlete-first quarterback fading away. You still see some fully pocket-bound guys like Mac Jones and Trask excelling, but the prototypes are your Tua Tagovailoas and Trevor Lawrences: high-end passers who, while mobile, still run far less than even Mariota did.
You may have noted I said there were eight instances of 70/70 guys but listed just seven of them. If Jones was the eighth, then I wouldn’t be writing this right now. It’s because the eighth is Anthony Richardson, in an absurdly low count of just 11 pass attempts and 11 rushes to his name, that we’re all here.
There may be some things that Richardson doesn’t do well, but we just haven’t had a chance to see them because he keeps moving the ball in such big chunks. Nine of his 22 stat-generating plays have gone for at least 20 yards. Three of the seven non-game-ending drives he’s had concluded with a long touchdown the first time he didn’t hand off.
I know FAU and USF are not great competition. However, they’re the same competition that Jones has been facing. The two-game starter has 72 combined rushing and passing attempts, and he has fewer than half of the 20+ yard plays (four) that Richardson does.
Jones also has four interceptions with two other passes that hit defenders in the hands. That computes to a rate of 12% of all drop backs ending that way, which is just under one-in-eight. Better decision making and ball security are supposed to be perks of going with an older and more experienced quarterback, but Jones has been close to disastrous in this dimension.
Richardson hasn’t come close to turning it over even once, though his off-balance 36-yard sideline heave to Jacob Copeland last Saturday might’ve ended differently against a better defense. Would he even attempt that against a better defense or is it just something he did knowing the opposition was poor? We’ll find out with time.
What we can say is that, even against bad competition, Richardson has shown some of the skills required to be a truly effective passer. He looked off a safety by turning his head on his Cotton Bowl touchdown throw that occurred well into garbage time, and on last week’s heave to Copeland, he squared up his shoulders while scrambling and shopped the field despite defenders bearing down on him. Jones attempts to look off defensive backs by pointing both his head and shoulders in one direction before turning them both in the direction he actually wants to go with the ball. That not only is slower but closes off his ability to throw to some areas of the field without additional costly full-body motion.
The list of players who were both elite runners and passers in the modern era of college football is short: Cam Newton, Lamar Jackson, Kyler Murray. Richardson hasn’t proved himself worthy of that designation, though his stature and style of play have drawn some comparisons to Newton already.
It is conceivable, though, that Richardson may ascend to that rarified territory, even if he’s still a long way from proving it out. It is not conceivable that Jones will. That’s no slight to Jones, as that list is literally three players long out of thousands of signal callers who’ve played on the FBS level over the last 20 years.
But Jones has been less explosive and less safe with the ball than Richardson has been, and Richardson’s breathtaking speed — even in a sport that has gotten noticeably faster of late — is enough to make defenses account for him in a way they don’t completely have to for Jones. If it wasn’t for Richardson’s hamstring, the picture couldn’t be any clearer.
Jones is still a good player. He’s averaging more than six yards per carry, and he broke that mark each of the two seasons prior despite defenses knowing he was the running specialist. He’d be an ideal quarterback for the game of a decade ago when many defenses still relied on heavy, lead-footed thumpers at linebacker and only contemplated nickel packages on 3rd & long.
The kind of quarterback that Jones is can still win plenty of games on a good team, which Florida overall is this year. A nice New Year’s Six bowl is on the table for a Gator team with Jones running the show. A division title, much less a conference or national title, probably is not with as good as Alabama and Georgia are.
It’s hard to see UF beating one of those teams with a signal caller who has thrown the ball to G5 defenders three times per game so far. It’d be different if Mullen had some kind of special sauce that no one else has, but he doesn’t because that’s not what kind of coach he is. Jones can defeat defenses that are unable to match his athleticism, but he won’t defeat the ones who can because he won’t do things they never saw coming.
Every report says that Jones is a superlative teammate and human being, which is more than can be said for a lot of people in this world. There’s never been a whisper that he has slacked off or been selfish. Every fan should be proud to claim him as a true Gator.
Mullen is probably sticking by Jones even notwithstanding Richardson’s hamstring because he’s seen him perform in big spots before. For instance, he can point to Jones keeping a steady hand on the wheel for a couple of drives in the big win against Auburn two years ago after a defender fell on Trask’s leg late in the first half.
Richardson hasn’t done that, but only for lack of opportunities. His hamstring will heal up sooner or later, and given the usage patterns so far, he’ll sooner or later get his shot to play meaningful snaps against SEC-level players. If he can make them look like high schoolers like he did members of FAU and USF, then it’s all over.
No matter what happens, Jones will be a key member of the team all season long. He’ll get meaningful drives in every game, even if he no longer appears in the first. And with Richardson’s hamstring now a live question, a hypothetically demoted Jones could go back to being QB1 anytime Richardson goes above a jog.
Florida needs Jones this year. But in the big picture right now, it’s hard not to see him as a stopgap between a Heisman finalist in Trask and a potential one in Richardson.
If I could unfailingly predict the future, I’d be making bank in Vegas instead of writing columns on the Internet. There still is a world where the last two weeks are a mirage and Jones ends up the better option. The chances of that world being the one we live in are low and falling, and the guy who makes the big bucks in Gainesville has a very big decision ahead of him.