One of the ways to identify a great player versus an average one is to see how they handle adversity, especially when they’ve never experienced failure before.
Do they make excuses for their poor performance and get snippy with the fans who are criticizing them, or do they block out the outside noise and focus on what actually matters?
It remains to be seen if Emory Jones will be a great quarterback at Florida, but, if he’s not, it won’t be for a lack of maturity. He handled himself with dignity and class in his two press conferences since he threw two interceptions against Florida Atlantic on Saturday.
He was open and honest about his own disappointment in his first start and how he plans to turn things around this week at South Florida.
“After watching [the film], I had a lot of opportunities to make a lot of plays.” Jones said. “Could do a lot of things differently, threw better balls and make better decisions, but all I can do is just grow from it and just learn from it. I’m glad I got the opportunity to actually just get a chance to learn from all that. And just know I’ve got to do better than that and just come back and try to do better next week.
“I was doing some things that I don’t usually do, just making different type of throws that I don’t usually do. Just watching, I didn’t look very comfortable to myself, and I’m very comfortable every day in practice. I’ve been doing this for a couple years, so, just watching it, I didn’t feel like I looked really comfortable.”
Head coach Dan Mullen said Jones’ ability to look beyond the box score and the highlight reel is one of the things that he looks for in a quarterback. Win or lose, play well or play poorly, there will be things to improve upon, and Jones thinks like a coach in that regard. He’s able to watch the film and pick out exactly what he did wrong without the coaches having to tell him.
That type of maturity and self-evaluation will give Jones a chance to be a great quarterback for the Gators. Mullen and quarterbacks coach Garrick McGee can tell Jones what to do until they’re blue in the face, but, at the end of the day, Jones is the one who has to play come Saturday.
So, that drive to get better has to come from within himself, and he has it.
“He can sit down and point and say, ‘Hey, you can look at my feet were off here,’” Mullen said. “‘Hey, you know what, I misread this play right here. Hey, I got myself off-balance on that throw. Hey, I should have slid this way in the pocket.’ And, I think when you understand those things, you have an opportunity to make your improvements a lot better, and I think he’s a guy that, as he analyzes it, he’ll look and say, ‘Hey, these are the areas that I need to improve, and here’s things that I did well in the game.’
“That does take maturity, and the maturity can go both ways. He could’ve lit it up last weekend and put up, like, video game numbers, but I would’ve still looked at it the same way and said, ‘OK, here’s the things you did well. Here’s the things you did poorly,’ and you need that maturity to continue to grow and improve. I think he’s been around long enough that he understands that either way.”
Mullen thinks that Jones didn’t play as poorly as the stat sheet suggests against FAU. He made some nice plays, but he also got a little too overanxious to make big plays at times, which caused him to miss some reads and make some poor throws.
Jones’ issues were primarily mental in week one, and Mullen has seen him work on that this week in practice.
“He played pretty well last Saturday but made some errors that he’s not used to making,” Mullen said. “I don’t know if ‘trying to do too much’ is the word. I don’t know the word. ‘I’m almost trying to be too perfect, too exact. My mind’s going in a million different directions trying to do different things on the field,’ instead of trusting your fundamentals, your techniques and doing what you’re supposed to do.
“And so, I think this week in practice, I’ve seen that. You’ve seen him, really, ‘Hey, are my feet exact? Am I on balance? My mind’s not trying to process a million things; my mind’s focused on what’s important and what I need to do.’ I’ve seen that, and that’s a good step forward.”
There’s no denying that Jones needs to play much better moving forward for the Gators to return to the SEC Championship Game and contend for a spot in the College Football Playoff.
But, given Jones’ maturity and attitude, it’s hard to bet against him doing just that.