With three games in the books, a quarter of the 2023 season is over already. Here are some keys to the rest of the season based on those first three contests.
Overall: Keep the Fire Stoked
The dreaded letdown game is a common trope in football. You probably know what it is, but every season is someone’s first, so here goes just in case. A letdown game is when a team performs poorly the week after a big win. Think about how Florida came out flat against Kentucky a week after the Utah win last year, or how they lost to Vandy on the road after blowing out South Carolina.
The structure of UF’s early schedule is an antidote to letdown games: McNeese came after Utah, and Charlotte comes after Tennessee. If the Gators won either or both of those big games, there was an overmatched opponent right after to avoid a letdown loss. And yes, both of McNeese and Charlotte are well below last year’s Commodores, which were plucky in a way this year’s two paycheck game opponents aren’t.
Not just Billy Napier, but some players spoke earlier this week about practices being inadequate. It’s probably a good sign that they did so, because it shows that there are some among the roster who are on the watch for slipping, but it may not be conclusive.
It’s only human to relax some after a big success, which is why the letdown game is a trope in the first place. However it being a trope means that anyone who’s paid any attention to the media cycle around a college football team knows that the topic of a letdown will come up after a big win. Are these guys truly this dialed in, or are they saying what they know they’re expected to say? We’ll find out.
Cupcake games are about clearing a minimum bar, not achieving a high bar. Florida doesn’t have to win 48-3 for this week to be a success, but it needs to not severely mess around and win, say, 17-3. The Gators aren’t yet at a stage where style points matter, but they do need to consolidate and build off of last week’s victory. If they don’t, it could be be 2022 all over again.
Offense: Adjusting the Throttle
In his postgame comments, Napier said he got too conservative in the second half of the win over Tennessee. That was true in the third quarter, but it was not later in the fourth.
The Vols came out run-heavy after the break, running the ball on seven of the first ten plays. They moved the ball a long way, but they needed things like uncharacteristic (for 2023, anyway) poor screen defense and a missed tackle by Florida on third downs to do so. The series stalled out after two short slant attempts on 2nd and 3rd down were both broken up by Gators.
On Florida’s first drive, they ran into a stacked box for no gain, messed up spacing on a screen against a defense with ten guys within ten yards of the line of scrimmage, and then ran three-of-four routes short of the sticks on 3rd & 10. Overly conservative indeed.
Tennessee finally took a deep shot a few plays into its next drive, but Jordan Castell broke it up. Milton did manage to hit on a longer pass on the next play, but it required a throw with a high degree of precision against tight coverage. Fortunately the Gator defense was able to get a stop on 4th & 1 with an assist from a referee accidentally kicking the ball, causing it to have to be reset.
Florida’s offense responded with a Zook Special, a classic run-run-pass-punt. Ricky Pearsall dropping the screen on 3rd down didn’t help, but he probably wouldn’t have made it anyway. Tennessee was able to move the ball some on its next drive, but penalties halted the momentum. Despite holding the ball most of the frame, UT only came away with three points on three drives.
The Gators finally moved the ball some to begin the fourth quarter, though a 15-yard penalty on the Vols helped, and Trevor Etienne getting more than 19 yards after contact on a 19-yard run put the team in field goal range. When Trey Smack connected to put the team up three scores with ten minutes to go, then it was time to get conservative.
Napier really needed this win, so just bleeding clock in that game state was utterly defensible. Even as the Volunteers did end up completing one of their patented quick-strike drives, going 75 yards in 1:14, three quarters of play showed they weren’t likely to do that more than once. UF’s defense was doing quite well, Tennessee was relatively mistake-prone, and Milton hadn’t been supremely accurate. He did hit a few deep shots, as he takes enough of them that he always was going to, but Castell’s breakup of one on-the-money ball showed that even accuracy wasn’t going to be enough.
Even when UF went to nothing but runs after that touchdown, they still chewed up just under five minutes running all of six plays plus a hard count that worked and a punt. That was half of the remaining time once the Gators went up by 17. The offense should have done more earlier in the half, but it was appropriately conservative on the last couple of drives.
As seen in Weeks 1 and 3, Florida is obviously a team built more to play with a lead than from behind. Can Napier bring himself to keep his foot on the accelerator when someone doesn’t fall as far behind as UT did, or who has a better shot at coming back?
Defense: Coverage and Line Depth
Leading up to last week’s game, I called the Briles/Baylor offense that Josh Heupel runs an evolutionary dead end a couple times on the GC message boards. It can score a lot of points and gain a lot of yards against a lot of defenses, but if an elite defense plays it the right way, its simplicity becomes its downfall because it runs out of counterpunches.
It’s too early to call Florida’s 2023 defense elite — and while better than all expectations, they likely won’t earn that moniker simply from where they’re coming from last year — but Austin Armstrong played it exactly the right way.
Despite all the flashy deep passing, this kind of offense is ultimately a spread-to-run scheme. They split receivers out very wide, but that removes defenders from the box. Those who run this attack want defenses to expend extra manpower to defend those exterior passes in order to run up the middle.
Florida largely plugged the middle with three down linemen and two linebackers, relying on players flying in from elsewhere to clean up outside runs. The plan was to trust the cover guys to take care of the receivers, and it largely worked. Milton only connected on three longer passes, and two of them had tight coverage. The only easy one came early when the Vols picked Miguel Mitchell, and he was able neither to avoid the contact nor recover. That was it.
There hasn’t been any chirping about who is “DBU” this year, which is fine by me. However, Florida has an abundance of good coverage guys as we saw against the Volunteers. There have been a couple of busts early in games against Utah and Tennessee, but they’re the exception, not the rule.
And the Gators held up against the interior run because they were able to adequately rotate players. The interior line depth that’s new to this season versus last is the reason why that could work.
Armstrong gave up nothing easy between the tackles and trusted his armada of DBs to get the coverage right — which they did. When a defense can do both of those things against the Heupel offense, it will hold a high octane attack to a relatively low output.
There are more complex offenses yet to face, but what Florida did against the Vols — and Utah, if you look at the right stuff — should be very encouraging for this season.