With the Gators just past the halfway mark of spring practice, one of the biggest questions that remains is what the offense will look like in the fall.
You could’ve easily confused Dan Mullen for Mike Leach the past two seasons. In 2020, the Gators averaged more than 39 passing attempts per game, and only four times all season did a running back record more than nine carries in a game. Even in short-yardage situations and when trying to run the clock out at the end of games, Mullen opted to throw the ball more than usual.
While part of the extreme reliance on the passing game can be attributed to the offensive line struggling to open holes, part of it can also be explained by Mullen’s willingness to adapt to his personnel and do whatever it takes to field an elite offense. With an intelligent and deadly accurate quarterback and an elite group of pass-catchers, Mullen would’ve been dumb to not have thrown it 39 times per game.
With the top-3 receivers from the 2020 team gone and a more athletic quarterback in Emory Jones taking over, the direction of the offense remains a mystery. Will it go back to looking like the run-first, death-by-a-million-papercuts outfit that Mullen became famous for as Florida’s offensive coordinator and Mississippi State’s head coach? Or will they continue to implement some of the pro-style passing concepts from the past two years but just sprinkle in some more designed quarterback runs here and there?
Even Mullen himself is unsure exactly what the offense will look like at this juncture. The coaches have spent the first two weeks of spring camp throwing as much of the offensive scheme at the players as possible without much consideration for what the players do best. Over the next two weeks, they’ll start to pare down the offense and determine the direction they want to go heading into the summer.
“Every year, it’s been a little bit different,” Mullen said. ‘So, this year, it’ll be a little different again. I’m sure there’ll be a lot of things that you recognize and then some things that are going to be a little bit different for us.
“I think that’ll be what we figure out here through spring and then what direction we want to head going into summer, and then we’ll figure more of that in the summer as we get ready to get into season, but there’ll be a lot of similarities to what we’ve done. We’re not changing a whole lot.”
Mullen explained that they’ll call a bunch of the same plays as they have the past two years, but they might look different to outsiders because of the vastly different skillsets of the signal-callers.
Kyle Trask excelled at reading the coverage prior to the snap, stepping up in the pocket to find a clean throwing window and delivering an accurate ball. He was not, however, a good runner at all. Most of the defensive linemen on the team were probably faster than him. So, he rarely left the pocket. The play either worked exactly as it was drawn up or it failed.
Jones isn’t as accurate of a passer or as good at reading coverages, at least based on what he’s shown in games so far. However, he has a cannon for a right arm and brings an element of backyard football to the offense. The play might look completely different than how it was designed yet still be just as effective with Jones.
“Emory’s got a much stronger [arm],” Mullen said. “So, on certain deep balls, there’s certain deep balls he can throw, I think, because he has a stronger arm. It’s not a knock on Kyle. I think everybody sees with Kyle the accuracy. Obviously, Kyle’s probably a much more accurate passer. I think if you look at the numbers, he was close to 70 percent completions, I think, which is one of the most accurate probably in school history.
“Kyle was really a pocket guy. He could slide in the pocket and make this and arm angle change. Emory’s a guy that’s going to extend, but he can extend outside … and have the threat of run because he’s so dynamic out in the open field with the ball in his hand. His ability to throw on the run and use some arm talent to kind of be off-balanced when you’re running one direction and be able to use the ball to flip the other direction. They’re just totally different players.”
Because they’re totally different players, there will be some minor tweaks to the offensive system this year. It’s not fair to expect Jones to do the things that Trask did. Just because they’re different players doesn’t necessarily make one better than the other, however.
It’s not a coincidence that Tim Tebow and Tom Brady, arguably the best college quarterback and the best NFL quarterback of all time, have been referred to as “system quarterbacks” by their detractors. Every player has a unique set of skills and weaknesses. They need a system that highlights their strengths and minimizes their weaknesses to unlock their full potential. Mullen is still in that discovery phase with Jones.
“I think people think ‘This is our system ,and this is what it is. If you’re a square peg and we’re a round hole, just keep slamming it until you become round and fit in there.’ Our job is to mold it as coaches and kind of tweak around the strengths of the players. So, we’ll build around the strengths of the quarterbacks that are here now, very much like the way we built around Kyle’s strengths over the last two years.
“It’s important for us to play to [Jones’] strengths. But there’s a lot of throws that Emory can make that Kyle couldn’t make. That’ll allow us to tweak and change some things within the scheme.”
When reports came out over the weekend that the offense struggled in the team’s first spring scrimmage, some fans were ready to abandon ship. The reality, though, is that the quarterbacks’ struggles were partially by design. Mullen used the scrimmage essentially as an experiment to find out which portions of the playbook to accentuate in the fall and which portions to outright eliminate.
It’ll be different in the fall when Mullen is working with a much smaller playbook, studying the opponent’s weaknesses and game-planning ways to create advantageous matchups. That’s where Mullen shines as one of the top offensive minds in the game. His history suggests that the offense will be highly productive this season, even if it does look a little different.
“There’s nobody in the country that does a better job than Dan Mullen at matching what we’re going to do schematically offensively to the strengths of our offensive players,” tight ends coach Tim Brewster said. “He did it with Dak Prescott. He’s done it year in and year out. There’s nobody that does a better job of not forcing a player to fit a system. He’s going to fit the system to the player. And so, there will be a lot of similarities, but there will also be differences as well.”