PD’s Postulations: The South Carolina Game

I know. This is the space where you usually go to find a silver lining. A little good news. Some positive perspective on Saturday’s events, when those events happened to have sucked the life once more out of Gator Nation. This is the part where I tell you that the sun will still come up tomorrow. And tomorrow. And tomorrow.

But there simply is no good news here to report. The only silver color that is lining the Gator universe today is mercury poisoning. The sun did come out today, but none of it shone on the Florida football program. The black cloud remains fixed over Florida Field and more specifically directly over the head of Will Muschamp on his way out. Wherever he goes, the black cloud comes along like a good pet. And whenever he has appeared to shed the cloud, it returns like a bad penny. This season’s games have given Florida fans the feeling that they are stuck on the island of misfit toys.

We’re a Couple of Misfits

That would certainly be an apt description for Will Muschamp and the Florida football program.

How would you like to be a spotted elephant? How would you like to be a team with no identity?

Or a choo-choo with square wheels on your caboose? Or a high-powered aerial attack with quarterbacks who either cannot or are not allowed to throw the ball?

Or a water pistol that shoots jelly? Or a creative offensive genius who only calls simplistic running plays?

They’re all misfits.

How would you like to be a bird that doesn’t fly; he swims? How would you like to be a team that doesn’t catch game-winning touchdown passes; they drop them?

Or a cowboy who rides an ostrich? Or an offense that rides the brakes?

Or a boat that can’t stay afloat? Or a team that can’t stop sinking its own chances?

We’re all misfits.

And it is important to note this because as King Moonraiser astutely observed, a toy is never truly happy until it is loved by a child. And a football program is never truly functional until it is loved by its fans. And the Florida football team has been estranged from its fans for a long, long time.

Everything off the field is such a perfect fit between the two, it was intoxicating to believe that this hot-shot up-and-coming “next great head coach” from the best coaching tree in the sport and with extensive championship experience in the SEC would be the perfect fit ON the field as well. But it turns out that even if he does become an elite head coach, some day, Muschamp’s style and philosophy is fatally misfit for the University of Florida. For a couple of years I was convinced that it was merely a case of being painfully conservative due to personnel limitations. However, it seems that this was a spurious correlation. A coincidence. An unhappy happenstance. Because now that Muschamp has all the offensive tools he needs to run a high-flying, high-scoring, aggressive, downhill running and downfield passing offense, he refuses to do it. Or even glance in that direction. He will not try a single fastball; just off-speed pitches trying to paint the corners.

Perhaps the perfect example of this was the deep pass along the sidelines to Quinton Dunbar that was caught out of bounds. First of all, every fan knows that Dunbar is incapable of keeping his feet while trying to catch a pass, so the coaches surely know this as well. Calling most of Dunbar’s routes within 5 inches of the sideline chalk is just asking for failure (that long pass down the middle against Vandy – that should have been a touchdown if Dunbar had the ability to keep his feet while trying to catch a football – was not called by the coaches; that was an audible by Treon Harris at the line of scrimmage). When Dunbar stumbled and had to dive for the catch against Carolina and came down on the out-of-bounds line, Muschamp no doubt kicked the dirt and thought, “I just can’t catch a break.” Well, when you scheme your offense so that every single pass to a wide receiver is within five inches of the sideline, you set yourself up for failure if everything is not perfect. Pretty much all other quarterbacks in the country – including the true freshmen starters – are using the whole field…but not at Florida. Muschamp thinks that using anything but the five inches next to both sidelines is far too risky for a forward pass. That is his philosophy. Paint the corner and just assume you will perfectly hit the corner with every pitch.

Trouble is, that will only work if everything else in the game is done perfectly. And this team does nothing perfectly.

The Perfect Storm

This Hollywood analogy has been made to describe so many segments of the Will Muschamp tenure at Florida that instead of watching Florida football each Saturday, we may as well be watching one of those minor television networks – the ones that play the same movie four or five times consecutively to fill their weekend programming. And as if the perfect symbolism, the end of the South Carolina game was a mirror of the end of that film, and signifying the end of Muschamp’s Florida career.

You know how the movie ended, right? The captain and crew had fought through the perfect storm, the boat had suffered multiple catastrophic damages that would sink any normal ship, yet it somehow soldiered on. Then, finally the crew saw sunlight peeking through the horizon. They had reached the outskirts of the storm. Safety and rescue were in sight, just a few yards away. Very much like Gator Nation and the Muschamps must have felt after the Georgia and Vandy games. The tattered boat had but one wave to overcome to reach safety. But even as it appeared they were over it, that wave rose and rose and kept rising until it turned the ship upside down and sent it tumbling back into the teeth of the storm. Upside down and finally sinking into the depths, all was lost just one wave away from salvation.

That one wave was the South Carolina Gamecocks.

Florida fans and players and coaches and everyone else from the Jeremy Foley to the “ICE COLD COKE” guy could see the sunlight outside the storm, and every one of us knew we were out of it. I personally danced a little jig when Treon Harris ran for the game-clinching touchdown, unaware that the wave was rising and the touchdown would not count, that the drive would wind up unbelievably empty of points, and that it was just the beginning of a total collapse the likes of which Gator Nation has never witnessed. All we had to do was crest over one more wave and it was over. Good guys win.

If we don’t have a defensive tackle drop a pick-6 softly tossed right into his hands on the Carolina goal line, we win. But the wave kept rising.

If we don’t get a bogus holding penalty on Treon’s touchdown run, we win. But the wave kept rising.

If we simply run one successful play after the called-back touchdown, we win. But the wave kept rising.

If we don’t get the field goal blocked, we win. But the wave kept rising.

If we can simply run a play – or CALL a play – capable of getting three yards to secure a single first down, a play that any team in America can execute when they need to, we kill the clock and win. But the wave kept rising.

If we don’t get the punt blocked, we win. But the wave kept rising.

If Tank Morrison doesn’t overrun the quarterback for the tenth time on the day, stopping the long catch-and-run that put Carolina in position to tie the score, we win. But the wave kept rising.

Heck, even earlier, if Quinton Dunbar can keep his feet on a deep sideline bomb, we win. But the wave kept rising.

The list is endless as the sea.

But the Gators inexplicably did none of these things. And even without doing any of those things, if we ran anything but a completely remedial offensive game plan the entire second half – or the entire game for that matter – we win by three touchdowns at least.

We were just playing it safe. With his career on the line and the Carolina defense probably the worst defense we will face all year, Muschamp played the whole game safe. With the Carolina secondary being absolutely putrid and begging to be torn apart, we refused to throw the ball. Because it was philosophically too risky.

That’s how you lose a game and that’s how you lose your job.

And at the end of the day, no matter if it is the fault of Will Muschamp, the players, cruel twists of fate or even the long-reaching arm of the Urban Meyer program-grenade, the fact of the matter is that Will Muschamp as the Florida coach is always in the perfect storm and his boat is incapable of getting out. He can see the clear skies over the last giant cresting waves, but he does not have the wherewithal to get out and the wave will not let him out. Meanwhile across state, FSU has done absolutely everything wrong off the field, has assembled the worst team of thugs and criminals since the mid-‘90s Nebraska Cornhuskers and they just keep being the happy beneficiaries of the most incredible luck and good fortune this side of 2013 Auburn. The only ending this rotten film can have anymore is to let the movie play out and watch the Muschamp ship sink to the bottom. Roll the credits and wait for the next movie to start. Hopefully it will have a much better screenwriter and it will not be a tragedy, but rather a thriller with a happy ending where the hero gets the girl, all the good guys live and all the bad guys in Tallahassee go to jail.

The Meat on the Bone

I have been writing – preaching really – all year about which metrics are important and which are not with regards to the decision to keep or fire Muschamp. Last week I pointed out that after the initial transition year, when you take out the seven game losing streak over which Muschamp had no control, the Gators were 21-5, with a 14-1 record against SEC opponents and a 5-2 mark against teams in the top-6 that season. All of that is accurate and I will always stand by that statement and its importance to the decision making process. Because it is accurate and it is essential.

Because no matter what else happened or happens, the objective here is to determine if Will Muschamp is Florida’s great coach of the future. That is the only criterion that ever mattered.

Those records absent the otherworldly injury deluge of 2013 were strong indicators that Muschamp MIGHT be that great coach for whom we were looking. However, it was clear Saturday that he is not. Because simply winning a lot of games is not sufficient at Florida. I do not abide the theory that he has to win with a certain style or by a certain large margin of victory every week to be that great coach, but he has to be able to win championships. Period. And Saturday’s game informed us that he is never going to win a championship at Florida.

Not because we lost, but because it was a game that Muschamp HAD to win just to keep his job and he coached it like a scared little child. He coached it not to lose. He constantly intentionally passed up opportunity after opportunity to go for the throat and instead opted for the safest, the weakest and the most timidly impotent path to cling to a late lead. That is a huge red flag that informs us that in the future if Florida were to be in the SEC Championship Game or the national title game, that Will Muschamp will coach those games like a scared little child. He will never “go for it”. He will never finish off a foe when it is ready to collapse.

That is not a learning-on-the-job thing. It is not a personnel thing. It is not an injury thing. It is a hard-wired part of his coaching DNA. Muschamp proved on Saturday that he is a defensive coordinator, and a defensive coordinator only. And I don’t think he is capable of ever being anything else unless he changes that hard wiring. Which basically cannot be done.

The End Game

I don’t know if this loss should have cost Muschamp his job, but after that collapse I officially don’t care anymore.

You can’t have a team on the ropes like that and lose. And you certainly cannot do it twice in the last three games in the Swamp when your job is riding on the results.

You cannot have the game won and let a field goal get blocked and then not do something to prevent the next punt being blocked. You can’t have that many chances to put them away and continue to call plays like a scared little child.

You can NOT follow up a blocked field goal and a blocked punt by calling plays like a scared little child in overtime and play for the field goal, knowing that the field goal could get blocked again and that just one of your classic defensive lapses on the ensuing possession will lose the game.

You can’t do ANY of those things and remain the Gators’ coach. I will feel terrible for Muschamp and how our recruiting class is going to be destroyed by the firing of the staff, and how the entire team’s development this year will be completely wasted for the third-straight year…but not now. I will worry about all that later.

I will lament the complete disaster that our program will be after totally starting over again with another inadequate head coach (because there are no great, let alone rock star elite head coaches available out there who would come to UF right now; none)…but right now I just don’t care anymore. Will, I really like you and you could still be an elite coach for us, some day many years into the future, but you had your chance against Missouri and again against South Carolina and you flat out blew it. Go home and look in the mirror and get mad as hell at the guy staring back at you. Because he is the one who destroyed this whole thing for you this year.

I know that I have come to be one of the only remaining voices of optimism with this regime, and most of you opened this column with that in mind. I am sorry to have nothing to provide in that capacity. For we are all stranded together on the Island of Misfit Toys, huddled around the fire waiting to hear the jingle bells of Santa’s sleigh, as we were promised. We were assured by all possible statistical metrics, waves of momentum and everything in the realm of human understanding: Santa was going to finally come and pick us up Saturday afternoon. But Rudolph’s shiny red nose never appeared through the snow storm. He is not coming. And as for finding something positive in all of this, as for coming up with something good to embrace, I am like the little Dolly for Sue, icy tears dripping from her face, confessing: “I haven’t any dreams left to dream.”

I know that since he took over the Florida program that Will Muschamp has been given the shaft by fate and bad luck more than maybe any coach in Florida history – perhaps college football history – but it is painfully clear right now that God just doesn’t want him to be the head coach of the Florida Gators.

And after Saturday, neither do I.

No child wants to play with a Charlie-in-the-Box.