There are widely differing opinions on how good the Florida Gators will be this year. Looking at the Massey composite rankings and its collection of 32 rating systems, UF has the second-highest standard deviation among top-15 teams. Among the major preview magazines, they range from No. 11 in Athlon to outside the top 25 in Phil Steele. Just this morning, Stewart Mandel released his SEC predictions which have UF tied for third in the East with Missouri at a conference record of 4-4.
I understand why it’s hard to find many people really bullish on the Gators. Emory Jones hasn’t started before, and spring and fall reports don’t suggest he’s on a Heisman track or anything. The offensive line has problems, and there are no established stars at the wide receiver or tight end position. On the other side of the ball, well, you saw last year’s defense.
Based on the preseason SP+ projections, an average top-five caliber team would go about 10-2 against UF’s schedule. I’m not here to tell you that an 11-1 or 12-0 season is in the offing.
However, I do want folks to take seriously what the upside of the 2021 team is. Basically all of the hedging I’ve seen done about UF, even from those who see the team as a fringe top ten team in clear command of second in the division, has been to the downside.
The Gators really might go 8-4. I would not be shocked if they lost any of the road games at Kentucky, LSU, or Missouri, and if they happen to lose all three, it’s a 7-5 team at best. These things are not out of the realm of possibility, but here is why something a lot better than those scenarios is possible as well.
They have the talent
One of the story lines about the Dan Mullen era has been underwhelming recruiting class ratings, especially once you take out the non-qualifiers and guys who left the team for one reason or another before their first fall camps even began. I’m not here to litigate recruiting, but by ratings, it has been an improvement over the McElwain days. And, the transfer portal really has been a game changer for the roster.
Last year Florida ranked No. 7 in the Team Talent Composite, which takes into account every player on a roster who got a recruiting rating. Only four teams were significantly ahead of the Gators — the usual suspects of Georgia, Alabama, Ohio State, and Clemson — and they went 1-1 against that collection.
Looking at who left, who signed, and who transferred in, UF will probably be around that same place this year. They don’t have a mutant tight end anymore, but there’s very highly rated talent just about everywhere.
Jones was a top 100 player. The lowest-rated running back is Malik Davis, who torched UGA’s defense last year. The leading receivers are expected to be Jacob Copeland and Xzavier Henderson, a pair of high 4-stars. The tight ends and offensive line do lack a lot of truly highly-rated talent outside Richard Gouraige and Keon Zipperer, but most of the line has played a decent amount before and you have to go to the third tight end to find someone below the 4-star level.
On defense, the only linemen who’ll play who lack blue chip ratings are the pair of sixth-year seniors at tackle who’ve been getting rave reviews in practice. Buck has a legitimately elite level of talent. The only sub 4-star middle linebacker who’ll get snaps is the guy who’s on basically every second team preseason All-SEC list. And the secondary? There’s some truly elite guys in Kaiir Elam and Jason Marshall, the nation’s top-rated JUCO transfer will help out at Star, and Tre’Vez Johnson is the only sub 4-star guy in the likely rotation.
UF did lose some key players off of last year’s team, but they’re not bereft of talent. There are only two teams they’ll be real talent underdogs to on this year’s schedule, and they’re the same ones they went 1-1 with a close loss against last year.
The offense won’t fall off a cliff
The offense almost certainly will take a couple steps back without a Heisman finalist quarterback and a couple of first round pass targets. Let’s be real, though: it’s not going back to the Muschamp/McElwain days or anything close to it.
For one thing, the unit just has far more talent than it did in those days (see above). For another, the last time a Mullen team failed to score 30 points per game was 2013. Sure, he broke that mark with a future NFL star in Dak Prescott, but he also did it with a guy who couldn’t throw at an SEC level in Nick Fitzgerald with Mississippi State talent around him. He also got to 35 a game with a very uneven Feleipe Franks in 2018. Even if Jones replicates 2018 Franks as a passer, the offense will likely be better than in ’18 because Jones is a significantly better runner.
Suppose the team drops about a touchdown per game from last year’s 39.8 points per contest down to something like 33. Well, the 2019 team averaged 33.5 points per game, and the Gators finished solidly in the top ten. It’s just not plausible that the offense will plummet in effectiveness to the point of actively harming the final won-loss record.
The defense really could improve a lot
I’ve never thought Todd Grantham is a national championship-level coordinator, but he can be and has been a lot better than he was last year. In fact he was considerably better just two years ago, as the ’19 defense was arguably his best ever and managed to pitch three shutouts.
Things went so wrong last year for a number of reasons, but the players at least have talked about them. In one press appearance at the beginning of fall camp, three guys covered the worst of it. Elam spoke about the communication problems, Mohamoud Diabate commented on the lack of full defensive install they had, and Zach Carter mentioned that some players were only in it for themselves after the pandemic summer.
The new secondary coaches should help correct the communication problems, and, not for nothing, we’ve been hearing since spring about how they’re actually allowed to teach and implement press coverage again this year. Grantham’s defense is complicated and needs a lot of install time, but they got the necessary time this year where they didn’t in 2020. The culture sounds much improved with specific focus in the summer and fall on restoring a team mentality.
Does this mean they’ll be back at the 2019 level of performance? No, not necessarily. That’d be a lot of ground to make up in one offseason. They could get back up above 2018-level performance though, which isn’t as high a bar to clear as you might think, and the ’18 team finished solidly in the top ten.
The age of analytics has been a welcome corrective to the overwrought mythos about football culture from decades past, but culture does still matter. This year’s defense will have to prove itself on the field, but it’ll at least do that without dragging the boat anchor of bad culture that it had a year ago.
Putting it all together
Florida was a fumble and/or just one more defensive stop against Texas A&M and a shoe throw against LSU away from being a perfect 10-0 in last year’s regular season even with all of the problems that were going on. Mullen only addressed some of the problems from that campaign, and he himself was one of them at times. The staff pretty clearly didn’t take LSU as seriously as it should’ve — the game plan was visibly worse than for any other regular season game — and Mullen had a couple of clock management blunders against Bama that helped prevent the upset.
Again, I’m not here to tell you that UF is some kind of dark horse national title contender. If literally everything goes right this fall it’s possible, I guess, but that description intrinsically assumes a large amount of good luck.
But Florida is not necessarily going to settle in somewhere in the teens of the rankings either. They’ll have a top ten team in terms of talent, a quarterback who’s been learning from one of the best two or three quarterback teachers in the college game for the last four years, and a defense largely free of the biggest things that hampered it a year ago. Even allowing that Mullen isn’t a completely solid game day coach outside of offensive Xs and Os, UF is in good position to go back to about where it was in Mullen’s first two seasons if things don’t go horribly awry.
Was that a level of performance Gator fans will be happy with for the long haul? No. They want conference and national championships. It was, however, a top-ten level of performance, not in the 11-20 range. And when you take a step back and look at factors like the high level of talent, the high floor for the offense, and the easy room for large defensive improvement, a finish in the second half of the top ten doesn’t sound so outlandish.