GC VIP: Orange and Blue Musings — 11/10/21 Edition

By Will Miles

Thud in Columbia

This is what I wrote about my hopes against South Carolina just last week.

“And please, for the love of all that is holy, just play hard for 60 straight minutes. Not just 10. Not just 20. Play hard for all 60 minutes and let the chips fall where they may.”

I did not get what I asked for.

The Gators lost 40-17 to a South Carolina team that could have easily put up 50 had they not taken their foot off of the gas. They lost to a South Carolina team starting its third string QB, who played at St. Francis College last year and was playing behind Zeb Noland, a grad assistant who last played FBS football in 2018 with Iowa State. For the second time this year, they surrendered more than 6.8 yards per rush to teams that came into the game averaging 3.0 or less.

It was a complete butt whipping. But more than that, it was a complete system failure. From players not looking motivated to turnovers to poor game planning to poor execution, it was just inexcusable considering what South Carolina had put on film coming into this game.

It was supposed to be a time to generate some good feelings even if Florida didn’t play perfect. Instead, it was a new low for a Florida program that has had a few lows over the last decade. Dan Mullen says that he thought his team was prepared coming into the game.

Instead, it was just one big thud.

Good energy, poor toughness?

In his Monday presser, Mullen talked about how he thought the team had prepared well all week and had good energy going into the game, but that they had poor toughness.

I’m not quite sure how those things go together. If you’re an SEC-caliber player, you’re a tough dude. That means that if you’re more talented than the opposition and come into the game with good energy, you should be able to dominate. 

South Carolina has scholarship players just like Florida and so you do need to give them credit for taking it to the Gators. But there’s no excuse for Florida to get blown off the ball the way they did, giving up over 10 yards per carry in the first quarter. And there’s no excuse for Florida to break down in pass coverage against South Carolina the way they did, giving up over nearly 13 yards per pass attempt in the second quarter.

If I could point to one position, one player, one moment that changed the game, I would. But the only thing I can point to that makes sense for the breakdowns is that the players are just playing out the string.

After the article in the Athletic last week calling Florida soft, you would think the team – particularly on defense – would have wanted to go out and prove the authors of that article wrong. Instead, they confirmed it.

Grantham gone

Todd Grantham has seemingly been on the hot seat since the day he arrived in Gainesville.

That quieted down with a successful 2019 season, but after his performance in 2020 and now in 2021, it was clear a change needed to be made. Last year’s defense was bad, giving up 28.6 points per game in its 10 SEC games. But this year’s defense hasn’t been much better, surrendering 26.9 points per game in 7 SEC games, including the shutout of Vanderbilt where the Commodores should have had at least 13. 

The time for change was overdue. The only way that Grantham could have saved his job and won back the Florida fan base was to perform against Alabama in the third game of the year. Instead, his defense couldn’t stop the Tide in the entire first quarter as Alabama built a 21-3 lead that they’d hold onto for the rest of the game.

And while we might cut him some slack considering the loss against Kentucky wasn’t his fault, the Wildcats are not world beaters on that side of the ball.

The loss to LSU was decidedly his unit’s fault. Yes, the offense put the defense in some tough positions in the first half, but that offense also couldn’t be stopped in the second half while the Gators defense couldn’t stop LSU either. And you’re not going to find anybody to make excuses for the defensive side in whatever that was against South Carolina.

So what we have is a defensive coordinator whose defenses haven’t been good in 2018, 2020 and 2021. A .250 hitter is adequate in baseball, but not without any power. It’s bad at defensive coordinator, especially when you don’t create any turnovers.

It was time for Grantham to go after last season. It was time for him to go after the loss to Alabama. It was time for him to go after the loss to LSU. The fact that now is the time only indicates a hesitation that has fans understandably frustrated.

Hevesy gone

The Grantham departure made sense. After all, the defense has been a glaring issue for two years. The departure of John Hevesy – especially right now – is more of a surprise.

Hevesy has been on staffs with Mullen for 20 years. That’s a long history of working together and undoubtedly of building a strong relationship. But even the strongest relationships can wane under the stress of a top-tier football program.

Hevesy’s lines have underperformed at Florida. He worked miracles with the 2018 line full of Jim McElwain recruits, but then was unable to create the same magic in 2019 or 2020. This year’s team started out the year well, but has recently been unable to move the pile as injuries have mounted and the competition has ramped up.

The injuries are really the key component to this move, because I’m not sure many will argue that Hevesy can work wonders with undervalued recruits (just look at Ethan White and Kingsley Eguakun). The problem is that he’s at Florida and is still having to work wonders with undervalued recruits.

That’s actually why the timing of this move is curious. In many ways, it is an acknowledgment that offensive line recruiting has to get better, and that Hevesy is such a poor recruiter that having the spot empty would be more desirable to recruits than having Hevesy there.

When you think of it that way, the need to change becomes obvious.

Is it enough?

Jettisoning Hevesy and Grantham are really about one thing: hope.

Hope for recruits that the coaches who will replace them will be better than the incumbents were. Hope for fans that the coaches who replace them will be able to turn things around similarly to the way that Mullen turned around the Gators offense from 2017 to 2018. 

There will be time to look for examples of this (more on this below), but the point is that by keeping Grantham last year, Mullen gave himself a shield for a poor season. Whether he knew that Emory Jones and Anthony Richardson would be turnover machines is debatable. I suspect he knew the Gators were going to struggle to some degree, just not to this extent.

As the losses have piled up, Mullen has held onto that bullet, knowing he could let Grantham go at the end of the season and placate a large portion of the fan base. The South Carolina game made that no longer palatable, and a move had to be made.

It’s interesting because Mullen held onto Grantham to give him cover and now the question is whether he held on so long that fans might not think it’s enough. Scott Stricklin is about to face the exact same choice with Dan Mullen.

“Most toxic work environment I’ve ever dealt with”

Perhaps the most disturbing part of this entire saga to me is the reporting by Neil Blackmon of Saturday Down South about the work environment with the Florida program being toxic.

The report alleges that Grantham had been difficult to work with over the past year and that he yelled at coaches and grad assistants who tried to offer constructive feedback and advice. I find it hard to believe that Mullen didn’t see and/or hear about those sorts of incidents.

If Mullen saw them and did nothing, then that’s a poor reflection on him and how he runs his program. If Mullen didn’t see them and so didn’t act, that says something about the comfort level of those assistant coaches and grad assistants in confiding in their head coach.

Every job environment has internal strife. Sometimes that tension is normal and at a blue-blood program like Florida, the tension is ramped up because of the stakes and the pressure from the fan base. But for a program also going through the Cameron Newbauer allegations, it isn’t a good look to have it released immediately after your defensive coordinator is released that he was creating a toxic work environment.

It suggests that, just like in the Newbauer situation, people in an uncomfortable working environment were unable or unwilling to come forward to get things fixed.

“This is more to losing to South Carolina”

Matt Hayes had an article detailing the fall of the Florida program where he quoted a big money (millions of dollars given) as saying in an email “This is much more than losing to South Carolina. I wish it were just losing to South Carolina. This just makes it all worse.”

That’s a damning indictment of Mullen and his program, that someone with that kind of influence and that kind of access can take a look at what’s going on and realize that South Carolina is everyone seeing the symptoms rather than it being the disease.

Because the symptoms have been there for a long time. You have the continued support of Grantham. You have the sub-elite recruiting compared to Alabama and Georgia. You have the lack of player accountability and discipline on the field. 

And you have the losses to inferior teams (talent-wise) like Kentucky in 2018 and 2021, Missouri in 2018, LSU in 2020 and 2021 and now South Carolina.

The deal with Mullen was always that he might lose to Georgia and Alabama because they had more talent. But once he got his guys in place, the expectation was that he wouldn’t lose games against inferior opponents because his development and in-game coaching would be superior.

Nothing exemplifies that deal as rotten more than the loss to South Carolina.

Mullen has lost the fan base

Fans have been calling for Grantham’s head for months now. But the sense I got from people who reached out to me after his dismissal was “too little, too late.”

That should be disturbing for Mullen as it means that he held onto Grantham for so long that people are now questioning him as a result. This makes perfect sense. By holding on this long, many believe (and I’m probably in this camp) that the moves with Grantham and Hevesy were directed from on-high rather than by Mullen.

That points towards his unwillingness or inability to make the tough decision when it involves people he’s close to. We’ve seen the same thing with his unwillingness to give Anthony Richardson more snaps and his loyalty to other players who have been in the program compared to younger players.

In other words, dismissing Grantham at the end of last season would have suggested Mullen could function as a CEO while dismissing him now suggests he has to be cajoled into making that kind of decision. You can’t run a program if you aren’t willing to make tough decisions, and the fan base is understandably worried that the next time a tough decision comes up, it will be delayed.

Combine that with the recruiting woes (currently 22nd in the 247Sports rankings) and what exactly are we holding on to? That was the question I received most often after the game and the dismissals. If dismissing a coach is a risk, but Mullen isn’t making the hard on-field decisions and isn’t excelling at recruiting off the field, then is making a change really a risk?

That’s a precarious place for a head coach to be. It’s something Scott Stricklin has to take into account. And it means that any more slip-ups this year could spell the end of this particular era.

Dancing in the moonlight

It came out at Mullen’s Monday press conference that Anthony Richardson injured his knee dancing a day or two before the game. It was such a ridiculous story that all I could do was shake my head and laugh derisively.

But I’m still at a loss for why you’d confirm this information if you’re Mullen. Your job as the head coach is to protect your players. By confirming the information, Mullen – whether his intention or not – deflected some of the blame from himself onto Richardson, something I know wouldn’t go over well with me were I Richardson.

I’m sure AR felt bad after he injured himself for letting his teammates down, doubly so after the loss. I’m also sure that he has done that dance move a hundred times and never had an issue (for the record, I tore my ACL just watching it). I’m also sure that Mullen feels like he shouldn’t have been horsing around to a point where he wasn’t available.

But what’s the benefit in publicly saying so? The risk is that you alienate the player who is your best hope for a resurgence in 2022. I just don’t get it.

The Brian Kelly model

A few people have brought up Brian Kelly as the model for what Dan Mullen now has to do at Florida.

Kelly went 4-8 at Notre Dame in 2016 and completely revamped his program and the way in which he communicated with his players. The result is that the Irish have gone 51-9 since. But that ignores a few key things.

First, the Irish have transitioned to many more ACC games than Big Ten games since that transition. Second, Kelly had a pretty significant track record at Notre Dame prior to that 4-8 season, going 55-23 in six seasons and making the BCS title game in 2012. 

But the biggest thing I see is that even though Kelly has gone 51-9 since 2016, all of those 9 losses have come against ranked opponents. He made it to the playoff in 2018 and got spanked by Clemson 30-3. He played a home-and-home with Georgia and lost both of those games. And this year, his Irish were beaten by Cincinnati in the game that will push the Bearcats into the playoff if the committee eventually puts them there.

Notre Dame is a very good team under Kelly. But they aren’t an elite team. They haven’t beaten the teams that Florida is going to have to beat to get where they want to go. They have recruited just about at Florida’s level but have played much easier schedules overall. 

Put another way, if you put Notre Dame in the SEC, what do you get? You get the 2019 Florida team as a ceiling, with an 11-2 record, defeating a good-but-not-great Auburn team at home, and putting up fights against better LSU and Georgia teams.

 

Raymond Hines
Back when I was a wee one I had to decide if I wanted to live dangerously and become a computer hacker or start a website devoted to the Gators. I chose the Gators instead of the daily thrill of knowing my next meal might be at Leavenworth. No regrets, however. The Gators have been and will continue to be my addiction. What makes this so much fun is that the more addicted I become to the Florida Gators, the more fun I have doing innovative things to help bring all the Gator news that is news (and some that isn’t) to Gator fans around the world. Andy Warhol said we all have our 15 minutes of fame. Thanks to Gator Country, I’m working on a half hour. Thanks to an understanding daughter that can’t decide if she’s going to be the female version of Einstein, Miss Universe, President of the United States or a princess, I get to spend my days doing what I’ve done since Gus Garcia and I founded Gator Country back in 1996. Has it really been over a decade and a half now?