By Will Miles
Keyontae Johnson
When Gators forward Keyontae Johnson fainted on the court against Florida State a couple of weeks ago, you hoped for the best.
But when news came out from his family that he was in an induced coma, it confirmed that it was a serious – and potentially deadly – issue. So when news came on December 22 that Johnson was being released from the hospital, there was a huge weight lifted.
He may not play basketball this year. He may not play basketball ever again, depending on the diagnosis. But he is alive and appears to have a shot at a full life. What awesome news.
But on the down side, there’s a faction of people who believe they deserve to know everything about everyone. That shouldn’t extend to medical records. Whoever the anonymous source is who’s spreading news regarding Johnson’s diagnosis before the family wishes it to be out there in public should be ashamed of themselves.
We live in a time where news is at our finger tips almost as it happens, and reporters end up getting rewarded for being first. But reporting medical information beyond what the family wishes to be public goes past a line that journalists shouldn’t be comfortable with, regardless of if they believe the information to be newsworthy.
No moral victories
Florida lost the SEC Championship.
Yes, it was only a 6-point defeat. Yes, they proved they could hang with Alabama (at least in the second half). Yes, a few plays go the Gators way and perhaps it’s a different game.
But there aren’t any moral victories in the SEC. The reality is that Florida is an 8-3 team whose three losses have come by a combined 12 points. That sounds like an unbelievable season, and in many ways it is.
But this is also a team that lost its three games giving up an average of 39.3 points in those losses. That’s putrid.
I wrote back in January that this was Mullen’s opportunity. It was his opportunity to take advantage of QB turnover at Georgia, LSU and Alabama. He was able to do so against Georgia, but certainly not against LSU. And while Tua Tagovailoa left Tuscaloosa, it turns out that his replacement is probably going to win the Heisman Trophy.
But that’s the thing about the SEC. Only a few people saw Joe Burrow becoming JOE BURROW in 2019. Or how about Tua unseating Jalen Hurts in 2018 to lead the Tide to the playoff.
Florida had that magic in a bottle this year with Kyle Trask, Kyle Pitts and Kadarius Toney. They just weren’t able to get the job done in the same way that LSU did last year or Georgia almost did in 2017. You have to take advantage when you have someone like Trask pulling the trigger, because those guys don’t come along that often.
Instead, Florida will play Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl. It’s a fine season, indeed. But it wasn’t what it could be, and so I’m left having really enjoyed watching the team play, but understanding that this was the shot and it’s probably going to take a couple years to build back up to take another.
Mullen was a great offensive coordinator on Saturday
The only caveat to the statement I just made about Florida taking years to build back up is that Dan Mullen is an offensive savant.
His game plan against Alabama, particularly moving Kadarius Toney all over the field in a way we haven’t really seen all year, was spectacular. Then when Alabama came out in the second half ready to take Toney away, immediately he had plays dialed up for Trevon Grimes and Jacob Copeland.
I have no idea whether Emory Jones is going to be as good as Trask (assuming Trask doesn’t come back). What I do know is that the Gators averaged 23.1 points per game in the McElwain era, while they have averaged 36.6 in the Mullen era.
I suspect that the offense will go back to being great – rather than transcendent – if Trask decides to leave, but Mullen hasn’t averaged less than 33.2 points per game in his three seasons in Gainesville. That’s plenty of offense to win the game with solid coaching and improvement on defense.
Changes coming for the defense?
And that’s where Florida really needs to make hay in the offseason.
Whether Todd Grantham remains or is asked to leave, the defense can’t be a sieve like it was this year. The Gators gave up 28.6 points per game, the worst number since the Gators went 0-9 and gave up 29.3 points per game in 1946.
Whenever you’re citing the year after WWII ended as the last time something was done, you know it’s an outlier.
The defense looked unprepared and often disinterested in 2020. It never seemed to be able to get off the field on third down against teams that were any good at converting them. Grantham’s defenses again struggled against QBs with significant experience (Mond, Jones), but this year added a new wrinkle by making true freshman Max Johnson look like the answer at QB for LSU.
It’s inexcusable that only one of the main defensive backs (Kaiir Elam) was recruited by Mullen or Grantham. Stiner, Wilson, Davis and Stewart were all part of the 2017 class, along with C.J. Henderson. If you want to know why the team is terrible against the pass, look no further than having to keep putting those guys out there because they were either unwilling or unable to play the younger guys.
Grantham was a ho-hum hire when he was brought in in 2018. He was able to improve the defense compared to the Randy Shannon debacle of 2017, but I suspect this is very similar to when he fixed a defense that was left in disrepair at Mississippi State by Peter Sirmon before Grantham was hired there.
He’s an adequate defensive coordinator. He’s not a difference-maker. If you want to beat Alabama, you need a difference maker.
Mullen wasn’t a very good head coach on Saturday – First half edition
Even with the defense acting as a sieve in the SEC Championship, Florida still had a chance to win the game.
But Dan Mullen – someone who is usually on top of in-game decision making – made clock management mistakes at the ends of both halves that were puzzling, if not inexcusable.
The first mistake is a little bit more understandable, as Florida didn’t run time off the clock before scoring with a little bit more than a minute left in the first half. That left Alabama with plenty of time to drive down the field and sink a dagger on a TD throw to Najee Harris.
Gary Danielson was on the broadcast completely puzzled that Florida didn’t run more clock. When Gary Danielson is questioning your clock management, you’re struggling. As an offensive coach, I expect Mullen to try to score and score quickly. But as a head coach, you have to put your players in position to succeed.
And giving Alabama more than a minute against this Florida defense is a mistake. I get that conventional wisdom is that you score and trust your defense. But after watching that first half, why would you trust the Gators defense?
Instead, Alabama took away all momentum Florida had going into the half, with a TD that put the game just out of reach at the end.
Mullen wasn’t a very good head coach on Saturday – First half edition
I’m sure you’ve already read about the timeout fiasco before the two-point conversion multiple times. That was inexcusable.
But just as inexcusable in my mine was spending the first timeout to stop the clock after the throw to Trevon Grimes that lost yardage. There was over two minutes left in the game. So long as Florida had three timeouts, they could score with less than a minute left and still have a legitimate shot at driving down the field. Once Mullen called that timeout, he was dooming his team to getting the ball with less than a minute left.
This has become a trend for Florida teams. Last year against LSU, the Gators took over down two TDs with 5:43 left in the game and ran 4:54 off the clock before turning the ball over on downs deep in LSU territory. But even had they scored, they wouldn’t have had time left.
They did it against Georgia last year as well, taking over down 14 with 10:01 left and running a 17-play drive that took 6:50 off the clock to bring the score within 7.
So yes, criticize the second timeout. That was egregious. But also recognize that the first timeout was bad. And that the lack of urgency that Mullen’s teams seem to show in late game situations isn’t just a one-off in this particular game. It seems to be turning into a trend.
All-SEC Awards
The All-SEC awards came out this week, and Florida had a few players on the list.
Kyle Pitts, Kaiir Elam and Kadarius Toney (as an all-purpose player) all made first team. Kyle Trask and Toney (as a receiver) made second team.
My colleague Bill Sikes has been putting together an interesting study on All-SEC players and what is necessary to win the SEC. What he found is that the historic minimum to win the SEC is 6 players, while the ideal number is 8.6.
You thought Florida might get Stone Forsythe on to the team, and you might be able to make a case for Zachary Carter, though it would be pretty weak. What that means is we should have expected Florida to come up short just by looking at their roster.
By contrast, Alabama had 9 first-team All-SEC players in 2020.
Having the most players who win awards doesn’t guarantee an SEC title, but it’s a good indicator. So next year, when you’re trying to figure out if Florida can compete with Georgia and Alabama, start asking yourself who has stepped up to an All-SEC level.
If the answer isn’t at least six guys, likely Florida is going to drop one or both to those teams.
Heisman Trophy
Kyle Trask has had an unbelievable season. He’s put up counting numbers on-par with Joe Burrow last season and has had one of the best seasons in Florida history.
And if you use the eyeball test, he was a more impressive QB than Mac Jones in the SEC Championship.
But Trask has two problems. First, his interceptions and fumble were key reasons that Florida lost to a significantly depleted LSU team. Second, we all knew that the winner of the Alabama/Florida match-up in Atlanta was going to get the majority of the Heisman votes.
Does that sit well with me considering the award is supposed to go to the most outstanding player? Not really.
But we knew that was the deal going into the game against Alabama. Trask had the opportunity to rise above his team’s defensive shortcomings and was unable to do so. He played great. But he also missed Justin Shorter when Florida needed it. He fumbled deep in his own territory when Florida needed to drive right down the field. And when the Gators defense got two straight stops to open the third quarter, he was able to convert that quarter into 14 points, not 21.
That’s an incredibly high bar. But it’s the bar we all knew he had to clear coming in. Maybe it wouldn’t have been that way had Evan McPherson hit the 51-yard field goal to send the LSU game into overtime. But the fact that Jones didn’t throw a pick-six in an Alabama loss to a big underdog is going to weight heavily with the voters.
I don’t think Jones is better than Trask. But that’s not what the voters reward anymore.
Early signing day results
In all the SEC Championship excitement, you might have missed that early signing day came and went.
Interestingly, Florida recruited at exactly the level they have since Mullen got to Gainesville in 2018. I suppose that can be seen as a positive or a negative.
On the positive side, Mullen has significantly upgraded the talent level of the team compared to Jim McElwain. On the negative side, the talent level is significantly below where it was under Urban Meyer, and perhaps more importantly, significantly below the level set by Kirby Smart and Nick Saban.
Top-10 classes are nothing to sneeze at. There are lots of programs that would love to have them. And those kinds of classes are good enough to win the ACC, Big-Ten or Pac-12. But they’re not going to be good enough to win the SEC, at least not regularly.
A more likely scenario is a team that steps up to compete every 3-4 years and otherwise is good enough to beat most comers, but struggles against the better teams on its schedule. That sounds a lot like Florida the last two years, as they lost to teams ranked first and fourth last year, and lost to teams ranked first and fifth this year (with the LSU loss sprinkled in).
It doesn’t appear that recruiting is going to improve much beyond where it is. That means we should expect to be Auburn compared to Saban’s Alabama rather than being Alabama. There’s no shame in that, but it’s a far cry from the Gator Standard that was set by Steve Spurrier and continued by Urban Meyer.
Recruiting violations
News came out this week that Florida football was put on probation and that Dan Mullen was punished for not promoting an atmosphere of compliance. This apparently happened a while back, and many of the penalties have already been served.
So I guess there are two ways to look at this. The first is that Florida hasn’t been recruiting at an elite level even though they’ve been cheating. The second is that Florida hasn’t been recruiting at an elite level because they were quietly serving a punishment for cheating.
These were considered level II and level III violations, as opposed to the more serious level I violations. Still, having your head coach get a show-cause penalty for recruiting violations shortly after signing a recruiting class that isn’t as good as your rivals is a frustrating development.
In college football, you’re not really trying if you’re not cheating. But at Florida, if you’re going to get popped for cheating, the results really should be better than what we’ve seen.
Oklahoma on the horizon
Florida is playing Oklahoma in the Cotton Bowl.
Kyle Pitts has already opted out, but it looks like Kyle Trask will play. That means one more time to see the explosive Gators offense that we’ve come to grow and love.
Oklahoma has a redshirt freshman – Spencer Rattler – at QB who has averaged 9.5 yards per attempt with 25 TDs and only 7 INTs, for a QB rating of 170.9. This is the kind of player who should eat Florida’s lunch considering the issues the Gators have had in the secondary.
I hope you liked the SEC Championship Game, at least in terms of the way both teams moved up and down the field and the teams nearly got to 100 points. Because there’s likely more of that to come in the Cotton Bowl.