By Will Miles
Basketball win over Auburn
Tell me you saw it coming too? After Florida dropped a game to mid-tier Texas A&M, the Gators held on to beat the #2 ranked Auburn Tigers.
Auburn is favored to win the SEC and get a number one seed in the tournament. They have been the best team in the SEC all year (now 10-2) and are a superior team in just about every way to Florida.
When Gators got off to a good start, leading 22-14 with 4:04 left in the first half. But just three minutes into the second half, Auburn had turned things around and had what seemxed like a commanding 31-24 lead. Given Florida’s struggles all year, this one seemed like it was basically in the L-column at that point.
But Florida completely turned it around, going up 8 on a Tyree Appleby three with just 2:17 left. From there, it was a roller coaster as Florida held on tight for the victory amongst what can kindly be described as an ugly series of turnovers.
This win puts Florida back to exactly where it was before the A&M loss. To get into the tournament prior to that game, you figured Florida had to go 3-3 and perhaps win a game in the SEC tournament. Going 2-3 with Auburn, Kentucky and Arkansas left on the schedule seemed unlikely.
But now, the Gators have a chance to finish off with wins over Georgia (6-21) and Vanderbilt (14-12). Yes, those are both on the road, and yes I would not be all that surprise to see Florida lay an egg after the scintillating win over Auburn, but all they really have to do is beat two teams that are measurably worse than them to make it in.
Appleby goes off
Tyree Appleby was a huge reason the Gators won the game against Auburn. And he did it in perhaps about the least likely way possible.
Appleby hit big shot after big shot, including 5-10 from three-point range. To be honest, if I’m Auburn coach Bruce Pearl, I can live with that. I say that because Appleby is shooting just 33.1 percent from three this year and is just 35.3 percent for his career. If he makes 3 of 10 or even 4 of 10, that game feels completely different.
Of course, that’s why they play the games. Appleby did make the shots and so Florida goes home the victors. But this goes back to what I wrote about last week when it comes to point differential. Appleby now is tied (with Colin Castleton) for the highest scoring output for any Gator this season. But in order to have that sort of performance, Appleby had to outperform his underlying statistics.
You can beat a team like Auburn once when that sort of thing goes right, but you’re not going to beat them the next time you face them – or similarly talented teams in the tournament – by relying on that sort of thing. Conversely, a guy like Auburn forward Jabari Smith goes 4-5 from three-point range and that’s not all that unexpected because he’s shooting over 43 percent from there this season.
I’m happy the Gators won. But I’m also realistic about why Florida beat Auburn. Just like my criticisms of Dan Mullen and his recruiting were tied to following a process that is sound, the same can be said for Gators basketball.
And the reason Florida won is because they shot 40 percent from three. The problem is that they’ve averaged 30.5 percent all season long.
And then came Arkansas
I wrote the previous sections before Florida lost to Arkansas on Tuesday night. After seeing the final score (82-74 Arkansas), I immediately went to Appleby’s line in the box score: 3-9 from three.
I also expected the loss to Arkansas, which is why I stated up above that Florida needed to finish out its season with wins over Georgia and Vanderbilt. That is still true, and the tournament is still in front of this team with a 2-1 finish (assuming a loss to Kentucky) and a win in the SEC tournament.
Beyond that though, the shortcomings of the team are obvious. As a team against Arkansas, they shot 32% from three. Transfer Brandon McKissic shot 43% from three last season and is shooting 25% this season. Appleby is a good offensive player, but he’s inconsistent and can be a liability on defense.
And I wonder what happened to Niels Lane? Lane is the Gators best defensive player and it isn’t even close. If you’re going to clank 68% of your threes, what do you lose by putting an elite wing defender out on the field who’s an offensive liability? Lane has averaged 21 minutes per game over the last five contests and only played 6 minutes against the Razorbacks.
I’ll be really interested to see what the lineup splits look like for this one.
Baseball opens 1-2 vs. Liberty
As long as I’m being a Debbie Downer, I may as well talk about baseball opening up its season with a 1-2 start against Liberty. Liberty may end up being a pretty good team, but there’s no reason for a team with SEC Championship aspirations to lose two of three at home to the Flames.
As always, the game of baseball is pretty simple and comes down to pitching. In the first game (a 7-2 Florida win), Gators starter Hunter Barco went six innings and didn’t give up any runs. Conversely, Timmy Manning went three innings and gave up four runs in game 2 and Pierce Coppola went 4.1 innings and gave up 2 runs (followed by Philip Abner surrendering 2 runs in 0.2 IP).
College baseball is not the majors. In MLB, teams now rely on their starters less and less and even have “bullpen games” where there is no real designated starter. But in college – with the limitation of 11.5 scholarships – the idea that you’ll be able to put together multiple dominant arms in the bullpen just isn’t realistic.
The end result is that you need starters who can go relatively deep into games and don’t put a lot of guys on base. If you look at the lines for Barco, Manning and Coppola, one thing really jumps out: 1, 7 and 8 is the number of baserunners allowed by the three. Manning and Coppola combined for 4 walks and a HBP.
Florida only gave up 6 and 5 runs in its two losses. You can absolutely say that they should be able to overcome that on the offensive side of the ball. But Mississippi State – last year’s championship team – only averaged 7.0 runs per game.
Grantham and the Harbaugh extension
Jim Harbaugh received a contract extension this past week. I wrote about this more in depth at Read and Reaction because his extension really got me thinking about the Gators, and especially where the team would be had Dan Mullen decided to jettison Todd Grantham earlier.
I say this because Harbaugh had a poor year (93rd in ppg allowed) in 2020 and made a change at DC. That yielded immediate dividends as Michigan got way better on that side of the ball (17th in ppg allowed), allowing them to make the playoff.
But the distance between Michigan and Georgia was evident in the playoff. The final score was 34-11 but anybody who watched it knows it could have been way worse than that. Considering that Michigan has virtually the same talent level as Florida under Mullen, that distance seems relevant. Given Mullen’s 1-3 record against Georgia, 1-3 record against LSU and 0-2 record against Alabama, you could say that the Michigan game against the Bulldogs was a really good mirror for Florida.
I was a big proponent of Mullen making a change from Grantham after the 2020 season. My reasoning was that I didn’t see a big collapse coming, so with Mullen around for a long time, he needed to maximize the talent he had. But that collapse was only enabled in large part because Grantham was allowed to stick around. We’ll never know how it would have played out in the long run had Grantham been replaced, but I do know one thing.
I prefer Florida’s current situation to Michigan’s.
Napier and Florida recruiting
I wrote last week about how Florida is absolutely loaded when it comes to the 2023 recruiting class. If you draw a circle around Gainesville with a diameter of 150 miles, there are 17 players ranked in the top-300 of the 247Sports rankings. Seven of those are top-100 players and three are 5-stars.
The good news is that Napier gets it. During one of his press conferences last week he talked about looking at the history of Florida, and that when Florida is winning championships, a large percentage of its roster hails from Florida. Implicit in that statement is not just that the Gators are full of Floridians, but that they are full of talented Floridians.
But the fact that Napier is leaning into this statement is a good thing. He’s setting expectations for himself and his staff. He knows that to win big at Florida, he’s going to have to win big at recruiting in the state of Florida. That’s not just for 2023, but subsequent years as well. The state is always teeming with top talent, and it would be a fool’s errand to go outside of the state for talent if you can’t keep the talent in-state at home.
I guess I’m just stating this because one worry I had with Napier is that he was very focused outside of Florida in his transition (2022) class. For lots of reasons, that made some sense. But one of the big criticisms I had of Dan Mullen was his focus on Chris Steele in his second class, a California kid who committed but then immediately moved back to California before seeing a fall camp.
It wasn’t that Steele left. That was something we could have predicted. It was that safety Jordan Battle – ranked very similarly to Steele and from Ft. Lauderdale – wasn’t more heavily recruited. It was that corner Akeem Dent (West Palm Beach) committed to Florida State. It was that after Diwun Black had to go to Juco, Florida had as many recruits ranked in the top-20 of the state (3) as Georgia, Clemson and Alabama.
With news that Arch Manning is now considering the Gators, I get that there will be lots of focus on that commitment. But if Manning goes elsewhere, that’s not a huge deal. But players like Cormani McClain, Richard Young, Keon Keeley and their ilk need to start choosing Florida on a much more regular basis.
Napier’s opinion of his staff
Filing more things under Billy Napier and saying the right thing, Napier was asked about his staff being ranked very highly by outsiders and how that made him feel. His response was great in that it talked about how those guys were deserving of that sort of feedback, but that they haven’t done anything in Gainesville yet.
Striking that balance – of acknowledging what people have done well while still keeping them grounded with future expectations – is a skill. You don’t appreciate it until you’re on the leadership side of the ledger and have to do it yourself.
We’ve all had terrible bosses, great bosses and on a spectrum in between. I’d hazard a guess that your great bosses were really good at giving you positive feedback while still maintaining high expectations for you. I’d also guess that your terrible bosses rarely gave you positive feedback, and weren’t clear about their expectations for you.
Luckily for Napier, the expectations set by the Florida fan base are going to make things abundantly clear to his staff what is expected. But it is good to see that he is at least thinking about how to balance out giving praise and setting his expectations.
Gators QB Room
Napier was asked this week about his QB room and insisted that it is in really good shape.
It made me smile when he brought up Anthony Richardson first when talking about his QBs. Richardson is the potential star who can move the needle for Florida right away if Napier can keep him healthy and bring him further along than where he was last year. Napier sees it, saying “he’s made some wild plays, right?”
Napier also had some positive things to say about Emory Jones as well. I get that Gators fans are ready to move on from Jones, but I agree with Napier when he says Jones played well at times last year too. There is talent there that harnessed could be an effective QB. I don’t think it can be harnessed enough to beat Georgia either though, so that’s why I’d prefer to see what Florida has with Richardson.
It’s a really interesting situation though. I don’t think there’s any way that Florida ends up with 6 scholarship players at QB in the fall. That means one, or maybe even two, of the players currently on the roster are going to transfer. Jones is the obvious candidate unless he wins the starting job. Who else ends up leaving is a mystery, and I’m interested to see how those battles play out during the spring.
Napier’s running game
One thing that I’ve heard some people grouse about is that Napier likes to run the ball. That is true (he has called running plays 55-56% of the time), but it misses some key context.
The first is that his offense is built on concepts similar to 49ers coach Kyle Shanahan and Rams coach Sean McVay. Those offenses use wide zone running plays to open up play-action pass, and do the vast majority of their damage on play-action. Indeed, in 2018 when the Rams made the Super Bowl, QB Jared Goff had a QB rating of 115.0 and averaged 10.0 yards per attempt on play-action concepts. On all other throws, he averaged 7.6 yards per attempt.
The other reason this shouldn’t really be a concern is that Napier was ahead a lot. Napier went 40-12 in his four years in Lafayette, and that includes a 7-7 opening year. That year he also ran the ball a lot, but that makes sense considering his defense was ranked 105th in points per game allowed that season.
Finally, Levi Lewis has been okay (QB rating of 144.4 at UL) but not spectacular. Conversely, Napier has put two offensive linemen into the NFL and will see another this year (Max Mitchell) and one more next year (O’Cyrus Torrence). We can’t simultaneously be upset that Dan Mullen wouldn’t give the ball to Dameon Pierce when Emory Jones had a QB rating almost identical to Lewis (141.7).
I fully expect Napier to run the ball. But I also expect that with better athletes at Florida, Napier will open things up when necessary in a way he was unable to at Louisiana.
Playoff expansion on hold
It was announced this week that the College Football Playoff system will remain in place until the current contract runs out. Good.
I understand why people want expansion, but without solid changes to the system as it is, that just ensures we get the same matchups every year instead of some level of variety. Alabama is always going to make a playoff system with 12 teams. They at least miss every once in a while with this system. The same goes for Clemson or Georgia or Notre Dame.
Otherwise, just pencil in the top-8 every year and allow everybody else to fight for the last four.
Would the spectacle of a 12-team tournament bring eyeballs? Absolutely it would. But it would also devalue the regular season significantly. That doesn’t happen in the NFL because there are only 32 teams in the league. The first thing that does is ensure that there is significant parity, meaning that there isn’t a ton of talent difference between a 12-5 team and a 10-7 team (see this most recent Super Bowl).
The second thing that it does is limit the number of cupcakes you can schedule. No NFL team gets to play the Jaguars or Jets 5 times a year, but just about every college football team has a Samford or Rutgers on its schedule.
Those cupcakes bring in revenue for everyone, not just the top-12. So expanding the playoff is good for the 20-30 teams in the system who can actually make that tournament on a regular basis. But it’s going to be terrible for teams that need the revenue from those cupcake games.
If you’re going to expand, do it in a way that limits the numbers of teams and admit that major college football is just NFL-lite. Otherwise, having Florida lose to A&M, LSU and Alabama in 2020 but still make the playoff devalues each and every one of those games.