By Will Miles
Baseball drops 2 of 3 to Vanderbilt
The Florida baseball team continued to struggle this weekend. After losing the opening two games to Vanderbilt, the Gators blew a 3-1 lead in the bottom of the 9th inning, only to pull the win out with a homerun in extra innings.
After those three games, the Gators record stood at 23-14 (6-9 SEC), which is actually a really good explanation of this team. It is a good, but not great, team. Unfortunately for the Gators, the #1, #4, #14, #19 and #22 ranked teams in the country reside in the SEC. Also unfortunately for the Gators, they are no longer included amongst those ranked SEC teams.
The problem is the same as it’s been all year. In the first game – a 5-4 loss – Florida committed two errors and gave up an unearned run. Obviously that run was pretty important. In the second game, the Gators surrendered 7 walks and hit a batter. Combine that with Vandy’s 11 hits and it’s amazing they only scored 8 runs. The third game was pretty clean until coughing up the 2-run lead in the ninth.
But even then, after going back ahead on a home run by Deric Fabian and getting two quick outs, the Gators couldn’t help but commit a throwing error and a balk to put a man in scoring position before securing the third out.
Baseball is pretty simple when the other team only gets three outs. When you make errors and walk and hit a bunch of batters, you’re going to lose. More than that, it’s going to make your team incredibly inconsistent.
Florida isn’t good enough to do the little things poorly, and right now that’s exactly what they’re doing. That – and not more home runs or superhuman pitching performances – is where any sort of turnaround starts.
Baseball scrapes by Stetson
I have to admit, I had penciled in the win over Stetson on Tuesday night. So imagine my surprise when I turned on the game and found that the Gators were already down 4-0 in the third. A big 5-run bottom of the fourth inning put the Gators on top for good, but not without a few hairy moments towards the end.
Yet again though, the 3-run third that put the Gators in that hole was aided by the little things. Starter Karl Hartman hit the first batter on a 1-0 pitch. That opened up the right side of the infield, where the next hitter put one through the hole (and advanced to second on an error by the right fielder). With nobody out and runners on second and third, Hartman surrendered a 3-run homer.
I have no way of knowing if Hartman’s pitch sequence would have been different had the error not occurred. Certainly you’re more apt to throw breaking stuff when you don’t have a runner on third, though without the error the Hatters would have still had first and third. But the point is that the mistakes cascaded down until a big mistake was made that cost the Gators 3 runs.
The Hatters returned the favor in the fourth, giving up a solo home run but then getting the next two guys out. Then, a walk and a hit batter (on a 1-1 count), followed by a single and a home run and the Gators were up 7-5.
Stetson makes those kinds of errors. Teams like Arkansas, Vanderbilt and upcoming Tennessee do not. I’m not sure this team can be great, but just eliminating the small mistakes would make them so much better.
Softball sweeps Ole Miss
No such problems existed on the softball diamond for the Gators, as they swept Ole Miss, in Oxford, over the weekend. That puts the Gators at 34-9 (11-7 SEC) for the season and currently ranked 9th in the country.
Interestingly, Florida is now 13-2 on the road, 5-0 in neutral site games, and 16-7 at home. That doesn’t appear to be a function of SEC schedule, as the Gators have played 18 SEC gams and 9 each have been at home and on the road and the number of ranked games is similar.
I’m not sure whether it means anything significant but it might be as the Gators get further into the tournament. I think we can probably expect that Florida will get a home series for the regional and potentially even the super regional. I’m just not sure that it matters, or whether it’s even preferred.
Carlos Del-Rio Wilson Transfer
Carlos Del-Rio Wilson announced this week that he’s going to enter the transfer portal.
This isn’t a huge surprise as I’ve been writing in this space for weeks that Florida wasn’t going to carry this many scholarship QBs. The departure of Emory Jones reduced the logjam a little bit, but the reality was that the signing of 2022 commit Max Brown combined with the transfer in of Jack Miller was a sign to those already on the roster not named Richardson that they weren’t going to get a lot of playing time.
With Napier saying earlier this month that he’s planning on giving out scholarships to 5 walk-ons, there is still quite a bit of purging to be done, and it likely will include some surprise players. Del-Rio Wilson isn’t exactly chopped liver as he was the 146th ranked player nationally coming out of high school and so it certainly shows that Napier isn’t going to be scared to push out even high profile players.
The writing was on the wall for Del-Rio Wilson. When Anthony Richardson came in to finish out the spring game and the Gators didn’t really run their two-minute offense, it had to be tough. With no opportunity in the game to really differentiate himself and Richardson being put back out there to essentially run out the clock in a scrimmage, it was clear it was time to go.
Certainly we all wish him luck at his next stop (except if he players the Gators) and it’s a reminder that this coaching transition may end up being tough as Napier remakes the roster.
Commitment of Tyree Patterson
The biggest area to make that roster transition is obviously on the recruiting trail, and Florida added a commitment to the all-important 2023 class this week.
Tyree Patterson – a wide receiver out of Eustis, Florida – decided to commit. Patterson is a 3-star recruit, and his composite ranking at the time was well into the 1,000s. That has since been revised to 570th, so consternation that this is a “bad take” was likely overblown.
Here’s what we know from the stats. Patterson is about as likely to succeed (if we define success as being drafted) as a low 4-star recruit rated somewhere in the 300-350 range. There really isn’t much of a difference between rates of being drafted or average round drafted for players in these ranges.
We also know that the impact that he has on the overall national ranking for the class is relatively insignificant. Every class – even Alabama’s and Georgia’s – has high 3-star level players. They don’t move the needle that much on the recruiting front, but often prove to be valuable depth pieces and sometimes do turn into stars.
And we know that Patterson isn’t a can’t-miss prospect no matter how good Napier’s staff is at recruiting. They clearly see something in him, and they may be right. But 5-star guys are 5-star guys because their physical skills are obvious and they overwhelm the competition. Patterson has not shown that yet.
So what we have is a solid, but unspectacular signing. I don’t grade any class on one player and recognize that players like Patterson can be valuable parts of a program. But I also don’t think you can build an elite-program with players of Patterson’s ilk alone.
I’ve written a lot about timing and when to be concerned about recruiting. The short answer is right around the time kickoff against Utah happens. The other answer is that the signing of Patterson is fine, but if Napier has 3-4 more players of Patterson’s status sign in the next month or two, I’d get a little bit nervous.
Black Jerseys
Napier announced this week that Florida is going to have black jerseys, probably not this year but likely in 2023.
This is a long-awaited development for a lot of fans, and a confusing one for me. Florida – and most college football programs – is a master at developing themes, logos and marketing pushes to maximize revenue on the apparel front. Knock-off Gator jerseys in black have been available from Chinese suppliers for a while now. To turn down that revenue source seemed really odd.
Well, that is no longer the case. You will now be able to get an Anthony Richardson jersey in black in the near future. Recruits will be able to wear them when they come get their pictures taken on recruiting visits. And the Gators will be able to wear them on the one or two games every year when it isn’t ridiculously hot in Gainesville, certainly too hot to wear black.
In the grand scheme of things, this isn’t really a big deal. But it’s pretty clear that both the fans and the recruits wanted to see the black jerseys. When you have low hanging fruit like that, it just make sense to push forward.
Spring Recap
The spring game was a real football game, something we haven’t had around Gainesville for a while.
I already mentioned the curious case of Del-Rio Wilson being replaced at the end by Richardson. To be honest, I didn’t look to see if that happened anywhere else, but that might be a clue to who is going to be staying and leaving as the scholarship crunch becomes real.
One thing I think we can start to say is that Billy Napier appears to be fairly truthful when he’s singing the praises of his players. He has been very positive about Anthony Richardson and that showed up in the game. He has also been very positive about Dante Zanders, and again, that showed up in the game.
So if you hear him going out of his way to praise people, I don’t think it is likely complete smoke. He’s obviously not going to give away every competitive advantage that he has, but it is refreshing that the days of hearing about how someone was looking great during the spring and then not seeing them in the spring game or at any point during the fall is hopefully over.
More than anything, being honest in that capacity means that the fans – who are smarter about football now than they’ve ever been – feel like they’re in the foxhole with their coach, rather than trying to be kept out of that foxhole by the coach. That was always what it felt like with Dan Mullen. Hopefully that continues to shift with Napier.
Offensive hope
I’ve got to be honest, the offense we saw during the spring game didn’t look a lot different than the one Dan Mullen ran last year except for perhaps the addition of the tight end on a more regular basis.
The amount of RPOs that were run was significant. Anthony Richardson still had the green light to scramble out of trouble if he needed to and was able to pick up multiple first downs that way. Just about every play had some sort of play-action or read that tried to put the defense in conflict.
The difference is Richardson. When Jack Miller was in the game, he moved the offense okay, but it felt exactly like last year’s offense led by Emory Jones: enough talent to move the ball between the 20s, but not enough to really finish the job.
Then Richardson came into the game and every play seemingly built on the last, where the offense was able to not just push the boulder up a hill, but enjoy the fruits of their labor as the boulder rolled back down to the other side as gravity took over.
The decisiveness of the throws and the decisiveness when he decided to run meant that the defense was always on its heels. Throws even in the intermediate area – which were a problem last season – were on-time and on-target. It left me convinced that Richardson is the guy to start for the Gators.
And it also left me way more excited for the 2022 season than I had been going in. If Richardson can play like that, Florida’s going to have a chance to win every time they strap it up.
Defensive concerns
Of course, they’ll have a chance to lose every time they strap it up as well, and that likely is going to be because of the defense.
As excited as I am about Richardson and the offense, I’m equal parts concerned that the defense just seemed to have no answer to stop him. In fact, Napier coming out of halftime was almost rooting for them to get a stop.
First the caveats. Spring games limit what defenses can do, forcing them into predictable coverages and schemes. What that means is that the offense – particularly the offensive line and the QB – are not forced to deal with conflict as what they thought they were going to get turns out not to be so. But it also means that the defense gets to showcase its ability to win one-on-one battles, and that’s the thing that concerns me.
None of us were all that enamored with Todd Grantham’s defensive prowess. But his defense excelled in 2019, in large part because Jonathan Greenard could consistently beat his man whenever he got a one-on-one matchup. That meant two things: first, Greenard required a double team that left other players open and second, Greenard didn’t require any special scheme to cause havoc for the offense.
That’s what the spring game told us about the defense. There isn’t anyone we’ve seen yet on that side of the ball who can provide what Greenard did. And without that, it’s going to be up to Patrick Toney to provide schemes that enable the Gators to cause havoc. Because if they have to rely on winning one-on-one matchups, it just doesn’t look like it’s going to happen.
Napier reality tour
Billy Napier is just starting to tour the Gator Booster clubs now that spring practice is over. I’m fascinated to see what he says as we have had a few Napier’s over the first few months.
Initially, Napier was very reserved in terms of what he promised for early signing day and national signing day. He was very careful to state that he knew this was a talent acquisition business but that he wasn’t expecting to move mountains for the 2022 class. That means when guys like Devin Moore, Trevor Etienne and Kamari Wilson signed, Napier looked like he had significantly over-delivered.
So what is the tone going to be for Napier now? Does he think that Anthony Richardson is good enough to carry him to a better record than perhaps the talent on the team justifies? Is he going to be deferential to Kirby Smart and Nick Saban, or is he going to aggressively pursue ramping up the stakes for those sorts of matchups?
I suspect he’ll focus on his team and probably stick with the same under-promise/over-deliver messaging that he had for the early recruiting returns. But we’ve already established that he seems to be willing to be honest with us about the state of various players and how they’re progressing.
That means if he does take a more aggressive tact, we should read that as him being pretty confident he’s going to have a good team in the fall.