I’d like to say that Florida had a get-right game against Vanderbilt, but it’s too early to tell on it.
The issue that crystalized after Lexington was that Billy Napier has a problem with getting his team ready to play on the road. By definition, there’s nothing he could do with a home game to assuage that concern. That opportunity will come next against South Carolina.
The defense did what it could to make the case that the Kentucky game was an aberration. I’m not going to get too worked up over the long touchdown when the receiver got away with a facemask pull, though I’d have liked to see Jason Marshall at least try to keep up with the play instead of immediately stop and look around for a flag. Setting that aside, they gave up one score on nine drives. Vandy only really threatened once on the other eight, and UF got a nice goal line stop to snuff it out.
It’s become clear to me that the two most important players on the defense are Jaydon Hill and Scooby Williams. They’re not the best, per se, but they are the most important.
Hill has finally provided an answer to the question of what to do with the Star/nickel corner position. UF hasn’t had a good one there since Chauncey Gardner-Johnson in 2018, going through what felt like a dozen different options.
I wasn’t sure if Hill was the best choice for guarding slot receivers given his history of knee injuries, but he’s been terrific nearly all of the time. He had a couple of pass breakups against Vanderbilt if I’m recalling correctly, though the CFBStats.com has him with only one (PBUs are subjective, we could both be right on our own terms).
I’m not a schematic wizard, but I think the key with getting it to work with Hill is that he’s been almost entirely a pure nickel corner. They’re not asking him to do a lot of the run support/safety stuff that makes Star a hybrid position. It’s a wise move, as he’s not that big and seemingly none of UF’s corners have any desire to tackle running backs.
Williams also bounced back well from what might’ve been his worst game ever. He’s asked to do a number of key things, not the least of which is to sit tight around the middle of the formation and crash in after delayed actions. Those actions could be intentional, like screens or dump offs, or they could but unplanned, like quarterback scrambles. He ends up in a lot of one-on-one situations where he needs to just not get beat immediately. He doesn’t have to make the tackle, but he needs to slow down the guy with the ball in order for help to come.
Williams was much cleaner at that this week after being a disaster at it against the Wildcats. He was solid at worst and excellent at best in the games prior to the UK contest, so let’s hope that truly was a one-time thing because Florida really needs him there performing that duty.
Shemar James is a good linebacker, but he has different jobs. Ditto for Derek Wingo. Teradja Mitchell is big and an enthusiastic hitter, but he’s got all the subtlety of a sledgehammer. He is at his best when he gets to run up and hit a ball carrier. He’s a liability at nearly anything else. Vandy’s second touchdown came when Mitchell bit hard on play action despite Princely Umanmielen being directly in front of him and having the ball carrier well in hand. Ken Seals got to float an easy one over Mitchell’s head to the receiver he should’ve been covering for six.
As for the offense, they got things cooking a lot better against a pretty rotten Vandy defense. My fear for the game was that the offensive line absences would make the thing a slog, but it wasn’t entirely.
There were some issues in the first half with the ill-fated double pass sticking out the most. Then the following drive ended in a different kind of frustration. Napier finally tried to be aggressive with a deep shot on 2nd & 2, but VU got a corner free on a blitz and Graham Mertz couldn’t find anyone to throw to before he got sacked. Then Napier called up a swing pass to Montrell Johnson on 3rd & 4, but apparently UF’s receivers forgot to block because three Commodore defensive backs converged on him at the same time.
We’re starting to see the roller coaster of the Mertz experience take a turn. Offseason expectations for him were so low — unnecessarily low, as I said a few times — that folks starting getting a bit high on him when he wasn’t a total disaster. However we’re also seeing his limitations.
His completion percentage is very high, but that’s because he’s not taking a ton of deeper shots. As we saw against Vandy, those longer passes are where the lion’s share of his incompletions come. Those plays are a triple-edged sword, if such a thing exists. He doesn’t always see open targets, he misses a decent number of the passes he takes, and he doesn’t see or feel pressure when he’s looking downfield. If his eyes are looking 15+ yards past the line of scrimmage, he nearly always takes a sack if he doesn’t get rid of the ball in less than two seconds.
The normal cliche is that Mertz won’t win the team many games, but he won’t lose them games either. Both of his picks have come off of tipped passes, and I don’t think he’s fumbled it at all. The latter is impressive given how many sacks he takes.
But at some point, with as limited as the offense can be, his problems with downfield passing will turn into costing the team games because the lack of it makes everything else the offense tries less effective. UF can’t take the next step with Mertz behind center, so it’ll be just as important as you think that DJ Lagway comes in ready to go from Day 1.