Perhaps no fans in the country are in a better spot than Florida’s to explain why the last 20 years of football have seen a shift more and more to the passing game and away from rushing. It might not be entirely fair since Gators have been predisposed to like passing since at least the Spurrier era, but the last two seasons are a perfect encapsulation of it.
The offense with Kyle Trask was pretty much the perfect ideal of a modern passing attack. By 2020, Trask was able to go through progressions four to five deep if necessary. Every single eligible receiver could be a legitimate target on any play. It also varied pass targets vertically. The bread-and-butter plays were throws between about seven and 17 yards downfield. A standard play making a standard gain was eating up a good chunk of the yardage to go and could border on explosive before yards after catch were factored in.
Rushing attacks lack that explosiveness unless the offensive line is completely dominating the game. Florida’s did for a while, but guys have been getting dinged up since Week 3 and the line is now a shadow of itself. There’s no way to game plan around line weaknesses with a run-based offense like there is with a pass-based scheme. The run goes as the line goes, always and forever, amen.
The whole idea of spread offenses is to make defenses have to cover the entire field. They haven’t had to this season. Emory Jones stares down his receivers so much and so rarely gets past his second read that it basically takes away half the field whether the design of passing plays mean to or not.
His lack of vertical passing aptitude also means that Dan Mullen doesn’t call a lot of the plays with a lot of intermediate routes like he did for Trask. Against a weak secondary, Jones can and will air it out. We saw that some against Vandy, though we also saw why there isn’t as much against better opponents.
His first deep pass of the game is the exemplar. Trent Whittemore beat his man down the sideline, but Jones doesn’t step into the throw. He’s almost leaning backward during his delivery, leaving the pass a short floater that Whittemore has to stop and reverse his body to catch. A gain of 32 is better than a lot of alternative outcomes, but the much better play would’ve been to lead the receiver so he could catch it in stride.
Jones has arm strength to spare, but substandard mechanics on longer throws leave them short and/or inaccurate too often. You can see how those things are true because of the second drive. To begin Vandy just doesn’t cover Rick Wells’s vertical route on a Jones rollout, and Emory does try to lead him. Because Jones is on the move, he’s not half-falling backwards in his delivery and fires a laser too far ahead that Wells can’t bring in. Then Jones loads up a deep ball to Ja’Quavion Fraziars from a stable lower-body base and overthrows it slightly. He didn’t fix the delivery for the whole game; the deep ball to Jacob Copeland was underthrown because he was leaning backward again.
I don’t mean to spend this whole thing bagging on Jones. His corner route touchdown to Whittemore was a thing of beauty, and the long pass to Dameon Pierce was about perfect. It’s just that being a great passer and only an okay at best runner will get a team much farther nowadays than a great runner who’s only an okay passer. At his best, Jones is more than okay, but by definition he only sometimes hits his best.
All in all, Florida hopefully got the disappointment of the Kentucky loss out of its system. The offense got to mash an overpowered defense, albeit with occasional sputtering. The defense got maybe a bit of a hangover out of its system in the first half too. It played the Bad Old Grantham hits at times between giving up long third downs, having linebackers occasionally abused in pass coverage, and even a first down on a quick slant with the closest DB ten yards away for old times’ sake. They tightened up a lot in the second half and reminded you that they really do look improved when they play smart, sound ball.
I don’t usually take anything away from Vandy games. Spurrier himself had a couple of close wins over bad Commodore outfits — including in 1996, of all seasons — so the final score may or may not say anything in particular. Plus when an opponent has close to zero chance of winning the game, the coaches can and usually will manage the game differently to test things that they’re working on. This is different than playing it conservative against a lesser but still game opponent like Kentucky last week, by the way.
On that topic, the Wildcats stomping LSU says more about the Tigers than anything. UK really did need a ton of stuff to go their way to pull out the win last week. Mullen unnecessarily playing it close to the vest was one of them. I still don’t think Kentucky is really all that close to UF in quality.
But, no one can get everything right all the time. There were examples of coaches doing things that I criticized Mullen for doing in the wake of the UK loss. Texas A&M used a kickoff return that Mullen might’ve had his guy fair catch to get a touchdown in the upset win over Bama. Michigan started a drive from its own 24 with 1:37 left in the first half holding all three of its timeouts. The Wolverines used two of those timeouts en route to a touchdown that they needed to beat Nebraska by three.
Yet, would you take Jimbo Fisher or Jim Harbaugh over Mullen? I wouldn’t, even knowing that Fisher has actually won conference and national titles. Jimbo is stubborn and doesn’t always maximize things either, and the ACC he won several times was much weaker than the SEC has been in decades. His 2013 national title team was better than any of Mullen’s teams, but it also started a cultural decay that left the program a shambles by the end of his tenure.
I would much prefer Mullen to just shore up the areas where he’s currently lacking because he really isn’t that far from having a national title-caliber team. It’s a discussion for after the season, but I really think he could have such a team personnel-wise next year. A great first step towards getting there would be not letting a sinking LSU find a(nother) life preserver at his expense.