So this year’s Florida team is not going undefeated. It never was. No Florida football season has ever ended with a zero in the loss column, and a team with an iffy offensive line and a low scholarship player count due to attrition and injuries wasn’t going to do it.
The second factor is not to be overlooked. Florida has 75 recruited scholarship players. Total. That includes Brenton Cox, who’s ineligible, and Feleipe Franks, CJ McWilliams, and the younger David Reese who are out for the year. That really brings it down to 71.
On Saturday they were also missing Kadarius Toney (shoulder) and Dameon Pierce (concussion) from the start, and then Jabari Zuniga and Jonathan Greenard couldn’t go for long. That brings them down to 67 at most. True freshman DT Jaelin Humphries, who was always going to redshirt given the depth at his position, has missed a lot of time this fall to injury and I don’t know what his status is.
SEC travel rosters are capped at 70. Florida always brings along some number of walk-ons who play special teams—long snapper Jacob Tilghman, for example—but the Gators could put three or four of them on the travel roster before having to eliminate redshirting true freshmen who were never going to play.
Against the nation’s fifth-most talented roster, one that is not starting down a ton of guys, that wasn’t going to be enough.
Florida was able to hang in there for a while, but once Greenard and Zuniga were out of the picture, the die was cast. Joe Burrow, Justin Jefferson, and Ja’Marr Chase were too much for a Florida without the only elite pass rushers on the team, and the former two will be playing on Sundays next year. Chase will go pro the year after once he completes his junior season.
I have made a lot of comparisons between this year’s Florida team and the 2006 team, and that’s not changing after Saturday. The biggest contrast is that the ’06 Gators were a lot better along the lines, but the parallels still persist.
Both are teams that could throw better than run, though the throwing game in either case isn’t super explosive. Both used a wide receiver (or several, in this year’s case) and a backup quarterback to help the run game. Both try to win with defense and special teams. As of now, both lost a road game to a top-ten SEC West opponent by two scores.
The biggest difference is that college football in general has changed a lot in 13 years. Dan Mullen’s scheme was cutting edge in 2006. Now, it’s fairly mainstream. His old mentor even evolved his offense beyond where Mullen has gone when he brought in Ryan Day a couple years back.
The 2006 season was still one where offensive dinosaurs roamed the land. The final top ten of the polls included Tresselball Ohio State, Les Miles’s LSU, Bret Bielema’s first Wisconsin team, Lloyd Carr’s Michigan, and Tommy Tuberville’s Auburn. The things that this year’s Alabama, Clemson, Ohio State, LSU, and Oklahoma are doing would be utterly unthinkable.
So while I could squint and see 2019 Florida winning the 2006 national title with better injury luck than it’s had so far, the 2006 Gators wouldn’t have much of a shot at the 2019 national title. They might scrape out an East title, but it wouldn’t beat Alabama in the SEC Championship Game and then go on to beat two more of those elite teams I listed above in the Playoff.
That’s okay, because Mullen knows it. He’s not blind. He knows what he’s got this year isn’t good enough. You can see it in how the ’06 team had 21 of 22 starters come from the previous regime but he’s been hitting the transfer market hard. The top line of the depth chart for LSU included three transfers he brought in and three guys who signed with him. If you count the ORs, that brings in two more Mullen transfers (counting JUCO transfer Lucas Krull as such) and one more Mullen signee. Breaking news: Ron Zook was a better recruiter than Jim McElwain was.
Late in the first half, I got a text from my sister-in-law noting that my brother kept saying “I’m going to throw up” throughout the proceedings. I responded that I was actually encouraged and that there wasn’t a need to be stressed. This was around the time the Gators were closing in on tying the game at 21.
I’d watched enough of LSU to know the Gators didn’t have much of a prayer of stopping the Tiger offense without Greenard and Zuniga. Given Burrow’s sterling numbers when throwing under pressure, it wasn’t clear they could get many more stops with those two guys. The Florida offense was counterpunching, and maybe the all the long drives would add up on the Tiger defense.
Well, the Gators flinched first in the second half after the holding call (yes, the officiating was inexplicable all around in that game), and that was it. The offense was back to having to catch up constantly, and the offensive line was reverting to its bad old form as LSU brought more pressure than it did in the first half. They knew they only needed to force two punts after the break to put the game out of reach, and they did it.
LSU was the better team before Saturday, and it was the better team in that game. It’ll continue to be the better team, though I wouldn’t call a potential rematch in Atlanta hopeless. I know it’s weird to say, but LSU’s offense is generationally good. They’re going to have to throw like $2 million a year at Joe Brady to keep someone else from hiring him away. The main solace is that they don’t have anyone obviously as good as Burrow in the pipeline, so it won’t always be like this even if they retain their wunderkind passing game coordinator.
No, the Florida defense did not look good. LSU will do that to every defense they face, including Alabama with its young, suspect linebackers.
The Gators look like they have a real chance to finish 11-1 despite losing everyone they’ve lost to injury. If offered that before the season, you take it. You especially take it with UGA spitting the bit against South Carolina, since with the required win over the Bulldogs the Gators can still take the East if they stumble at postseason-banned Missouri.
Regardless, this Florida team has no real shot against Bama, Clemson, Ohio State, or Oklahoma. Mac didn’t leave behind a firm enough foundation for that to be realistic. National title hopes were never going to be fulfilled.
But you can see what Mullen is building, and you can see how he is making do with what he has better than the prior two coaches ever did. UF isn’t elite yet, but with some improvements on the recruiting trail, you can see how they could be.