Allow me to play my dad card: I’m not mad, I’m disappointed.
The recent exemplar of coaching at UF is Urban Meyer. He took his first bye week to make substantial changes in the things that were broken in his Utah offense. He didn’t wait until the off season to do that.
To be fair, I don’t think anything in Billy Napier’s offense or defense is broken in the way Meyer’s original offense was. Deciding to play ball in the SEC with no tight ends and asking just your five linemen to block nearly every play was a bold choice that backfired more spectacularly than anything this year has failed from an Xs and Os standpoint.
But throughout the first half, I found myself wondering just what it was that Napier and company did with their extra week. The tackling wasn’t much better. The offense looked the same. They played more man coverage than usual, so there was that, but they did play some man before. The usage level of man coverage was new; its existence was not.
That is why I’m disappointed. I don’t expect Napier to be another Meyer. It’s not fair to put that level of expectation on anyone.
However, I did want to see something that showed that the current offensive staff recognized that you can’t roll up to a game with the No. 1 team and it’s still very good defense and do the same thing they’ve done all year. Yet, that’s exactly what they did early.
The sole third down conversion before the half was a swing pass to Montrell Johnson. It worked because 1) Georgia 100% didn’t believe that Florida would ever throw to a running back, but also 2) it put a playmaker into space.
Nice job, though they had to audible into it. It wasn’t the planned play for that situation.
But also, come on. They didn’t pull that club out of the bag until they were down 21-0. That same drive saw some more receiver-led spread sets, and it would’ve worked great had Anthony Richardson not sailed a pass over Marcus Burke’s head.
Why did it take until they were down three scores to start breaking their own tendencies? Why?
I get that Richardson tweaking his knee on the first play of the game may have scuttled some stuff. I don’t know how this keeps happening, after similar occurring on the second play against Kentucky and also sometime in the first half against USF.
Yet you don’t need to put AR on the move to throw a swing pass or run four verticals out of 11 personnel.
The long touchdown to Xzavier Henderson wasn’t a wheel route, but it functioned like one. With a wheel, you sneak a running back or occasionally a tight end out from the core of the formation to the sideline where another player’s route has cleared out defenders by drawing them away. A short out route from Ricky Pearsall did just that, leaving Henderson all alone on the sideline (where he’d started the play).
Kirby Smart has been susceptible to wheel routes for a long time. Dan Mullen repeatedly clowned him with them in 2020, but teams used to break off long touchdowns with them on Smart when he was Alabama’s DC. It’s not a new phenomenon.
But alas, Napier’s base offense doesn’t seem to have a lot of throws to the backs. So, we didn’t see him test the Georgia defense with something that has worked against its architect for a very long time.
And because there aren’t many throws to backs, that means the screen game is almost nonexistent outside of the bubbles to receivers. How do you punish an aggressive defense? Traditionally, you do it with screens. But not if you’re Napier, apparently.
I am aware of the complaints that Napier runs a “high school passing offense” from some quarters. I don’t have the scheme expertise to judge that one way or the other.
If that’s true though, the question I would have is why he doesn’t run something more complex. If it’s because he’s keeping it simple for Richardson, who’s still raw as a passer, then okay. Fine. But if it’s not that, then I’d be worried. It’s like the old quote about music solos that I can’t find the origin of right now: bad soloists use three notes because that’s all they have, great ones use three notes because that’s all they need.
Napier can draw up a fantastic rushing attack. That’s plain as day. If he has it really working, then he doesn’t need a Trask-offense level pass attack. It won’t always work, though, so he has to have something more. How much more he has is still a mystery. He never had a good passer at Louisiana, and AR is a work in progress.
It’s also notable that the Trask offense came with Brian Johnson as the passing game coordinator, and the sophistication immediately disappeared once Johnson went to the NFL. Emory Jones had something to do with that, but even an offensive mind as great as Mullen needed help. I am not ready to say Napier needs to hire an offensive coordinator, but a passing game coordinator would be welcome. I just don’t know how he’d make room for one on the staff since he’s dead set on having two offensive line coaches. Maybe a good pass guy gets fired this year and Napier can start his own analyst school for wayward coaches.
Napier was very proud of his team not quitting and coming out with energy in the second half. He should be. After the long Brock Bowers tip drill touchdown, it was clear that it wasn’t going to be Florida’s day. So many things kept swinging against them, from that to AR getting hurt early again to the terrible pass interference call against Jason Marshall that set up UGA’s fourth TD.
The players believe in the staff. That’s great. It would be easier for those of us on the outside to believe in it too if we saw more variety and creativity from the offense. You can’t redo the whole scheme in a bye week, and the whole thing didn’t need overhauling anyway. However it would’ve been so easy to cherry pick some Mullen plays that are proven to work against Smart and put those in, especially since most of the players in the team know and practiced such plays very recently.
That’s not how Napier works apparently, and I even wrote the story on that almost two months ago. Patience is hard, never more so when the plan to win in the long run requires taking some lumps in the short term. It’d be nice if he’d show some flexibility to try more to win now, but this will be all worth it later if the plan comes to fruition.