Good morning, Gators. For all of you living in the peninsula of the state, please keep a close eye on Hurricane Milton and do what you need to in order to be safe. Anything I could write here would be well out-of-date by the time you read this, but especially if you’re in the Tampa Bay area, finalize those plans ASAP.
Setting real life aside, it was nice for a half to see the Florida team I thought we were going to see this year. It was basically the squad that Billy Napier had told us we were going to see during the offseason.
The offense was not always a work of art, but scoring four times in a half is never a bad sign. We got to see the ball control regime do its thing on the 15-play, eight-minute long opening drive, and also we got to see DJ Lagway have a couple of quicker drives that both ended in points.
The defense played better than it has at any point since last year’s Tennessee game, the Samford game excepted for obvious reasons. As per my request, the defensive front really stepped up to help corral the Knight’s previously explosive offense. There were still some blown plays here and there, but it never truly felt like UCF had a chance to come back and win despite the Gator offense coming up empty after the break.
It’s cheap and easy to blame the post-halftime shutout on conservatism, because that doesn’t tell the whole story. On the Gators’ first drive, coming after the Knights had their own eight-minute drive and got points, Napier went for it on 4th & 1 on the team’s own 34-yard-line. Noted read option wizard Graham Mertz did a perfect give fake before picking up the conversion.
Where the drive went sideways was also at a point of being fairly aggressive. On 2nd & 1 at the UCF 29-yard-line, Napier called for a deep shot. Both Austin Barber and Hayden Hansen had trouble holding their blocks for long. Mertz drifted right in response to Hansen’s lost block, but he never saw Barber’s man coming for him and took a sack. Hansen was flagged for holding on top of that, so 2nd & 1 turned into 2nd & 11. If Napier had gone the conservative route and tried to pick up the conversion instead of going for a big gain, they probably move the sticks and extend the drive.
From there, Napier fell into an old habit with a predictable run by Montrell Johnson that lost a yard. He did dial up something long on 3rd & 12, but Damieon George couldn’t handle a spin move off of a stunt. Mertz did his flick to Johnson for five, and Trey Smack had to try a 53-yarder.
The second drive after halftime died because Jake Slaughter whiffed on a second-level block on second down and Mertz barely overthrew Elijhah Badger on a deep sideline go route on 3rd & 4. I’m perfectly okay with the latter call, by the way. Badger is a load to cover one-on-one, and that’s what coverage he had. There was never a safety in the frame once Mertz drew his arm back to throw. That’s the sort of thing that leads a coach to say, “we had the look we wanted”, and you want the offense to try to take advantage of that look.
The third drive after halftime featured a bubble screen to Tank Hawkins ruined by Chimere Dike not holding his block, a bad choice on a read option by Lagway (if it was a read option and not a play fake, there’s no way to know for sure), an extremely questionable false start flag, and a 3rd & 15 tunnel screen blown up ultimately by UCF D-linemen delaying Barber and Knijeah Harris getting up field to block. It was a lot.
And then when the fourth drive came around, there was 1:48 on the clock and it was time to run time out to preserve the win.
The offense got both sloppy and unlucky after the break, but ultimately the bigger problem was the defense not getting off the field quickly enough. Again, UF scored on four drives before halftime, and it still had time to punt twice too. In the final two quarters, they only had three drives before it was clock-killing time.
I would chalk some of the issue up to reversion to more probable levels. You wouldn’t predict the Gator defense to have as much success as it did in the first half, so you’d expect it to struggle to keep that up in the second half. Plus, UCF is not terrible, and Gus Malzahn has been calling good offenses for a long time now.
There were only a handful of real bad plays from the defense after the half. One came late in UCF’s marathon drive when Jason Marshall tried to strip the ball from a running back instead of making the tackle, allowing the ball carrier to get an extra chunk of yards. Another came when Malzahn hit true freshman LB Aaron Chiles with a wheel route for a large gain. The last was the touchdown run when George Gumbs, DJ Douglas, Trikweze Bridges, and Marshall all missed tackles. Even that, though, came after a terrible pass interference flag on an uncatchable ball.
I would’ve liked to see the Gators put points on the board in the second half, but ultimately they did enough to ride the large halftime lead to a win. The offense at least chewed enough clock to keep the game out of reach, and the defense largely didn’t give up back-breaking plays. And I really don’t want to be too critical of the defense when they had their first five-sack day since the 2021 Missouri game.
Saturday is what the success state of Napierball looks like. The offense controlled the clock and took care of the ball, the defense mostly avoided big mistakes, and special teams was a net positive despite a missed field goal and a questionable decision to return a kickoff. Complementary football, right?
The margin doesn’t matter much as long as all the pieces lock in place together. Napier’s final Louisiana team won five games against either FCS or sub-.500 FBS teams by a one-score margin, so this isn’t a new development.
Make no mistake, this was a better win than the Mississippi State game was. The defense was just so much better, allowing 110 fewer yards of rushing (sacks removed) to Malzahn’s Knights than to Jeff Lebby’s Bulldogs. I didn’t see enough to start second guessing my obit to Napier’s tenure from after the A&M game, but it certainly was enough to give cover for delaying making any tough decisions for at least another week.