While watching the game against Vandy, it reminded me a lot of the early-season win over South Carolina. The Gators were shooting themselves in the foot too often, but the game also was never in doubt. The final scores were even pretty similar: 38-24 over the Gamecocks, 38-17 over the Commodores.
The details aren’t so similar. Collin Hill threw for 4.5 yards per pass, while Ken Seals more than doubled him at 9.4 per pass. It was a fairly honest 9.4 for Seals too, as he didn’t have something like a single 80-yard pass on a defensive breakdown skewing things. That dude has been getting better all year and has a real future. Someone, whether Derek Mason or his successor, is going to a bowl or two on his arm alone in 2022 and maybe 2023.
Beyond that, South Carolina had a great rushing day and Vanderbilt didn’t. UF got out to a big lead early on Carolina but poured it on later to inflate the margin in Nashville.
And Kyle Trask, despite the team having a “ho-hum” day according none other than Dan Mullen, lit up the ‘Dores worse than he did the Gamecocks. Trask’s new baseline is apparently his demolition of Arkansas, because 383 yards at 10.9 per pass with three touchdowns and no picks is a terrific day by most quarterbacking standards. Most of his incompletions were receiver error too, either through drops or Rick Wells not knowing where the back of the end zone is.
Georgia slogged to a 31-24 win over a Mississippi State team with fewer than 50 scholarship players. UGA gave up the same number of points but about 150 more yards to the West division Bulldogs than Vandy did. Tennessee failed to show up for the second half again, this time in a loss Auburn. FSU is more lost now than Florida ever was in between Dan Mullen’s two tenures in Gainesville. Clemson can’t keep COVID out of its program. Penn State and Michigan are disasters. USC can’t lose enough to get rid of its Jim McElwain equivalent.
There are a lot worse places to be than bummed out because you didn’t quite get to 40 points and 400 passing yards on Vanderbilt. I know the game wasn’t what you wanted. It wasn’t what I wanted. But as I pointed out in Friday, Vandy is getting better as time goes on. Not so much on defense as offense, but again, sloppiness and not defensive excellence was often the issue with Gator drives dying.
Something has occurred to me, though, and this newsletter rather than a feature story on GC is probably the right place to try the idea on for size: does Dan Mullen like how his team is winning this year?
On defense, the answer is a definite no. I know he keeps defending Todd Grantham more vociferously than fans would like, but he’s not the type to go out and throw an assistant under the bus. I have thought UF could do better at DC since the day Grantham was hired in late 2017, but Mullen likes him and is sticking by him for now. If a change is coming, you won’t see Mullen tip his hand about it.
But you also know he’s not happy with the defense because he said he sat down during UF’s COVID-induced downtime to evaluate the defense player-by-player to make sure they’re asking the right guys to do the right things. That doesn’t happen after three games if you’re satisfied with the product on the field.
On offense, though, how could he not be happy? He has one of the best quarterbacks and passing attacks in school history. He was a quarterbacks coach before an offensive coordinator, and developing passers is his calling card. He must be happy with how things are going.
But is he?
Coming out of halftime, sideline reported Paul Carcaterra said Mullen told him a couple things about the offense. One, which Carcaterra emphasized every word of, was that they “have to run the ball harder”. Despite having one of the best quarterbacks and passing attacks in school history, he keeps pulling Trask to put Emory Jones in for run-heavy series of plays. He called unnecessary QB runs for Trask in the second halves of blowouts each of the last two weeks.
Mullen came up in the spread-to-run school, which hinges on two insights. You can get a numbers advantage in the run game if the quarterback can carry the ball, and you can reduce the number of defenders in the box by spreading the field. That’s the primordial soup that produced Dan Mullen, Vaunted Offensive Mind.
Trask is averaging fewer than four rushing attempts per game this year (no sacks included). Feleipe Franks was up at 7.5 per game in 2018. Every time Mullen was asked why he went with Franks over Trask, it boiled down to two factors: game experience and Franks’s greater mobility.
Mullen has gone pass heavy before, as in 2015 when he had a senior Dak Prescott and no good running backs. Prescott attempted 477 passes versus the team’s 395 non-sack rushing attempts. Even then, Prescott registered 160 rushes. If we assign every sack to him — there’s no good source to find how many Prescott personally took, unfortunately — he still has 128 carries, almost 40% more than the top running back Brandon Holloway’s 92 carries.
Dan Mullen wants to win games with a punishing run game. For two straight years, he doesn’t have one. Even as the offense is lighting up the scoreboard and Trask is, as a passer, performing the best of any quarterback he’s coached has, we occasionally get glimpses that the lack of a run game is eating him alive.
Now, the counterpoint. Everybody except Mike Leach and the occasional Run ‘n Shoot coach like June Jones believes in the need for balance. Maybe you’re a pass-first team, but you still need to run well when you run it. That’s true as far as it goes, and Mullen was right to want better output from the rushing attack after the first half versus Vandy.
Even though he recruited three dual threat QBs in a row after getting to Gainesville in Emory Jones, the now-dismissed Jalon Jones, and Anthony Richardson, the two 2021 commits of Carlos Del Rio-Wilson and Jalen Kitna are more pocket passers. And Mullen put in the work in the offseason to build a fully-featured pass attack to play to all of Trask’s strengths. Plus he really is running Trask less than any other of his signal callers, with him averaging four non-sack carries per game in starts last year to go with the 3.7 of this year.
I’m sure if you asked Mullen if he likes the manner in which his team is winning this year, he’d look at you like you had three heads and dismiss the question. I can’t help but wonder, though, if Mullen would prefer this year’s offense or his best of last time around, 2008. That team, at least after Carl Johnson moved in at right guard against Arkansas, could steamroll teams on the ground with a power rushing quarterback, two lightning-quick running backs, and a receiver hybrid who could do both at times.
I think he’d take 2008. We might not know for years; circumstances forced Trask on him and we probably have years of Jones and Richardson to go before the 2021 guys take over.
However if we see Mullen drift away from running quarterbacks starting with Del Rio-Wilson, Kitna, or a 2022 signee, then we’ll see that he actually planned on going more to the pass starting from signing day on. It’s something I’ll keep in the back of my mind as we watch UF offense develop over the next half decade.