Florida’s offense should’ve been bad this year. The offensive line was a mess, and no amount of shuffling personnel ever fixed the problem. Though the unit was somehow serviceable in pass protection, it was awful at run blocking. Therefore, the team had basically no run game despite having a previously effective senior at the top of the running back depth chart.
Some teams are one-dimensional by choice. The triple option teams are the most extreme example, and the more pure Air Raids like Mike Leach’s are unbalanced on purpose in the other way.
When a team plans to be balanced but finds out it’s incapable of being so, that should spell trouble. It should mean defenses can key on the one thing it does well and shut things down. Many a season has gone awry from that very thing happening.
It’s a real credit to Dan Mullen and Kyle Trask that the Gators didn’t suffer that fate. Despite UF basically abandoning the run before games hit garbage time in the final month of the season, the offense kept on clicking. That doesn’t happen without a skilled offensive architect and an excellent quarterback.
It also probably doesn’t happen without having eight or nine good passing targets.
The Gators had eight different players catch at least 20 passes this year: the four senior wide receivers, Trevon Grimes, Jacob Copeland, Kyle Pitts, and Lamical Perine. Kadarius Toney only appeared in six games due to injury; his average implies 18 grabs across 12 games. He wasn’t 100% in all of those contests and would’ve taken some of Copeland’s 20 catches if healthy all year, so it’s probably eight either way.
Still, it’s an unprecedented number in recent history. In the ten seasons leading up to this one, only in 2011 did the player with the eighth-most catches have more than ten (freshman Quinton Dunbar with 14). Several campaigns didn’t make it past six or seven players with double-digit catches, and only 2009 with five and 2010 with six saw more than four players with 20+ receptions.
Mullen’s base personnel is one tight end, one running back, and three receivers. He could rotate six players through those three spots freely to keep everyone fresh. He had a running back in Perine who ended up an excellent pass catcher, better than some wide receivers UF trotted out in its lost decade. And the one serendipitous stroke of luck in the misfortune of Feleipe Franks’s injury is that the sophomore Pitts was ready to break out, and the quarterback he spent a ton of time with building chemistry on the second team offense last year ended up running the show.
It remains to be seen how many of these guys will be back next year. Grimes and Toney are draft eligible, and there has been speculation about both of them. Toney posted something sufficiently vague on social media before the FSU game that could’ve meant it was his last game in the Swamp this year or his last game in the Swamp ever. Grimes has NFL size and speed and could easily be a Combine superstar if he wants to be. I haven’t seen any chatter from pro scouts about Grimes, but I have seen from multiple people that a couple NFL teams would love to sign Toney as an undrafted free agent. He might have a professional future in 2020 even if it doesn’t involve hearing his name called by a suit in Vegas.
Something that probably held Georgia’s offense back this year was their loss of a ton of receiving yards from 2018. The Bulldogs only returned 24% of their receiving yards, and their passing game was frequently a mess this year.
As it happens, ESPN’s Bill Connelly (then at SB Nation) has run correlations on returning players and found that the highest correlation on offense between success one year and the next is returning receiving yards. This should make some sense. Passing requires precision, which requires lots of practice. Backup quarterbacks can get reps with the starting receivers sometimes when coaches want to verify that they have a decent QB2. Starting quarterbacks rarely spend time with backup receivers, though.
Florida is losing 52.4% of its receiving yards regardless with the departure of the senior receivers plus Perine. If Grimes also goes, then the Gators are down 65.8% of their receiving yards. If Toney also leaves to try to make the Seahawks’ practice squad, then UF would be down 71.2%. Put another way, they’d be returning 28.8% of their receiving yards, not that much more than UGA did this year.
One mitigating factor is that Pitts must come back as a rising true junior. Trask and Pitts have a real chemistry, and we know he can be a No. 1 receiver because he was one in 2019. Copeland also must come back as a redshirt sophomore and shows promise. After this point, however, you can see why the correlation works the way it does.
Past those two, you’re looking at a lightly-used career backup with multiple short suspensions in Rick Wells, a grad transfer in Jordan Pouncey who barely did anything at Texas and got passed up by freshmen this year, and 2019 signees who all redshirted. Keon Zipperer may come on like Pitts did this year, but he’s another tight end. The situation at receiver would be precarious.
The good news is that the rumblings all point to Grimes and Toney returning, which means the three-receiver sets are covered with those two and Copeland. It’d get dicey if any of them missed time, but there you have it.
No matter how it shakes out, UF probably can’t go nine deep in passing targets again. When those starters need a blow, will Wells, Pouncey, Trent Whittemore, Ja’Markis Weston, or Dionte Marks be able to make any plays? Mullen is hoping so, but devoting a roster spot for two years to a lightly-used guy like Pouncey says something about the receiving room for next year. Let’s hope spring brings some promising signs from the young ones.