Hi Gator Country, I hope you are having a great holiday season so far. I have had some extra time between cookie decorating and The Muppet Christmas Carol to develop some new insights about where I think Florida football is going.
The long list of players hitting the transfer portal is merely a sign of the times. It would’ve been nice to keep some guys on there, not the least of them a UF legacy in Aidan Mizell, but that’s how it goes. Most of the players who’ve announced they’re leaving are depth pieces who, had Billy Napier managed to keep the job, ideally would’ve grown into contributors down the line. It doesn’t surprise me that a new head coach wouldn’t fight too hard to keep those guys around since he’ll want to make his own decisions about that kind of player.
Michai Boireau is probably the one that hurts the most because quality defensive tackles are rare and expensive in the portal. You never want to see a D-tackle who can hold his own in the rotation head out. I don’t think Boireau is a future NFL or even all conference player, but that’s a guy who can give good enough reps as a second stringer for a championship caliber defense.
Tulane has a couple of defensive linemen who’ve announced their intentions to transfer, but neither is an interior player. Florida is losing a couple of tackles who didn’t play a lot, Caleb Banks because of injury and Tarvorise Brown due to being low on the depth chart, plus a couple who did contribute in Boireau and Brien Taylor (out of eligibility). Joseph Mbatchou and Jeremiah McCloud being a year older at least will help with filling out all the snaps needed to have a quality line. The Gators still need a real centerpiece kind of player there, a Banks kind of guy, and that’s perhaps going to be the trickiest portal acquisition of all.
It’s unfortunate for everyone that replacing DJ Lagway is not going to be the hardest thing, but that’s how it ended up. Lagway was in the 90s in the passing efficiency rankings this year, and he’s either unable to get healthy or unwilling to do what it will take to get there.
The fact of the matter is, though, that there are a lot of good quarterbacks out there. The explosion of private coaching, which has filtered down into high school, has really raised the floor on college players. There still are precious few who can play well in the NFL, but decent college passers are everywhere.
Take Tennessee, which lost Nico Iamaleava unexpectedly last year. What do they do to replace him in an emergency situation on short notice? They snagged Joey Aguilar, who’d previously played at App State and had very briefly transferred to UCLA. Aguilar had actually played better in 2023 than 2024 for the Mountaineers, and a bad Bruins team stuck in neutral was the best offer he previously had before UT came calling.
All Aguilar did was lead the SEC in passing yards per game at an even 287. Yes, some of that is the Josh Heupel offense, but Iamaleava threw for just 201 per game last year. Aguilar was third in the conference in passing efficiency, substantially behind Heisman finalist Diego Pavia but a whisker behind second-place Trinidad Chambliss. All told, the Vols probably upgraded behind center on accident. That’s how available good quarterbacks are.
We’ll see if Georgia Tech’s Aaron Philo really does follow Buster Faulkner and what options there are for a more seasoned transfer to compete with probably Philo and Tramell Jones. I don’t know the future there. What I do know is that there probably is a good vision of the future Sumrall Gators still playing right now.
We know Sumrall is a defensive guy and has architected good units before. I’ve mentioned how his two Troy defenses were legitimately top 25 in the country according to some opponent-adjusted advanced stats rankings.
As for offense, Faulkner comes from an Air Raid background but has employed a very bullyball-style run game for Brent Key at Tech. Given Sumrall’s quotes about his Florida offense needing to be explosive and wanting to be a Bob Stoops-like defensive head coach, it stands to reason that he’ll direct Faulkner to install a very Air Raid-like pass attack. Stoops, after all, was the guy who first brought the Air Raid to the Big 12 when he hired Mike Leach as his first OC. However it also would make sense for Faulkner to retain a lot of the power rushing stuff that he’s been doing in Atlanta because you need to have that club in your bag in the SEC.
If this sounds familiar — a tough defense paired with a combination Air Raid pass attack and brutally tough rushing game — it should. UF has played a team employing that blueprint two years running: Miami.
Mario Cristobal first tried hiring RPO guy Josh Gattis, but after a rough first year, he brought in Shannon Dawson to install an Air Raid-based pass attack. Cristobal still has the sensibility of a former offensive line coach, so he wants a great defense and rushing game too, but he did go Air Raid for his passing game.
One would hope Sumrall manages games better than Cristobal does, but I expect him to follow largely the same idea. And it does make sense for these guys to employ the Air Raid when you remember why it exists. It’s not an offense meant to throw downfield a lot like the old Fun ‘n Gun or the Baylor-derived offense’s like Heupel’s. Its goal is to spread out the defense to create space and then pepper them with a bunch of short, safe passes. They’re the run-replacement kind of passes that other attacks use things like bubble screens for.
If that doesn’t click for you, consider the most prolific quarterback Leach had at Texas Tech: B.J. Symons. He set the then-FBS record for most passing yards in a season at 5,833 in 13 games in 2003. That enough passing for you? Yet, his yards per attempt was a mere 8.1 because he threw the ball a whopping 719 times that season. For comparison, Graham Mertz threw for 8.1 per attempt in 2023 when everyone got tired of the dink-and-dunk offense.
Now, few teams run as pure an Air Raid as Leach did, and I don’t expect Faulkner to at UF. The point is, the Air Raid can be compatible with a ball-control offense because there are a million ways to throw an easy three-yard pass and get a yard or two in YAC to keep matriculating the ball down the field.
I hope UF doesn’t become a carbon copy of Cristobal’s Miami because it’s not my favorite brand of football, but it does work. They’re in the second round of the playoffs, though I don’t expect another game of trying to protect the team from it’s own quarterback is going to work against Ohio State. There are worse models for Florida — having a defense not premised on freak edge rushers paired with a slow offense that runs a lot of two tight end sets comes to mind — but we’ll start to find out in a few months just how closely the Gators will be following the Hurricanes’ lead.