Every year there are questions about some positions on the Gator football team. That’s the case with pretty much every team in every season. Even when a team returns basically everybody, there will be good young players pushing some number of the veterans.
These questions are easy fodder writers of season preview material, so there are never shortages of analysis of them. I don’t always agree with what others think are the actual questions, though.
A perfect example is from last summer when a lot of fans and media worried about the running back position. Dameon Pierce was the only returning player who’d gotten at least 50 carries in either of the prior two seasons, but even then he was a clear backup to Lamical Perine and, in 2018, Jordan Scarlett. He would presumably be fine, but was there anything behind him?
The answer ended up a clear yes, and I thought it was clear enough even before the season began.
Malik Davis had shown real skill in 2017, but he got hurt in 2018 and wasn’t fully himself in 2019. By fall of 2020, he would have enough time to recover to his old form if he ever was going to. Maybe it was just me being unfoundedly optimistic, but I thought we’d at least get 80% of the 2017 Malik Davis. Turns out, we got something more than that. True, his yards per carry rate was down — so was Pierce’s, so it obviously wasn’t just him — but he turned out to be a great receiver out of the backfield.
Beyond that, I felt like everyone had forgotten about Nay’Quan Wright. He was a 4-star signee in the 2019 class, and the coaches tipped their hands to how highly they thought of him during that season.
Mullen and staff have fairly strictly followed seniority order when it comes to determining playing time. They’ve done it dating back to the Mississippi State days, and they follow it even in garbage time.
At the ends of the Gators’ three shutout wins in ’19, the same thing kept happening. Perine would disappear first, of course, and soon after so would Pierce and then Davis. Then, 2018 signee Iverson Clement would get a single carry before Wright would get the rest.
Clement got his carry first, because like I said, the coaches strictly honor seniority. However, Clement finished the season with exactly three rushes; Wright finished with 12. The signal was there for those who knew how to see it: Wright was going to pass up Clement in 2020. To a certain extent, he already had. Wright got 54 carries and caught 19 passes last fall, and Clement has transferred to Temple.
I put Lorenzo Lingard into the calculations too, though he ended up a lightly used backup and special teams guy. Alas. Regardless, I thought there was plenty at running back with no need to worry about the position. I was right.
The position I feel similarly about this year is quarterback. I know there are some out there who think there will be a real competition between Emory Jones and Anthony Richardson. A part of that is merely the standard phenomenon of fans thinking the backup quarterback might be better than the starter. Except in seasons like last year or 2007-09, that comes around a lot.
More of it, I think, is that fans aren’t sure if they can trust Jones as quarterback. They appear to think he’s just fine as a runner, and they should. He’s finished with a higher yards per carry rate than any primary running back the last two years despite his presence on the field often being a flashing neon sign saying “THEY’RE GOING TO RUN”. Some of his success comes from the advantage of option plays, but he really is a great ball carrier. His vision and burst are a fantastic combination.
The worry is more about Jones throwing passes, probably because he’s done so little of it to date. He most extensive outing as a thrower was the Cotton Bowl, and the combination of a hailstorm of drops and throwing to backups who were playing against OU starters much of the way led him to have an unmemorable stat line.
I am sanguine about Jones as a passer, and it goes beyond the stock line that his running ability means he doesn’t have to be as good a thrower as a more pocket-bound quarterback.
Mullen isn’t flawless in his history of developing signal callers, but his track record is about as good as it gets this side of Lincoln Riley. Franks will get drafted this spring, which is a remarkable development given how he looked in 2017. It won’t happen because he got a lot better in the COVID offseason at Arkansas. It’s because of how well Mullen and Brian Johnson salvaged his career in 2018-19. No, Franks was never going to be a Heisman finalist as Trask was in 2020. However he was much, much better under the new staff than the old.
Nick Fitzgerald ran for more than 1,400 yards after you exclude sacks in 2016, and he fell off a cliff as a player as soon as Mullen left Starkville. Dak Prescott guided Mississippi State to the No. 1 ranking in 2014 and has started every game he’s played for the Dallas Cowboys.
There’s a lot of quality work in Mullen’s past going back to Omar Jacobs at Bowling Green, and the exceptions stick out for an obvious reason. Chris Leak was better in 2004 than he was after, and Mullen’s first (and only) 4-star quarterback signee at MSU Tyler Russell wasn’t that great. Both of them were pocket guys and not great runners. Leak carried the ball more than you remember him doing so, but Russell was just as pocket-bound as Trask.
Trask’s success last year shows that Mullen was finally able to fill out his resume by building a great offense for a pocket passer. It’s beside the point with Jones, though. Mullen has been coaching up very good mobile quarterbacks on the FBS level since it was still called I-A in 2001.
Especially now that Mullen’s passing game proficiency has leveled up, I can’t see a single reason to worry much about Jones taking over. If he doesn’t excel, it’ll be a once-in-two-decades aberration. Aside from the iffy guys he inherited in Starkville, Mullen quarterbacks who can run all do great.
Jones is entering his fourth year of the system. Richardson is only entering his second. Even without Mullen’s preference for experience and seniority, which is never going away, the latter is literally years behind the former in learning the offense. And because Mullen’s development process doesn’t teach the full offense right away but rather layers things on from year to year, Jones will always have more of the playbook open to him.
Barring injury, Jones will and should start this year. Given Mullen’s full track record, there’s zero reason to think that Jones will be anything less than an above-average quarterback who will win the team far more games than he loses it.
Don’t overthink it. It’ll be Jones’s team. He’ll do great. Spend your worry time on other positions.