It’s December 20, 2017. Dan Mullen is about to get his first recruiting coup as Florida head coach.
Today the 4-star, dual-threat quarterback Emory Jones will flip his commitment from Urban Meyer and Ohio State to UF. He’s a dynamic runner with a cannon of an arm, exactly the kind of player who can make Mullen’s spread option sing. Visions of the 2007 and 2008 offenses dance in the heads of Gator fans everywhere.
It’s August 27, 2018. Florida has released the first depth chart of the Mullen era. It lists Feleipe Franks as the starter and Kyle Trask the backup. Some positions go three-deep thanks to the OR designation, but quarterback is not one of them. Jones is nowhere to be seen.
It’s August 19, 2019. Florida has unveiled its depth chart for the opener against Miami. As expected, Franks again is the starter.
Trask and Jones now both appear in the backup spot with an OR between them. The official releases have that same OR on them for the rest of the season, even after Franks’s injury put the lie to that fiction.
Through three years on campus, Mullen’s earliest big recruiting win has netted about 200 passing and 170 rushing yards per year. He’s accounted for 13 touchdowns, only two of them coming while the game was in real doubt at the time.
On a certain level, it it’s entirely expected that it’s taken until now for Jones to get his first crack at starting. Mullen and his various offensive staffs have long demonstrated a preference for seniority and experience, particularly at quarterback. The simplest answer for why it took an injury to Franks for Trask to get a chance at starting is that Franks had played meaningful snaps on the college level before 2018 and Trask had not.
From another point of view, it is a bit of a surprise compared to how things looked in winter of 2017-18. One would’ve figured that Jones should have a leg up on the competition.
He really is the prototypical quarterback for a Mullen offense, even more than Tim Tebow was. He may not be a short-yardage battering ram, but he almost never gets stuffed for no gain or loss. That fact comes from his superlative ability to find and explode through holes, which makes him a better rushing option in almost every regard.
Yet, Franks ended up looking better than appeared possible in 2018 compared to the prior year, and Mullen had never had near the success with a pocket-bound signal caller as he had with Trask in 2020. A couple of improbable-seeming events had to happen to keep Jones largely on the bench until now.
Mullen’s regular usage of Jones, even while having another quarterback on his way to being a Heisman finalist, is proof that his ball carrying ability has always been there. That, and Mullen still feels a need to move the ball on the ground regularly even as he has a record-setting passer.
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Watching Jones will take some getting used to after his two direct predecessors in the job. And while quarterbacks always change in size and style from one to the next, this transition is a big one.
Feleipe Franks was 6’6” and looked it with his general impression of being all arms and legs. Kyle Trask was a big galoot, listed at 6’5” and 240 lbs on the 2020 roster. UF listed Tim Tebow at 6’3” and 245, so that’s what kind of territory we’re talking about.
Jones is six feet and two inches of chiseled muscle on a narrow frame. He looks smallish in every dimension, but despite that fact he’s remarkably resilient to taking hits as a ball carrier. His elusiveness helps, but tackling him is like trying to take down a 210-pound bag of concrete that can run a 4.7-second 40-yard dash.
It’s not just physique that sets Jones apart from Franks or Trask. The way the ball comes out for him is entirely different.
You always felt you had a good idea of where the ball was going with the prior two quarterbacks, though for different reasons. Physics dictated that the lanky Franks had to have a long and therefore slower windup, so you had some advance warning even when he rocketed a pass somewhere. Trask’s arm was adequate but not outstanding, so the ball just didn’t move as fast.
Jones has a cannon of a right arm. He easily surpasses Trask in arm strength, though he’s not quite at the level of Franks. Jones’s windup is also quick and compact, practically making Franks look like he has the sense of urgency in unloading the ball of a beer league softball pitcher.
Why am I going through this trouble to compare Jones to the primary starters of the past four years? Here’s why.
Seth made a great film breakdown video of Jones for Gator Country back in January. There were a couple of throws from Jones that Seth highlighted as having good ball placement that gave me pause.
When watching the plays in real time, I thought Seth was being charitable to Jones. It appeared at first glance that a couple of receivers were making good catches on questionable throws.
When slowed down, however, you could see that they indeed were examples of excellent ball placement. Had Jones hit the middle of the targets’ numbers, a defender would’ve had a chance to break up the pass or worse. The ball placement was outside the receivers’ cores because that’s where the completion could be had.
It’s a huge difference watching Jones do that versus Trask. Trask was precise with his ball placement, but his average arm strength meant you had a little bit of a chance to see what he was doing. His throws appeared planned out because they had to be.
Compared to Trask’s tosses, some of Jones’s throws can look like “oh crap” moments where he’s firing it without a lot of forethought. If the ball isn’t going between the numbers as in Seth’s examples, they could look like errant passes.
They still could be errant passes, as Jones is not yet as polished as Trask was by his fifth collegiate year. Jones is only entering his fourth, after all, and Trask was an unusually good passer as evidenced by all the records he set. If Jones isn’t up to that level as a passer, well, he has a lot of company in the entire history of the program.
There has been a narrative about Jones since his arrival that he’s a terrific runner who needs work in the passing game. Mullen putting him in the game to merely juice the run game from time to time didn’t help dispell that meme, and few in the media have taken a close look at Jones as a passer. It’s not an indictment of said media to mention that; the sample size is small and scattered across a lot of games, and there are always bigger fish to fry than to analyze a lightly-used third-string quarterback who rarely if ever gets the keys to the whole playbook.
I want you to be a sophisticated viewer. Play close attention to where Jones puts the ball when he fires off a pass with little warning that doesn’t go directly at the target’s center of gravity. Don’t be surprised if you see that it went the only place it could safely go while the game commentators are talking about how the receiver bailed Jones out or similar.
A new era of Gator football is dawning, and everyone will have to adjust to it, fans and media alike. There’s no reason for you not to get a jump on everyone else in this regard.