Games like that don’t happen often.
The last time Florida scored 50 while giving up 30 was in 2007. It was the game when Tim Tebow accounted for seven touchdowns in a 51-31 win over South Carolina. It almost happened a couple times in 2005, but before that contest against the ’07 Gamecocks, it was the 59-31 win over Hal Mumme’s OG Air Raid-running Kentucky in 2000. Two years earlier it happened against Mumme and Mike Leach’s Kentucky, and then in 1995 there was the famous second half scoring flood to beat Tennessee 62-37.
Saturday was the fifth time in my lifetime, which began in 1985, in which a 50-something to 30-something game happened. The Gators don’t play in the Big 12, in other words, so games with 80 combined points don’t come around too often.
I think it’s instructive what Dan Mullen said in his postgame press conference. He said the team will get better in the coming weeks on both sides of the ball.
Before we breeze right past it, consider what that means for the offense. Mullen said he kept it fairly simple on offense because they didn’t know what to expect from the Rebel defense.
They kept it simple. They will get better. They just scored 51 points on 642 total yards. The Ole Miss defense is not good, but those make for quite the combination looking ahead.
Anyway, the defense is probably where your mind was going when you read about the assertion about them getting better. Ole Miss could’ve scored more if not for some dysfunction and penalties here and there, and they scored 35 points on 613 yards.
For starters, being down two safeties really hurt. Brad Stewart missed the opener as he always does, and Shawn Davis went out on a bad targeting call early. You might think that the safety rotation might’ve gone away with two of the top four guys not available, but you would be wrong.
Trey Dean looked mostly great back at safety, and Donovan Stiner did not have his best performance. Rashad Torrence also got in the game back there and, well, looked like a true freshman playing in his first collegiate game with no spring practice. I guess it’s good for his development to get some meaningful snaps, and the Gator offense was clicking in a way such that they had the luxury to throw the true freshman in there to give up some big plays.
Under normal circumstances, Stewart and Davis will be available and are much less flammable than a true freshman. That right there accounts for some things. I do not think the CJ McWilliams experiment at star went all that well either, but Stewart apparently was playing well at that spot during fall camp. Marco Wilson did a lot of the star work anyway, but Stewart would allow Wilson to go back outside more.
The long rotations didn’t really help elsewhere either. Ole Miss’s second touchdown is an example.
Dontario Drummond is wide to the right with Elijah Moore in the right slot. An H-back is on the right as well. Kaiir Elam is the corner on that side, and Stiner is the safety. Wilson is over there as the star. So far so good.
Moore runs a corner to the right side, and Elam and Stiner bracket him. It’s good coverage; he was never open. The H-back runs a short out, and Wilson has him. Great.
Drummond runs a quick whip route, faking a break inward before going out to the right. Who has him? No one, because the linebacker on that side, Lacedrick Brunson, is following the H-back and not paying a whit of attention to the wide receiver who goes right behind him.
Brunson was a low-rated recruit who was a Randy Shannon find out of South Florida. He’s just not that good, and he didn’t show up on the two-deep of the pregame depth chart. I know Mullen considers depth charts to be lower than toilet paper, but it was accurate in that sense. Brunson is not a player who should be in a contested game if the goal really is to hold the opponent to the lowest score possible.
All of this is to say that against a tougher opponent, I think the defense will look better because the rotations will be smaller and not have players like Torrence or Brunson in them. Not for more than a series or two, anyway.
I will add that Kyree Campbell was a guy they missed too. Zach Carter might get better in the inside with time, but he did not do a heck of a lot. Gervon Dexter got some highlights but was also swimming a bit. You may remember his first tackle for loss. It was easy, as Ole Miss just didn’t block him on that play. The snap before, Dexter missed tackling the running back because he lined up late against the Rebels’ tempo and was hesitant after being a bit surprised by the snap. He’s got all the potential in the world, but he’s still learning.
The lasting takeaway I have from the game, besides how spectacular the offense looked, is that the team still doesn’t have an abundance of quality depth. The first string wide receivers are a mile ahead of the second string. The defense was missing three players and suffered visibly for it.
If Florida is going to accomplish all of its goals, it has to be extremely careful about not having guys going down to COVID tests and contact tracing. They can beat anyone with a good performance and everyone at the ready. They cannot roll into a game down 10 or 15 scholarship players and expect to beat a lot of the teams on the schedule.
I do think the team will look better in a week against South Carolina. The Gamecocks are still very much a Will Muschamp team, and Mullen and staff know exactly what to expect from that coaching staff. We’ll see less vanilla next weekend on both sides of the ball.
If South Carolina lights the defense up for 30 or more, it’ll be time to worry. Ole Miss doing that with a better quarterback and set of skill position players with the element of surprise is less a concern.
In the ultimate survive-and-advance season, Florida is 1-0. You really can’t ask for more than that.