If there’s one thing that sets Dan Mullen apart from a lot of offensive guru types around college football, it’s his lack of a killer instinct. Actually, I don’t know exactly how his killer instinct manifests, if it exists. It’s just that he doesn’t have one under the commonly accepted terms of football discourse.
He doesn’t run up scores gratuitously. If he finds something that works against a defense, he’ll hammer on it repeatedly until the opponent makes an adjustment. Or, as is sometimes the case, until he decides the point margin is big enough that it’s time to work on other things. If those other things work similarly well, he’ll hang half a hundred on the poor saps. If not, then you’re not going to see a massive scoring margin.
The clearest example to me of this effect was last year after the 63-35 shellacking of Arkansas. All things considered, it was the best the offense looked against any opponent. Putting up 44 on Georgia the week prior was impressive too, but everything just looked so effortless against a Razorback defense that had given some other pass-heavy attacks fits.
After that, it seemed like Mullen took his foot off the gas. In the ensuing contest, the 38 points UF scored on Vanderbilt were tied for the third-fewest the dreadful Commodores allowed all season. Point output then declined to 34 against Kentucky and again to 31 against Tennessee. Every week is different, but Vandy put up 35 against UK and those big blue Wildcats put up 34 on the Vols. The Gators won all three of those games comfortably because the defense allowed fewer than 20 points in each, but that unstoppable buzz saw was gone.
The thing about trying to turn the switch off and on is that it doesn’t always work out. The team stayed in the low 30s following the UT win, but the defense lost its edge too and gave up a number in the high 30s. Shoe throwing GIFs then echoed around the world.
If there’s one thing to take away from the win over Tennessee, it’s that Mullen chose to flip the switch at halftime.
Tennessee had some defensive success in the first half because it crowded the line of scrimmage, often putting eight or sometimes nine guys within five yards of the ball in or around the box. The Gators ground out three scoring drives anyway because they’re the better team, only stopping for a field goal because of self-inflicted penalties.
None of the the drives were easy, necessarily, because Mullen almost never asked his offense to punish the Vols with vertical passing. Emory Jones did hit some nice intermediate throws on play action rollouts, but they were crosses or hitches that clearly didn’t threaten to be something deeper.
Then on the first drive of the second half, Justin Shorter beat his man on a go route up the numbers. Jones put it right on the money for 33 yards. Tennessee then only put six in the box on the next snap, and Mullen used play action to pull in the linebackers to free Kemore Gamble on a seam route. It only went for 13 yards before a safety cleaned it up, but those two plays put the Vols’ defense irrevocably off balance because suddenly a lot more things were on the table for the Gator offense.
Both teams ran a lot in the second half, so UF only had four possessions. Three of them were extended touchdown drives, with an unforced false start helping lead the other one to a punt.
Jones only attempted two longer throws after the drive that loosened up the defense, though on the punt drive he had all longer routes on 3rd & 17 and ended up scrambling because no one was open. Both deeper throws came on the team’s final drive, and the first of them was after the team had already gained 25 yards on four plays.
Vertical passing didn’t have to be frequent; it just had to exist in some form. And once it did, Florida got favorable box numbers for running the ball far more often than not. Suddenly the offensive line turned into maulers again and ball carriers were getting five or more yards upfield before contact.
I’m not in the meeting rooms, so I don’t know what the initial game plan was. From the outside, it looked like Mullen was trying to keep things controlled and win the game like it was one of the two cupcake contests that started the year. Maybe. There could be more to it.
Among stereotypes for bright offensive minds, Mullen is not a mad scientist or a grip-it-and-rip-it guy. He’s an incurable tinkerer who always is trying this or that to see if he can get a marginal gain from it. He has said publicly that he’s still learning to call plays for Jones, and the early emphasis on rollout passes might’ve been him working on that. With Stewart Reese sitting out as a precaution and Michael Tarquin subbing in routinely, he might also have been testing his offensive line’s younger right side for future reference.
I’ll give Tennessee this much: they didn’t come to play along with the controlled Gator win. I don’t know if Josh Heupel is the long-term answer there since UCF slowly regressed under his watch and he has a reputation of being a poor recruiter. If there’s one thing you can’t be at a program with relatively little in-state talent and superpower surrounding you on every side, it’s a guy who doesn’t live and breathe recruiting.
However everything from the Vols just seemed more organized and sound than it has in forever. Take the long coverage-bust touchdown.
Heupel saw UF’s youngest and greenest secondary combination on the field. He spread receivers outside the numbers on both sides of the field to really isolate the DBs from each other. On the left edge, he used a receiver stack, which is something the Gators have struggled with for years. He put a running back to the quarterback’s right to make sure the single-high safety Rashad Torrence started more to that side.
Jason Marshall jammed the front receiver in the stack, which is a welcome change over the past couple years’ of coverage because it disrupts that route. However Mordecai McDaniel had his eyes on the play action even though Ty’Ron Hopper was blitzing off the left edge and was always going to be right on top of any handoff. That’s all the opening the receiver needed, and six points came of a young guy making a young guy’s mistake. It appeared that Heupel deployed that play there to take advantage of one of Florida’s less-polished coverage players.
Defensive coordinator Tim Banks also should be commended for keeping his overmatched unit’s head above water for as long as he did. He might’ve done so in part because he’s a little different than a lot of DCs in the region. Unlike many SEC defensive coordinators over the years, Banks doesn’t have even a tangential connection to Nick Saban anywhere.
His past set of mentors won’t wow you; he worked for defensive guys Gary Blackney and Tommy West (who?) before mostly running defenses for offensive head coaches for a while. He came to Tennessee from Penn State after working four years as co-DC with Brent Pry, whose only SEC experience is running James Franklin’s Vanderbilt defenses. Mullen never went up against Vandy in any of those seasons. Not that Banks is some kind of innovator, but early on Mullen might’ve been testing a defense he hadn’t exactly faced before.
Whatever the case, Florida ended up winning with relative ease after a couple of early defensive lapses. Heupel’s offense with its extreme spread sets mean that if a linebacker is half a step late on a screen or a safety in single coverage has his eyes on the play action, it can generate a quick score. It needs those big plays because, as we later saw, it doesn’t do a lot without them.
In between now and Jacksonville, Mullen will keep tinkering to find out the plusses and minuses of this year’s team. Keep in mind we’ve only seen the full attack in half the games so far, as he made it clear from the spring that the plan was always to play both Jones and Anthony Richardson. Kentucky isn’t great and Vandy is dreadful. LSU doesn’t seem much if any better than last year, but last year’s result plus the game being in Baton Rouge means they need to take it seriously. If Mullen goes into that one like he did the Tennessee game with the car firmly in third gear, it’s going to be a less comfortable three-and-a-half hours than we’d all like it to be.
The thing about having Bama on the schedule and coming up short after allowing three first-quarter TDs is that every SEC game matters equally as much from here on out. Yes, UGA does in some sense matter the most because the Bulldogs are so good. However them being so good means no one else on their schedule besides UF is going to test them. Arkansas will slow them down but doesn’t have the firepower to pull off the upset. Auburn is bad. The rest of the East behind UGA and UF is mediocre-at-best.
LSU was a game to give last year because Georgia got Bama on the schedule. It’s not a game to give this year, nor are road games at Kentucky and Mizzou or any of the others. Mullen can get away with some switch flipping as we saw on Saturday, but he needs to be more judicious with it than he was a year ago.