Florida is 1-0. Let’s not completely lose sight of that before digging below the surface. The Swamp was a great atmosphere again, and the team delivered a win for the fans.
Now, FAU is not a normal season-opening pushover. The Owls had an above-average defense a year ago and were expected to be in about the 70s nationally out of 130 teams. That’s where some lower-tier P5 teams like Wake Forest, Oregon State, Texas Tech, and Northwestern reside this year.
And speaking of P5, the team has a bunch of transfers from those leagues. They also have a bunch of coaches from there too. You know about Willie Taggart, and you might’ve known about former Arizona head coach Mike Stoops running their defense this year. But also, their O-line coach Ed Warinner worked for Urban Meyer at Ohio State, and inside linebackers coach Lance Thompson worked for Nick Saban at both LSU and Alabama and overall has been at five SEC schools in the past.
All those coaches, like the transfers, are at FAU for a reason. They’re scratch-and-dent specials by this point in their careers, but they do raise the floor of a program like that one above where it’d normally be. There is a certain minimum level of quality that their experience is able to provide, just like the measureables and athleticism of former P5 players do. The Owls are much, much better than the South Florida outfit that UF should demolish this week.
If not for a couple of mental mistakes by Emory Jones, the Gators easily could’ve gone to the half up 24-0 or 28-0. Had Emory Jones checked down to Nay’Quan Wright instead of throwing his end zone pick, I don’t think they get the first down. That might’ve led to a field goal, or maybe they go for it. We’ll never know. The narrative of the game would be much different if UF had gotten even just field goals instead of nothing.
But they did get nothing, and the reason was the guy on offense that we were all at least a bit unsure about. Jones had a couple of bad picks, and he had a miscommunication inside the 5-yard-line. Mullen said it was a good teaching moment because he should’ve double-checked when the play call he thought he got (QB sneak on 4th & Goal from the four) didn’t make much sense. I guess. He had a lot of teaching moments in the game, more than a lot of quarterbacks do in their first starts.
Jones had the fewest yards per attempt from a Gator starting quarterback (4.2) since Feleipe Franks against Missouri in 2018 (3.8). Good though the Owls’ defense may be for what kind of program they are, they’re not that good. Jones’s accuracy was up-and-down, throwing at Justin Shorter and Malik Davis’s feet or behind Trent Whittemore. His running is as good as advertised, but his passing raises nothing but questions.
For all we talk about Mullen tailoring offenses to his quarterbacks, I didn’t see much in the passing game that was geared towards being easy for Jones. I suppose that’s a compliment of a sort. There is a fallback option of simplifying things with one-two-run progressions and more tricks to get guys open. The latter might happen anyway since there weren’t a lot of guys getting open on their own.
There also is the option to make the pass target counts make more sense. Jacob Copeland only had three balls thrown his way, all of them early, and Xzavier Henderson had just one (interference-negated) target all night. Dameon Pierce had more targets than Davis and Wright combined. I know Kyle Pitts is gone, but the tight ends collectively got two balls thrown their way. Mullen was in full testing-stuff-out mode in some ways, which makes it harder to evaluate the performance.
The head coach did say after the game that he thinks Jones can run the entire offense, whereas Anthony Richardson can’t yet. I knew that was going to be his line about the quarterbacks, and you had better believe that Jones will be the starter for at least the next two weeks.
Richardson has an undeniable wow factor; in fact, the broadcasters said the three words Mullen used to describe him to them were “he’s a wow”.
That wow factor is why we’ll see him on the field routinely even though his and Jones’s games don’t contrast much. Subbing in Jones periodically made sense to juice the run game when Franks and Kyle Trask were starting. Ditto Josh Portis and Tim Tebow during the Chris Leak era. At first glance, Richardson is just a taller version of Jones.
He has more wiggle, though, whereas Jones is a slasher on the ground. Richardson also exudes more confidence. Jones may run the show, but he never seems truly in command.
Richardson drastically underthrew Ja’Markis Weston on a deep ball and then overthrew three longer passes on the final drive. He’s not there yet. The big question, though, is not whether he’s there yet but whether he’s closer than Jones is.
I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m confident that Mullen thinks Jones is. I think Richardson has the higher ceiling. Mullen might too based on some of his comments.
It’s still Jones’s team, and the offense did nearly everything it wanted to do in the run game with Jones out there. We shouldn’t forget that given the rushing issues of the past two years. You’d never have guessed this program threw 43% of the time two years ago and 41% of the time last year.
Still, I had to write about Jones and Richardson in this newsletter after that game. I didn’t want to, because I know Mullen won’t change signal callers this early in the year. I wanted to talk about whether the O-line and defense improved (yes and kind of). I wanted to hopefully discuss how the offensive rotations work (still a mystery, except maybe that Davis is RB1). I wanted to have literally anything else take up some oxygen.
Instead, we had Jones in his postgame interview answering questions about Richardson and saying he knew that noises about a competition were already out there. It was that way for a reason: big No. 15 has an extra something that Jones has yet to show he possesses, even if he lacks the experience and depth of knowledge that Jones has. It’s going to be this way for a while.