By David Parker
Thoughts of the Week – Vandy Week
Tell me that wasn’t a wild game. Tell me your attitude toward the team and program didn’t fluctuate pretty wildly throughout the game. I don’t believe you.
I couldn’t watch the game live, but I know Gator Nation was losing their stuff after a scoreless first quarter, and especially after taking a meager 14-point lead into halftime.
Of COURSE we were going to come out flat. But who cares that we just came off our most emotionally draining game of the year, which itself was at the end of a brutal 4-game stretch against 3 top-10 SEC teams and another that just knocked one of those top-10 teams off in their own house. Right? We should have been blowing them out by 28-30 points at halftime.
Bet your tune changed when we rung up a 42-point second half. Didn’t it. I know. It did.
Remember when I asked how we would know when we are “back”? Remember I said we wouldn’t know until after it already happened, and we would only recognize it in retrospect? And that we may already be there?
Well, being “back” doesn’t necessarily mean that we are winning all our biggest games. After all, in our most glorious dynastic runs, we never won all our games in one year, ever. Being the first bookend of another dynasty run doesn’t require that we win all our biggest games, either.
I say all this to highlight the way Gator fans approached and experienced Saturday’s Vandy game. A couple years ago, we would have been happy just to beat Vandy. Same thing during most of the Muschamp error. But we fans endured the first half of this game like we would during the Spurrier and Meyer eras. This was the biggest shutout win by the Gators over an SEC foe since the national championship season of 1996 (a 65-0 win over Kentucky), it was the biggest shutout victory over Vanderbilt ever, it was 2 points shy of Florida’s largest margin of victory over Vanderbilt in the history of the series that dates back to 1945, and the 3rd shutout of the season marked the first such accomplishment by Florida since the 1988 season.
And yet…the game ended with Gator fans thinking we should have won by more. Didn’t we?
Welcome back, elite expectations. Can the program be far behind?
Or is it already back, too?
Looking Ahead
Continuing that thought, if Florida is truly back, it would mean we are in reload mode, not rebuild mode, as well. This doesn’t mean we will necessarily have a better record next year than this year. After all, Spurrier had a bubble-pop season in Year 3, the year that seems to transition between the early coaching impact of getting the inherited team to play far better than they ever played before, and the year when the new coach has almost all his own players at every spot in the depth chart. The Year 3 bubble reflects the foibles of the first recruiting class of a new head coach, the coaching transition class that is always so difficult. Just ask Urban Meyer, who went from SEC and national champion to a 4-loss champion of nothing in his third year at Florida. Dan Mullen faces perhaps his toughest year of coaching yet in 2020: trying to avoid the Year 3 bubble pop.
If he can do that, even though both Spurrier and Meyer had SEC championships and a natty in the bank after two years, he will have done at least one thing they could not do.
But how likely is this to happen? I suggest to you that it is very likely. More likely than it was for us to be in a position in November to be an 11-win team. Perhaps significantly more likely.
Because next year the Gators will basically be the same team, with the following changes…
Add the following:
— Depth everywhere.
— A very impactful offensive line starter or two through the transfer portal.
— A year of strength, conditioning and technique improvement in run blocking on the offensive line.
— A ton of experience and development with all the young guys who have shown signs of big impact this year.
— A full season and another off-season for quarterback Kyle Trask being THE guy. He will genuinely be in the running for best quarterback in the nation in 2020, and will have more running game support.
— Despite losing David Reese, linebacker will become a team strength. We know his limitations in pass defense, and our new breed that has emerged this year and will take over next season are the brand of fleet-footed sideline-to-sideline coverage ‘backers and run stoppers we’ve been missing for some time.
Hold even in the following areas:
— Status quo, and possibly improve, at defensive line. As good as Jonathan Greenard & Jabari Zuniga are, they have missed all our difficult games this season but one, so whoever we have playing next year in their positions will be better than Greenard & Zuniga on the sidelines in street clothes.
Lose some, but not enough to be significant:
— Depth at WR will take a hit, but we probably won’t lose much if anything in terms of production, because we will be running the ball more next year and there are only so many balls to go around. Keon Zipperer and Kyle Pitts will be a living terror for SEC defenses, along with 3-4 top notch wide receivers buzzing around, as well.
— The running back position will miss Lemical Perine, but Dameon Pierce has emerged as the better all-around back, the stronger guy between the tackles and moving the pile, and we will never be lacking at this position as long as Dan Mullen is here.
When I look at that team and I see that Georgia loses a lot, including their elite play makers on offense, LSU loses their difference-making quarterback and possibly their program-changing offensive coordinator, and Alabama loses their do-it-all star quarterback Tua Tagovailoa along with probably their entire starting receiver corps, three of the best receivers in the country, I see Florida’s opportunities opening up like a sliding glass door into the future.
Chomps from the GC Staff & Columnists —
NICK DE LA TORRE
The Gators hit the road this week to play at Missouri. I won’t even begin to try and explain the Missouri series because, quite frankly, I have no idea how to even begin to wrap my mind around the games that Florida and Missouri have played.
Missouri has won the last two games by a combined score of 83-33. None of those scores have made sense, nor have the plays that led to the final scores. This year presents another oddity.
Missouri is significantly better on the road than they are at home. When playing at Memorial Stadium the Tigers are scoring 40.4 points per game as apposed to just 13 on the road. Their defense is giving up an average of just 11.6 points-per-game at home but more than four touchdowns a game on the road.
This is the last SEC game for a huge number of Florida seniors and it means a lot to them. There will be no Georgia hangover this year and the snow that has fallen on Columbia, Missouri (seriously, it snowed briefly on Monday) will have melted away in the weekend temperatures that should be in the 50s at kickoff. Florida wants this game and they need it. Not in the sense that they need it to get to where they want to be this season, they still need Georgia to lose its next two games against Texas A&M and Auburn if they want to go to Atlanta, but they need it to stay on course and to change the strange, no good, nonsensical series with Missouri.
A couple of notes:
Trey Dean was not happy with his role playing Star. The coaching staff had asked Dean about making a switch to safety in the spring and he did not want to. They tried again in fall camp but Dean wasn’t receptive. He’s now seeing a reduced role and that caused him to be very unhappy last week before the Vandy game. He’s calmed down since but Marco Wilson will be playing Star and Dean will be coming off the bench as Kaiir Elam gets a more expanded role outside.
Regarding Brad Stewart. Dan Mullen said Stewart was expected to play but he did not practice on Monday and was very limited Tuesday. At this point I think it’s more doubtful that he’ll be healthy enough to play on Saturday.
Van Jefferson has not gotten a Senior Bowl Invite yet. I spoke with him on Tuesday and he was been invited to the East/West Shrine game but not the Senior Bowl. He smiled and said simply, ”if Reese’s (Senior Bowl) comes it comes. I’m not worried about it.”
DAVID WUNDERLICH
The chatter about Mississippi State head coach Joe Moorhead potentially taking the Rutgers job after the season has quieted down, mainly because all the rumblings out of Piscataway have Greg Schiano going back there. I always thought the Moorhead speculation was a bit far-fetched. It seemed to be based entirely on the guy’s history of coaching in the northeast, which required some squinting since he spent time at Georgetown and Akron as an assistant.
Last year’s MSU team was at a cyclical high, with a veteran-heavy roster stocked with some legit NFL talent on defense. That defense was the real deal, but it was squandered in no small part because Moorhead didn’t know how to adjust to the offensive talent on hand. The team went 8-5, and offensive point totals in the four regular season losses were 7, 6, 3, and 0. The Bulldogs only lost to teams that won at least nine wins, but they could’ve been a nine-win team had they picked up any of those losses as wins.
This year the team is struggling to make a bowl. It’s 4-5 with three games to go. One of the remaining contests is a gimme win against an FCS team, and one is a sure loss against Alabama. That leaves the Egg Bowl as the swing game as to whether they’ll go bowling or not. The clunker they had in the loss to Tennessee ensures they can’t boast of having no bad losses as was the case in 2018.
Dan Mullen missed a bowl in his first year in Starkville but never did after. He did go 5-7 in the 2016 regular season after taking a chance on a first-time defensive coordinator who turned out to be a bad pick, but the team’s high APR and national shortfall of six-win teams allowed them to go bowling anyway and pick up a sixth win.
One of the things rivals liked to point out when Florida hired Mullen is that he only finished above .500 in conference play once. Moorhead, despite being a highly regarded OC at Penn State with (FCS) head coaching experience, isn’t going to get it done in his first two years. He went 4-4 last year after inheriting the best roster in modern school history and will go no better than 3-5 this year. Maybe this Mullen guy knew what he was doing after all.
ERIC FAWCETT
Florida’s loss to Florida State for 6th year in a row has sent shockwaves around Gators basketball and it looks like Florida is going to respond by shifting their starting lineup. Scottie Lewis, their top recruit in 2019 is likely to get into a starting role to help out a defense that hasn’t made coach Mike White particularly happy through two games. Expected to drop out of the starting 5 is Noah Locke, a sophomore guard who was a sharpshooter from three last year but has struggled mightily this year going 2-14 up until this point. The Gators have an easier contest against Towson on Thursday to hopefully get their rhythm back before a road contest against UConn Sunday.
That’s all, folks!
All the best,
Your friends at Gator Country
…where it’s GREAT to be a FLORIDA GATOR!