By David Parker
Thoughts of the Week – Georgia Week (10-26-19)
I know what you’re thinking. A big, devastating loss…time for PD to pump the sunshine and tell everyone it’s all fine.
Well, you’re not entirely wrong. The sun isn’t falling. We’re still at least a year ahead of schedule. After beating Auburn, we were always playing LSU and Georgia with house money. Unless we have another avalanche of injuries, the almost-worst-case-scenario right now is that we enter our bowl game trying to get our 11th win of the season.
But don’t get me wrong. I’m angry. Losing I can take. Every game produces a loser, and we are so fortunate to already have 7 W’s in the bag. Gonna happen. But, you really want your losses to be a case where you played your hearts out, your coaching staff did a great job putting the players in position to compete, and you were just beat by a better team or by the bounce of the ball.
But that’s not what happened in Jacksonville. Our whole team did not play their hearts out (although many of the players did, and most of the rest of them didn’t have the chance to). We did not get beat by a better team or by the bounce of the ball. And our coaching staff did not do a good job or put our players – at least not the defenders – in a position to compete or win.
As great a coach as Dan Mullen is, these kinds of games will happen now and then. They happened with Spurrier and Meyer – at least once a year, as well. But it’s beyond imperative that this kind of game doesn’t happen against Georgia. Ever again.
This is difficult, and probably hypocritical, to say, but the biggest thing holding Dan Mullen back right now is that he did not assemble a very strong coaching staff. And that happens a lot when a head coach takes a new job. And the coach then has to turn over the dead weight.
I am not one to call for a coach to be fired; in fact I don’t think I have done that since Jon Hoke in the Spurrier era, but I certainly hope beyond hope that Todd Grantham moves on next year. I have seen enough to know that we will never be elite again playing his scheme. Coincidentally, my problem with his scheme is the same problem I had with Hoke: it literally facilitates the success of the opposing offense. We came into LSU knowing that the only way to stop their offense is to cover their receivers and pressure the quarterback. We virtually refused to try to pressure the quarterback, and we played cotton ball-soft zone coverage with 5+ yard cushions, making it basically impossible to defend the pass. But at least we had the excuse of missing our best defensive linemen, best pass rushers, and playing one of the two best offenses in the nation.
The recipe for beating Georgia? Just limit their running attack and make Jake Fromm throw the ball to convert third downs, and they are toast. South Carolina, of all teams, showed how easy it is to make Jake Fromm look stupid if you stop their run (LSU and Auburn the last two years did the same thing). The trick of course is to stop their powerful running attack behind their huge offensive line that the refs allow to commit assault and battery holding on every play with no calls, like they’re Alabama or something. But we did that. We matched up man to man and shut their running backs down. They had to rely on Jake Fromm to convert third downs all day, which he can’t do.
….unless, of course, you lay your defensive backs 5+ yards off the line of scrimmage, cover air pockets instead of receivers, and do nothing to apply a pass rush. Which is what we did. Every. Single. Time. Every time Jake Fromm has had to carry the load passing the ball, UGA has lost. 100% of the time, it works all the time. The ONLY way he can win a football game throwing the ball is if he has all day to throw and all his receivers are wide open on every play. Which is exactly what we facilitated for him.
Hindsight and Foresight
After all, coming into the game, if we knew we would hold Georgia’s tailback D’Andre Swift under 100 yards and hold all UGA’s running backs to under 120 total yards rushing, and make Jake Fromm beat us…wouldn’t we be celebrating a big win before the game even kicked off? Of course we would.
But Grantham apparently doesn’t intend to ever let our players play pass defense. Refuses to. Will Muschamp, the Inspector Clouseau of college coaching, idiot that he is, isn’t even that daft. At least he gives his players a chance to make plays. And when he did against Georgia a couple weeks ago, they shut them down. After a few third down conversions, the Georgia fans were celebrating third down conversions before the ball was snapped. Yelling things like, “They’re not even covering us!” They were laughing at us (very loudly, I might add) before, during, and after pretty much every third down conversion attempt by their Dawgs. That did not feel good as a Gator fan, but we made every third down conversion automatic for them. I would be laughing at us, too.
I’m not actually that upset that we lost. I’ve somehow moved to a place mentally where I don’t let it bother me that much. I now greatly enjoy winning and brush off losing (whereas most of my life, I hated losing far more than I loved winning). But what does still bother me is when we throw away games we should have won. When that happens because college kids make some mistakes, I can forgive that with no problem. Kids are sometimes going to do that. But when it happens because we have one or more coaches doing an unfathomably bad job running a position group, the offense, the defense, or the whole program, then that still really bothers me.
And I think that’s what just happened.
Myth Busting
A saw a number of myths crop up over the weekend that I wanted to debunk. The biggest myth is that we lost to Georgia and LSU because they recruit so much better than we do. I promised myself not to enter that recruiting vortex again, so I will address the more direct piece of the myth that was expressed many times after the LSU and UGA games: that they had better talent, even vastly better talent.
They had vastly better talent? No. How do you figure out if a win or loss is because of talent or scheme/coaching? Well, probably the biggest cue is the 1×1 matchups throughout the game. We won far more 1×1 matchups on the day in Jacksonville. I’d say we about drew even, or were very close to it in Baton Rouge, where you have to expect to come up a little short of even (especially at night). But in the end, their offense dominated out injury-depleted defense; our offense dominated their relatively healthy defense.
–> Myth 2: Georgia beat us because they dominated both lines of scrimmage.
No. They did not dominate both lines of scrimmage.
They dominated us when they passed the ball. That’s the only win they got on the line of scrimmage Saturday.
We dominated them when they ran the ball. The only reason they scratched out a respectable 3.2 yards per carry average on the ground is that we let Fromm run on broken plays and Swift broke off a couple long runs after our defense was exhausted from the unending 3rd-and-Grantham debacles to skew the average.
We almost always had our way with them when we passed the ball; our RBs ran for 4.4 yards per carry average, so we even won the line of scrimmage when we ran the ball, too. We were at worst a draw on the line of scrimmage across the whole game.
–> Myth 3: Our defense was put in a terrible position all day by our offense’s inability to convert third downs.
While it is true that our offense did not make it easy on our defense in the first half, that was expected going in. Who thought the Georgia defense was going to just lie down and let us throw it down their throats at will? Grantham coaches for us now, not them. The defense was supposed to show up big time and put in a lot of time. But in truth, we only had to punt 3 times (and making our defense look even worse, we let UGA run nearly 70 plays and only forced 2 punts). We were abysmal at 2/9 on 3rd down, but I think even worse was our defense giving up 12/18 3rd down conversions. I no doubt think the chicken & egg argument starts with the defense because I am looking at this and the LSU game in the same batch. While we played pretty badly on offense Saturday, in the first half especially, we played great on offense for 4 quarters against LSU. And our defense still almost never made a stop in Baton Rouge.
Two games against LSU & UGA, 4 quarters played, only 4 punts forced by our defense (and they converted no 4th downs).
LSU has a great offense…UGA, not so much. Very importantly, the defense couldn’t stop either of them from play 1 to play 70. If our defense just got worn down, I would get it. But we’ve been helpless, hapless and flailing on defense in those two games from start to finish. Two formerly shutdown corners have barely made two plays between them all year, because you can’t defend a pass from 5 yards away.
In Summary
To return to my comfortable perch atop Sunshine Mountain, I am really happy we are 1-2 years ahead of schedule on this colossal rebuild, especially given how good the SEC and national competition (like Clemson & OSU) is, and how much harder it is to ascend to elite status compared to eras past…I’ve just seen enough of Grantham too know we will never get there with that anchor weighing us down. Unless Dan gets involved and forces him to let the back half of our defense actually participate in football games again – which I don’t think he will. Head coaches seldom do. They almost always sink or swim with their hand-picked guys. So the anchor will remain at the bottom, and the sooner we cut that anchor rope, the sooner we can advance to the next level. Maybe someone can get in the ear of the Cleveland Browns again.
Chomps from the GC Staff & Columnists —
ANDREW SPIVEY
Florida is taking advantage of WIllie Taggart being fired at FSU and they’re going hard after several of the Noles recruits including RB Jaylon Knighton who just recommitted from them. Knighton will vista Florida this weekend and the Gators have a really good chance here. Knighton is a back that fits Mullen’s system very well.
Another name that Florida could benefit with the FSU news for is WR Bryan Robinson. Robinson was a strong lean to FSU but now that Taggart is gone, Robinson is talking to Florida even more now. Robinson is scheduled to be in town for the FSU game and the Gators could take all of the momentum with a good trip with him.
Florida could also get one of its former commits back in the fold in defensive end Morven Joseph who is committed to FSU. Joseph and UF commit Gervon Dexter are still very close and Joseph has already visited Florida once this fall. Look for Joseph to get back on campus again soon.
NICK DE LA TORRE
Saturday was disappointing for the Gators, no way around that. Mullen didn’t scream and yell after the game, he was calm and told the team that they need to stick together and finish the season strong. I was told the players responded well on Monday at practice. There are things that need to be cleaned up, for sure, and they’re working on that.
Two injury notes. Jeremiah Moon injured the same foot that he broke during offseason workouts. I don’t know if his season is done but the earliest he would be able to get back on the field would be a bowl game. It’s a shame. Moon has been playing really well, especially when he was needed to step up and fill in for Jon Greenard.
Amari Burney has a knee sprain. I don’t think he will play this week against Vanderbilt but could return for Missouri.
I know we’re all disappointed about the outcome last Saturday but I think Florida will win their remaining games and finish 10-2. That’s a good season and a bowl win gives you 11 wins. I think we all would have taken that before the season.
DAVID WUNDERLICH
The offseason attrition meant that the Gator football team had no margin for error when the season started. They could only reach their ceiling if nothing went wrong, but no season every goes by with nothing going wrong. Nowhere is it more evident than at the star position.
In the spring Florida moved Amari Burney to linebacker because they were comfortable with Trey Dean and John Huggins at star. The younger David Reese is listed as a linebacker now, but he was listed a DB last year and could’ve tried out there if need be. Over the summer, Reese tore his Achilles and Huggins got himself kicked off the team. During the season, it’s turned out that Dean is playing out of position. Poor play from him at star cost the team in both the LSU and Georgia losses, though to be clear you can’t pin everything about those losses on him.
There are two options to dealing with this. One is to put Burney back at star, and the other is to put a corner like Marco Wilson there. UF has done both, but each has its drawbacks. The former disrupts the linebacking corps, while the latter puts a true freshman in Kaiir Elam outside. Wilson is also on the small side, so him there reduces the position to a mere nickel corner without any of the extra blitzing or run support that turns it into the specialized star position.
There could’ve been more options, but that’s where the attrition kicks in more. Chris Steele played with the 1s in spring and could’ve bolstered the corner option, but he transferred. CJ McWilliams at least had game experience, but he also tore his Achilles. Who knows if they’d try it, but Kylan Johnson was a high school safety before moving to linebacker in college. He grad transferred, though, and is now Pitt’s third-leading tackler.
Huggins, Reese, Steele, and McWilliams are four guys who could’ve been involved directly or indirectly to address the deficiencies at star, but they’re all gone. So is Johnson, the hypothetical/experimental fifth option. Florida is still on track to increase from nine to ten regular season wins, so we need to keep perspective. However, the offseason personnel woes have officially made an impact on the season.
That’s all, folks!
All the best,
Your friends at Gator Country
…where it’s GREAT to be a FLORIDA GATOR!