Average or Special: Which Will It Be For the 2021 Florida Gators?
The record in 2020 says the Gators pooped out at the end of the season that started so promising but ended 8-4. A casual glance at those three consecutive losses that ended the season make us think Dan Mullen’s team had a chance to be something special but hit the wall and had to settle for good instead of great.
The Gators were good in 2020 but sometimes they were brilliant. They were a flawed team, yet for their many flaws and inconsistencies, they were a handful of plays away from truly special.
We only remember the inability to get stops on third down in the fourth quarter of that 41-38 loss to Texas A&M, but we tend to forget that the Gators had back-to-back penalties for delay of game and false start that turned a potential touchdown drive into a field goal. We tend to forget that Malik Davis, who never fumbles, coughed up the ball with 3:40 to go in the game and the Gators driving. Once the Aggies got the ball, they drove for the winning field goal as time expired.
We only remember Marco Wilson’s infamous shoe toss in the LSU loss. We tend to forget the missed block that allowed a Kyle Trask pass to be deflected at the line of scrimmage on the opening drive from the LSU three. Kemore Gamble was wide open. We also tend to forget the left side of the offensive line caved on fourth and goal from about six inches on that same drive that meant UF came up empty on the opening drive. There was also the incomprehensible interception at the LSU 15 off a deflection in the second quarter that turned what seemed to be a surefire touchdown into a drive-killing turnover. Or the whiffed blocks on third-and-goal situations (second and fourth quarters) that forced the Gators to kick field goals instead of scoring touchdowns.
We only remember Kyle Trask running out of time at the end of the 52-46 loss to Alabama in the SEC Championship Game. Trask was hot. Alabama’s vaunted secondary had no answers for Kyle Pitts and Kadarius Toney. All Trask needed was about a minute-and-a-half and the Gators could have sprung the upset. We forget about the late hit that should have been targeting that forced Trey Dean III to fumble the ball away after he had picked off Mac Jones in the second quarter. Alabama scored a touchdown on the next play. We also forget how Kyree Campbell slowed up near the sideline in the second quarter and instead of a third-down incompletion, the Gators were flagged for 12 on the field. Instead of punting from their own 38, Alabama got new life and drove for a TD. We can make a talking point out of the fact the Gators not only lit up the Alabama defense but they’re the only team that managed to stay within 17 points of the mighty Crimson Tide. But talking points don’t win games and critical mistakes lose them.
It’s small consolation to the way the season ended, but the Gators were so close to special, even with the worst defense in the University of Florida’s recorded football history. Think about it. Make one play a game on defense or eliminate a penalty or make a block in those games and the Gators could have been 11-0 and top seeded in the College Football Playoff.
Did you happen to watch either of the playoff semifinals and/or the championship game? Do you think for even one second any one of those defenses could have stopped Pitts, Trask and Toney? Everybody knew Florida couldn’t run the ball very well so they resorted to all-out blitzes on every play or dropping seven, eight or even nine in coverage. It looked good on paper yet Trask still found holes in the coverage and the Gators put plenty of points on the scoreboard.
Now all we can do is to look back on 2020 and realize just how close Florida was to football greatness even with a team with so many easily identifiable flaws. The distance between merely good and ever so special for UF 2020 is measured this way: Make even one play of those mentioned above in each of the three losses and it’s a Florida team that would be talked about for decades to come.
It is the combination of the way the 2020 season ended, the fear that last year’s bad defense will carry over to 2021, the absence of Trask, Toney and Pitts, and the uncertainty of a new season with a quarterback that has never started a game in the three previous years that makes this Florida team a mystery. There are reasons to believe that 2021 will result in another good season, perhaps another 8-4, maybe a 9-3.
There are also reasons to believe that this team could indeed be special. Maybe not undefeated special, but special in that the Gators could make the SEC Championship Game if they win two of these three games – Alabama on September 18; LSU in Baton Rouge on October 16; and Georgia in Jacksonville on October 30 – as long as one of the two wins is over Georgia.
Let’s tackle the perceptions one by one.
From the day the Florida charter landed in Gainesville after the Cotton Bowl loss to Oklahoma, Dan Mullen and his staff have made every effort to put 2020 behind them. Mullen has remarked on more than one occasion that 2020 was a season unlike anything he’s ever had to go through as a coach. The COVID pandemic created a season like no other and it altered everything from the way the Gators practiced to playing in stadiums that were 75 percent or more empty to a schedule that was changed on the fly.
“Last year was a very different situation in every aspect of the program,” Mullen said. “The mental and emotional stress and toll it took on you was very hard. You don’t know if you’re playing a game or who is playing until Friday night or Saturday morning, just from week to week with offseason preparation being thrown out. I think one thing you look at is a lot of football players and football programs, you’re used to a very scheduled, regimented approach on how you prepare and how you do things, how you get ready, and how you go through a game week, when all of that is interrupted by massive amounts of uncertainty, that’s really hard.”
There was no spring football last year, no offseason conditioning program and instead of being on campus where they do their usual summer bonding, they were back home hoping there would be a season as they did their best to implement their own personal conditioning and workout schedules. Once it was agreed there would be a season, everyone rushed back to campus where COVID protocols were in place that made players almost prisoners in their own apartments. More than one coach nationally has said the COVID protocols made focus a lost art in 2020.
Just having spring football, an offseason conditioning program run by Nick Savage and coordinated workouts among the different position groups has helped to erase last year’s memories. There are still COVID protocols in place, but they aren’t nearly as severe as they were last year so last year’s feelings of isolation have disappeared.
No one seems to have come up with a reasonable explanation for last year’s defensive reversals that saw the Gators go from the 9th-ranked defense in Division I in 2019 to the 83rd-ranked defense in 2020. The Gators gave up 15.5 points per game in 2019, 30.8 in 2020; 304.8 yards per game in 2019, 428 in 2020.
To prevent a repeat of last year’s disaster, Mullen fired the two coaches on the back end of his defense and replaced them with Wesley McGriff, whose resume includes stints coaching the secondary with the New Orleans Saints and most recently Auburn, and Jules Montinar, who cut his coaching teeth as a grad assistant for Nick Saban at Alabama and was most recently at South Florida. The expectation is that McGriff and Montinar will address porous coverage that allowed 28 touchdown passes in 2020, double what the Gators gave up in 2019.
If the Gators are to improve significantly on the back end, they’ll need another stellar season out of corner Kaiir Elam, who made numerous preseason All-American teams. About the only sure thing among the other four secondary positions is free safety Trey Dean III, who seems to have found a home after spending the last two years trying to function at corner and nickel. Transfer corners Jadarrius Perkins (from Missouri) and Elijah Blades (from Texas A&M) will be on the field a lot as will redshirt freshman Avery Helm and true freshman Jason Marshall Jr. Tre’Vez Johnson, who played a lot as a true freshman is the front runner at the safety opposite Dean and juco transfer Diwun Black is such a good athlete that he’s being given every opportunity to play nickel. Backing them up are a bunch of guys who have little or no experience although they are quite talented.
Up front the Gators gave up a whopping 170.5 rushing yards per game in 2020. To avoid a repeat of that fiasco, Mullen brought in tackles Antonio Valentino (6-3, 312) from Penn State and Daquan Newkirk (6-3, 308) from Auburn. They are both experienced run stoppers who have shown the ability to collapse the pocket in the middle, something that should free up last year’s leaders in sacks, Brenton Cox Jr. and Zachary Carter, to get more pressure off the edge. If sophomore Gervon Dexter and freshman Desmond Watson (6-5 and a couple of biscuits under 400) can become dependable in the interior rotation, defensive coordinator Todd Grantham may have found the answers to stuffing the run.
The strength of the defense will be a 12-deep, experienced linebacker corps led by last year’s leading tackler Ventrell Miller, explosive Mohamoud Diabate and experienced vets Jeremiah Moon, Khris Bogle and Amari Burney. The Gators have depth and more talent than they’ve had in the three previous years.
No one is predicting the Gators will be a top ten defense in 2021 the way they were in 2019, but if they can finish in the top 30 then Florida will have alleviated the concerns that the defense is in a downward spiral from which it can’t recover.
There is no threesome of Kyle Trask, Kyle Pitts or Kadarius Toney on this year’s team so media expectations are that the Gators will drop off significantly but that tends to discount the fact that Mullen has this habit of re-tooling his offense to fit the personnel on hand without much dropoff. Go back to 2016 at Mississippi State. Mullen lost Dak Prescott to the Dallas Cowboys and the replacement quarterback was Nick Fitzgerald, whose best offers out of high school other than MSU were Samford and Chattanooga. The offensive dropoff was two points and 20 yards per game even though Fitzgerald was a run-first QB. And wasn’t it just the third game of 2019 when Feleipe Franks went down with a season-ending injury that doom and gloomers were predicting the Gators would struggle to finish 6-6 with Trask at QB? How’d that work out?
It is never easy to replace superstars, but the beauty of college football is it’s an ongoing process because of graduation and transfers. The replacements for Trask, Pitts and Toney may not be household names just yet, but this is a new year and Mullen will design an offense around the talent that he’s accumulated.
Instead of an offense designed around an accurate dropback passer (Trask) throwing to a unicorn (Pitts) and the shiftiest all-purpose wide receiver in the nation (Toney), the Gators will more resemble what Mullen ran in 2008 when he was Florida’s offensive coordinator who schemed plays around Tim Tebow, Percy Harvin, Aaron Hernandez and speed guys Chris Rainey and Jeff Demps in the backfield. This year it will be Emory Jones and Anthony Richardson at quarterback either running or pitching to backs like Dameon Pierce, Malik Davis, Nay’Quan Wright, Lorenzo Lingard and Demarkcus Bowman. The Gators will throw the football but not as often as last year and that will be by design to take advantage of what Jones and Richardson can do with their feet.
“You're going to be a different scheme,” he said. “So you have different guys, different playmakers. You put guys in different positions that are out there on the field. Obviously, the threat of quarterback run, whether it be a designed quarterback run, whether it be an option run or his ability to go scramble puts a lot of difference and a different type of pressure on the defense.”
With running quarterbacks, a loaded backfield, and an improved offensive line that has 95 career starts (Gators had fewer than 20 in 2019, for example), the Gators may be running something like a 60-40 run/pass ratio, which is similar to the 2018 team that ran 526 plays (213.15 yards per game) and threw for 364 (213.5 yards per game).
One thing for sure, the Gators will only go as far as Jones and Richardson will take them. Jones is the shiftier runner of the two while Richardson is the more accurate passer. You can’t load the box on Jones, however, because he can indeed throw the ball well, and you can’t drop eight on Richardson, because he may not be as elusive as Jones, but he can pick up big chunks of yardage with his feet.
Neither is as accomplished a passer as Trask, but the threat of the run, particularly when they get outside the pocket, should give them open receivers. They may not have to be as accurate as Trask. And, while Trask could take a small opening and turn that into three or five yards, Jones and Richardson can take that same opening and make it 20 yards into the secondary before anyone lays a glove on them.
Mullen will be using both quarterbacks, which is something he’s done successfully in the past but when the season starts it’s a clear 1-2 with Jones as the one and Richardson the backup. Whereas Jones may not have ever started a game, he has been on the field during critical moments in big games in the past couple of years. Jones led the Gators to a critical field goal against Auburn in 2019 when Trask was sidelined for a series with an ankle injury, and he threw a TDP and ran for 36 yards in Tiger Stadium against eventual national champ LSU. Last season, Jones was on the field in the SEC Championship Game for the second series.
Jones has also used the experience of the last two years combined with the expectations of 2021 to evolve. Mullen has made it abundantly clear that when opponents try to load up the box to stop Jones the runner, they will get burned by Jones the passer. The Jones Mullen saw during the spring and has been seeing during August is one who will be a dangerous dual threat.
The key for Mullen will be to put Jones in situations that play to his strengths.
“I think he's a very different quarterback than the guy we had last year,” Mullen said. “I mean extremely different. Does some things way better, some things not as good. Our job as coaches is to make sure we're putting him in position to do the things that he does well."
To summarize what is ahead for the Gators, if they still have a hangover from 2020, they’ll be that 8-4 team that is good but a long way from great. If the defense is outside the top 30 we can expect good but not great. If the offense hasn’t adapted to new personnel and a new scheme, the Gators will sputter. If Jones and Richardson are unable to harness their skills to make the offense go, then 8-4 might be as good as it gets.
Special is possible. A lot of things will have to go right including getting a win over Georgia and going 1-2 against Alabama and LSU, but they’re all do-able. The Gators can put last year behind them. It’s called mental toughness and focus. The defense can and almost certainly will be better. Top 30 better? That remains to be seen but there is talent enough to make that leap and prove 2020 was an aberration. Make up for the absence of the three-headed monster of Trask, Pitts and Toney? It’s called offense by committee and while it may not be quite as explosive as last year, it will definitely be less predictable. You knew exactly what the Gators were going to do last year from the moment they stepped off the bus. Stopping them was the problem.
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