For a Quarter, The Gators Sowed Seeds of Georgia Doubt.
- Franz Beard
- Oct 29, 2022
- 6 min read
Updated: Oct 30, 2022
It is certainly worth questioning if Georgia is the No. 1 team in the country based on what we saw in the third quarter. The polls and the first half may continue to say so when they come out Sunday, but the Bulldogs certainly didn’t pass the eyeball test in the third quarter.
By FRANZ BEARD
JACKSONVILLE – The lesson of Saturday’s Florida-Georgia game is appearances can be so deceiving. If you simply go by the final score – Georgia 42, Florida 20 – then you would think the Bulldogs are every bit the No. 1 team in the nation. The way Georgia played in the first half alone would lead you to believe that, but then came the third quarter and with it came seeds of doubt.
In a first half in which Georgia (8-0, 5-0 SEC) grabbed a 21-0 lead and then took a 28-3 lead into the halftime locker, the Bulldogs were dominant as Stetson Bennett threw for 262 yards and a pair of touchdowns and the defense gave up 88 total. Even that is deceiving when you consider 41 came on an Anthony Richardson to Justin Shorter pass that was effectively an NFL pitch and catch against tight coverage.
This was a take no prisoners first half. Georgia’s players looked like real men. Florida’s players looked like boys who didn’t belong on the same football field.
And yet in the third quarter, Florida came out swinging. The blowout of 1982 proportions – Georgia won that one Herschel’s junior year, 44-0 – never materialized. If you didn’t know better you would have thought the Gators were the top-ranked team in the country. The Gators scored 17 unanswered points on offense and the defense turned the Bulldogs over twice, leading to 10 Florida points.
Now, the Bulldogs did pile on a pair of fourth-quarter touchdowns against a gassed Gator defense to finish with a 42-20 win, but the contrasts of the first half and the third quarter were startling. In the first half Bulldogs played with confidence and swagger. The third-quarter Bulldogs wore the look of a team with just enough flaws that the oddsmakers in Las Vegas may make Tennessee a prohibitive favorite when the two teams square off for what figures to be the SEC East Division championship game next week in Athens.
It is worth questioning if Georgia is the No. 1 team in the country based on what we saw in the third quarter. The polls and the first half may continue to say so when they come out Sunday, but the Bulldogs certainly didn’t pass the eyeball test in the third quarter.
Actually, they didn’t really pass the eyeball test for the entire game. Remember, this is a Florida defense that is one of the worst in the country. The Gators did give up 555 yards and 42 points, but 383 of those yards came on 17 of Georgia’s 78 offensive snaps – eight pass plays that resulted in 237 yards and nine running plays that went for 146. On those 17 plays, Georgia averaged 22.5 yards. So, on the other 61 snaps, Georgia gained 172 yards and averaged 2.81 per play.
That’s the story of Florida’s season so it’s not like Georgia really did anything special. The Bulldogs simply did what everybody else has been doing all season. Giving up chunk plays has been Florida’s defensive M.O.
Against Georgia’s defense in the first half, the Gators had to fight for every inch on the ground 13 running plays netted 13 yards – and without the threat of a run, Richardson looked like the proverbial lost ball in the tall grass.
But then things changed with a bit of help from the Georgia defense.
On Florida’s first possession of the second half, the Gators elected to go for it on fourth-and-four from the Georgia 46, but just before the ball was snapped, Florida coach Billy Napier got a time out called. Georgia linebacker Bear Alexander never heard the whistle and blindsided Richardson. The personal foul gave the Gators a first down at the Georgia 31 and from there it took seven plays for the Gators to get into the end zone on a three-yard run by Trevor Etienne.
That TD was followed by a Georgia fumble forced by Amari Burney and recovered on the Georgia 23 by Trey Dean. The Gators got to the Georgia 11 where the drive stalled. Adam Mihalek, whose 52-yard field goal accounted for Florida’s first-half points, came on to drill a 26-yarder to make it 28-13 with 6:07 left in the third quarter.
Burney, whose near spectacular play against Georgia All-America tight end Brock Bowers turned into a 73-yard touchdown pass in the first half, picked off a Stetson Bennett pass intended for Daijun Edwards at the Florida 33 (then brought back to the 18 after a roughing penalty). Three plays later, Richardson hit Xzavier Henderson racing down the west sideline for a 78-yard touchdown pass to close the gap to 28-20.
That was as close as the Gators came. Georgia went ground and pound for an answering TD and when Florida couldn’t convert a fourth down from the Florida 49 early in the fourth quarter, Bennett led the Bulldogs to the clinching TD, setting it up with a 29-yard pass to Bowers, who had five catches for 154 yards to show for his day at the office.
It is what Florida did in the third quarter that is the head-scratcher. Why couldn’t the Gators play with that level of intensity and efficiency in the first two quarters? If they had, the Gators could have won this football game.
“I don’t think we came out as aggressive as we did in the third quarter,”Richardson said.
That was obvious, but why?
This could have been a defining moment for a team that has struggled to find consistency all season. Personnel has something to do with it. Georgia’s roster has 25 former 5-star players. The Gators have five. Georgia just keeps running talent in and out of the game. One reason the Gators ran out of gas in the fourth quarter is that their lack of quality depth caught up with them. When a Georgia player gets gassed, the Bulldogs simply run another stud out there who was either a 4-star or 5-star recruit out of high school. Their roster oozes talent.
Florida has a roster that will change dramatically in the offseason. Simple mathematics tells us that’s the case. There are 83 on scholarship right now and just four who will exhaust their eligibility. Napier already has 22 committed recruits with expectations of five or six more. A class of 28 recruits would put UF at 107 on scholarship and that is before any transfers are added.
What does that tell us? It says that a whole bunch of players – perhaps 35 or more – on the current roster won’t be with the Florida football program next year. It’s one of the cold, cruel realities about college football these days and times.
The team with the best players is the one that wins the championships. Right now, Georgia has them. Florida does not.
Even so, the Gators have enough talent to play close games. In the case of Saturday against Georgia, the Gators could have been in the hunt except for the disastrous start. Of course, that has a lot to do with talent as well.
Napier basically tried to sidestep the talent issue, but there is no question, he knows that the differential between the two rosters is enormous. He talked post-game about a Florida team that showed heart and desire, going so far as to say the Gators may have turned the corner for the better.
“I think today might have been a turning point to some degree relative to what is really in there, in your heart, in your soul, between your ears,” Napier said. “I think there’s some things we can learn.”
It has been a season filled with learning experiences which is true in most transition seasons when a new coach takes over a program that lost more than it won the year before. Napier is correct when he says “got to coach better, got to lead better, players need to play better. I think execution can be better.”
All those things are true, but a team with better players tends to be better coached and better led. Players tend to play better when they have more talent than the other team. It’s a whole lot easier for good players to execute than players who aren’t as good.
Saturday, Georgia’s better players made more good plays than the Gators. The Gators are a team that has such a narrow margin for error that they can’t afford to have a first half like they had against Georgia. There are four games remaining and every single one is losable if they play the way they did in the first half. If they play a full game the way they did in the third quarter, all four games can be won.
Win four and the Gators finish 8-4. Do that and it ranks right up there with healing the ten lepers. If UF finishes 6-6 or 7-5, it is what they were predicted to do when the season began.
Georgia, on the other hand, is expected to run the regular season table and at a bare minimum make it to the SEC Championship Game. Play as they did in the first half, and the Bulldogs meet or possibly exceed the bare minimum. Play like they did in the third quarter and the season will crash and burn.
Comments