No. 11 Florida Gators Fall To No. 1 Alabama, But Find Something They'll Need To Get Back To Atlanta
This game was billed by both sides as a measuring stick; an early season opportunity to figure out who you are as a team and where you’re going. It had all the makings of a classic. No. 1 Alabama, coming to Gainesville for the first time since 2011, to face No. 11 Florida Gators. And as both teams left the field on Saturday evening, they walked away knowing they had found out each was capable of making this game a rematch in Atlanta in three months.
Gunmetal clouds in the distance threatened a stormy afternoon, but stayed just far enough east to provide an overcast sky in the muggy Swamp. Despite rain possibly benefiting the Gators run game, there was no need for a storm. All the thunder and lightening one college football fan could need was inside Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, as the Gators fell, 31-29, to Bama.
There are no such things as moral victories in football. But if this game was a measuring stick, then the Gators can be confident they’re moving forward knowing they measure up as one of the best teams in the country.
“It was a fun game to be a part of,” said Head Coach Dan Mullen after the game. “You love these games, been 10 years since you’re had that game here in the Swamp. I’ve talked about it moving forward we want to play them more often. Be honest with you, I hope we play them really soon, like later this season. I want that opportunity. Our fans, it was great SEC football."
The Swamp was positively vibrating, even as a large number of fans were still stuck outside, held up by a slow ticket taking process. Despite the pockets of missing spectators, and 10 minutes to kick-off, Gator fans were pulsing with an energy that only comes around for certain games, once every couple of years.
This was that game; the one circled for months. The one that inspired pilgrimages to Gainesville and pre-game promises made in desperate hope. For the first time since 2011, the Alabama Crimson Tide was visiting the Swamp, with a quarterback making his first road start to boot.
Florida won the toss and elected to defer. It allowed the crowd to stay hyped up, as the defense took the field. And initially, the crowd of 90,887 did their job to perfection, forcing a delay of game on the Tide’s opening drive. But a questionable defensive pass interference call on Trey Dean allowed the Tide to keep moving.
Then Bryce Young worked around the crowd for the remainder of the first quarter, taking the first drive downfield with gashes on the edge, tearing up the Gators defense in the flats. The did it again on the second drive, and then after grabbing a floating interception off Emory Jones, made quick work of a short field, going up 21-3 before the opening quarter could come to a close.
“I think early on they kind of came out, hit some plays on us, a couple of mistakes,” recapped Mullen of the first quarter, “but once we settled into the game, as I told you, our guys expected to win the game. We just dug ourselves an early hole we had to dig ourselves out of.”
They proceeded to do just that, putting together a second quarter that broke records. For starters, the defense came alive, forcing three straight three-and-outs. The second drive ended after Kaiir Elam, the projected Top 10 pick in next year’s NFL Draft, put his hand in for a textbook pass break-up, negating what would have likely been a touchdown.
Gator fans breathed a sigh of relief when the ball was called incomplete and nothing else. Elam, Avery Helm and Trey Dean all received a defensive pass interference call on the day, with Elam receiving two, and each seemingly questionable. Three of the four DPI flags were thrown on third down, giving Bama the fresh set of downs which they turned into touchdowns.
"Well you know you just gotta control what you can control,” remarked Trey Dean of the calls after the game. “We've got to go out there, you know, if they call it, we play the next play. But you know it's, we gonna correct—we gotta correct what we can correct and the others, we just go out there and play to the best of our ability."
Working to control what they could control worked out well for the defense the rest of the day. Alabama came into the game with a 21-game streak of 400 plus yards. Florida held them 324 total, and only 91 yards on the ground.
Over Bama’s last 80 quarters of football (going back to October 2019), they’ve been held scoreless in a quarter only three times. One of them was a quarter in an otherwise blowout against Mississippi State in 2020. The other two quarters? The third quarter in the SEC Championship Game against the Gators, a six point Bama win, in 2020; and then the second quarter on Saturday.
After a first quarter that was riddled with missed tackles and bad angles, the defense settling down to make this a close game was one of the more encouraging signs of growth with this Gator team. It came, said Mullen, from a simple message between the first and second quarter.
“Just to relax. Just make tackles, do your job, don't try to make plays. I think sometimes guys, you know, you get in big environments, guys try to make plays. What you have to understand; and…I’ve got to make sure I explain it to you the right way—is do your job within the scheme call, whether it's offense, defense, even defensively.
“We make the call. Execute the defensive call. And if you do that within that scheme you're going to have the opportunity to make plays if you do what you're supposed to do. Just don't get out of it and say, 'OK, I'm going to try to do something different and make a great play over here.' The plays will come to you. I think our guys, we got them to relax a little bit and just go out there and execute. And they did. I think we really executed clean moving forward in the game.”
The missed tackles are indicative typically of a correct defensive call (the player being in the right spot for the play) but poor execution. Realizing how many times defensive coordinator Todd Grantham had them in the right scheme but execution wasn’t there, can be a positive in the long run. At least according to Dean, who believes the defense came away from this game with a better understanding of their individual roles.
“Coach Grantham gonna call the right plays, gonna put us in the right position. We just have to go out there and execute. So, we're gonna take this and continue to build on it. You know, ultimate goal is to win a National Championship, first win the East.”
As the defense began to put together a plan and performance—with the young secondary growing up before our eyes—that very well could carry them to the SEC Championship for the second year in a row, the offense took advantage of the breathing room.
So much went Florida’s way before kickoff, including young superstar Anthony Richardson performing what has now become his famous front flip while leaving the field for warm-ups. But then Head Coach Dan Mullen—who’s been teasing a two-quarterback system—revealed Richardson would only appear in a true-backup role; i.e. if Jones was hurt.
This after Richardson pulled up with a tightened hamstring on a touchdown run last week, in the win over USF. According to Mullen, doctors explained the risk to him as, “he’s not going to be 100 percent and if he plays he definitely can make it worse. That was one we talked about going into the game. We did an MRI yesterday. He was actually ahead of where we thought he would be, which was really positive for next week with him.”
Still, the Gators weren’t lost without their little firecracker, thanks to a performance from Emory Jones that sets the Gators up for a potential SEC East run. After two weeks in which he was publicly maligned, taunted and even booed by Gator fans, Jones came out and accumulated 261 total yards and a touchdown on the ground.
“I definitely felt more comfortable,” said Jones. “I got in a groove out there and we got the offense rolling. Our offensive line did a great job up front and our running backs made a lot of plays for us. They definitely made me feel more comfortable as a team.”
The running backs, along with Jones, thrashed Bama on the ground to the tune of 258 yards. The second best rushing offense in the country (averaging 340.33 yards per game on the ground) helped the Gators keep up their streak of games with 400 plus yards (439), now extended to 13 games. It’s the best active streak in the country.
"Coming into the game, one of the big things, you wanted to be able to run the ball. We were able to run the ball. Very rarely do you see that big a disparity when you play Alabama in the rushing attack. We came out, had more than 100 yards more than they did. There’s little things we gotta fix. We gotta finish drives and get points at the end of drives there, put ourselves in the lead.”
Nearly a quarter of Florida’s yardage—and a great example of finishing a drive like Mullen mentioned—came when the Gators started with literally the worst field position possible; at their own 1-yard line.
Led primarily by Jones and Nay’Quan Wright, the Gators drove 99-yards on 11 plays. Wright had 75 of the yards himself on four plays. The running back told the offense on the sideline before they took the field that they were about to go 99-yards, and he was right. And until someone stops them, the Gators will continue to lean on their seven-headed rushing attack (Dameon Pierce, Malik Davis, Wright, Lorenzo Lingard, Demarcus Bowman, Jones and Richardson).
“We did it the first two weeks, we just go continue to do it,” predicted Wright. “Whether it's Bama, Tennessee, LSU, whoever it is, we gonna continue to run the ball. It doesn’t matter who’s out there, we’re just gonna put the ball down and run the ball. We did it the first two weeks, we was really efficient, so we're just gonna keep it going.”
After a touchdown by Dameon Pierce (his second of the day) the Gators were within two with three minutes left to play. They were down two due to a missed point after touchdown early in the game. So Mullen dialed up a two-point conversion play…that didn’t work. It looked clunky from the beginning, as Jones stayed with his running back at the mesh point the entire way, never pulling up but wanting to.
There were two options on the play, according to Mullen, with neither being where Jones could find them.
“We had a guy line up wrong and then a guy go the wrong way.”
Added Jones, “it was a miscommunication on the whole play. I mean, we had the back lined up on the wrong side, and we didn’t really want to use a timeout at that time, and I mean, it was just a miscommunication on the whole play, and it didn’t go our way right there.”
Instead of tying the game, Florida fell by two. When facing the best team in the country, those are the mistakes that can’t be made. It’s the difference between a win and a loss and for the Gators on Saturday—despite playing one of the best games in a long while—it meant a loss.
It was Florida’s eighth loss in a row to the Tide, and Mullen is now 0-11 against Nick Saban as a head coach. Each loss though—while never to be billed as the unacceptable “moral victory”—has seen the Gators chip away at the chasm that separates Bama from the rest of college football.
Last December, when these two faced off in the SEC Championship, the differential was six points. Saturday, it was two. The score is indicative of the gap Head Coach Dan Mullen seems to be closing with the Almighty Bama. He’s preached inching up on teams before. With Georgia, it was “seven points” separating the two teams. The ensuing season, Florida whooped their rival, 44-28.
“I think we have the opportunity to be a pretty good team this year,” noted Mullen. “There’s a lot of things we've got to fix up and we've got to get better at, but I think we have an opportunity to be a pretty good football team.
“Give [Alabama] credit, they're an excellent football team. Obviously Nick [Saban] does a great job within the program and continuing to have guys play at an extremely high level. But I thought, you know what? I thought we had a good plan offensively and defensively and I thought our guys executed really well, for the most part."
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