No. 6 Florida Gators Balancing Excitement Of East With Necessary Work
Updated: Dec 7, 2020
Scott Stricklin, bundled up in big jacket, hands deep in his pockets to ward off the cold, meandered around the Florida Gators sideline, taking his hands out quickly in the 41℉ temperature to fist pump coaches and players as he passed by them.
The clock was ticking down as the No. 6 Gators (8-1) defeated the Tennessee Volunteers (2-6) by a score of 31-19—a score that was made close by a late garbage time touchdown from the Vols that was significant to some.
As Stricklin greeted one coach then a player then another, he gave them all a message.
Put a smile on your face…this is what we work for. The Gators are going to Atlanta, having officially clinched the SEC East with the win on Saturday. That’s the first step of a three fold goal and it’s arguably the hardest part, requiring a gauntlet of a schedule in the best of years and 10-game full SEC schedule in 2020.
Stricklin’s nudge was a reminder Mullen needed.
“I’m a perfectionist, like I’m critical of every little detail that goes on during the game and I’m starting to analyze all the different ways we can get better,” Mullen explained after the win.
“So Scott Stricklin came up and told me to put a smile on my face and make sure we enjoy this and put a smile on our face because this is what we work for. I’m thrilled. This is it. I came to Florida to have the opportunity to win championships. That is the reason that I came here. Now we’re SEC East champs. Now we have the opportunity to go be SEC champs. That’s what you work for all the time. That’s what we worked for since the day I got here a little over three years ago.”
The perfectionist Mullen has plenty to work on and it’s why he had to be reminded to smile as the game wound down. The Volunteers held the Power 5’s best passing offense to their lowest point total of the season. Florida had two opportunities for touchdowns on the opening two drives, working down into the redzone for a field goal the first time and punting from mid-field the second. Of the 12 drives, the Gators scored four touchdowns and one field goal.
“It shows where the program's at, right, when we're 31-7 when clean-up time starts and we kind of just clean up the game to finish it out and we say that's not a very good game by us or not one of our great performances. It shows where we're at as a program, which I think says a lot,” posed Mullen.
Following those two sputtering drives, the offense answered with three touchdowns on the next four drives. There was a screen to Tre Grimes to go up and take the 10-7 lead. Then there was another redzone play that saw Kadarius Toney run 15 yards in pre-snap motion before finally slipping out to the right where Kyle Trask hit him for the easy touchdown.
Tre Grimes got his second touchdown of the day after stealing the pass from teammate Jacob Copeland—“I had a feeling y'all were going to ask me this. I was throwing it to Copeland at first and Tre kind of came in. They were both open in the same spot, so I figured one of them was going to catch it,” said Trask—and then Copeland grabbed his own in the fourth quarter for the 31-7 score.
But there were also receivers running wide open and drops and more than one ball slightly off target.
“It definitely wasn't my cleanest game,” admits Trask, who still threw for 433 yards, four touchdowns and became only the second quarterback with Danny Wuerffel to have three such games with that much yardage. He also pulled within one of Wuerffel's single season touchdown record, with at least three more games to go.
He also had a Steve Spurrier-esque Heisman moment with a perfectly executed pooch punt.
Still there were issues and no one knows that more than Trask.
“There was some times when maybe I was doing too much. And you know I just gotta, you know, just trust what we have called and just let it play out.”
Adds Mullen, “I don’t know if there’s a game this year we left more points on the field than we did tonight. Really disappointed that we left all those points on the field offensively. I’m looking at this, to score 31 points that was disappointing for me with the opportunities that we had to go score a lot more points during this game.”
With Grimes and Toney’s touchdowns, they join Kyle Pitts as the second Gators trio in school history with at least eight receiving touchdowns in a season. The other trio came from the 1996 Gators: Reidel Anthony (18), Ike Hilliard (10), Jacquez Green (nine).
But what of Kyle Pitts? The nation’s best tight end caught seven receptions for a game high 128 yards yet at halftime he had only two catches for 30 yards. Given the impact he can have on a game, it rose the natural question, why isn’t Pitts involved more?
“There's always an effort to get Pitts, you know, open as much as you can because he's obviously a matchup problem,” explains Trask.
“And I think they did a great job—Tennessee—throughout the game of giving us some different looks. You know, trying to, put more guys on Pitts to shut that down, and we just gotta adjust as an offense.”
And Pitts was involved more in the second half, like on the opening drive of the third quarter—where the Gators have dominated this season—when he streaked down the left sideline easily beating his man and pulling in the 42-yard pass from Trask. And two players later, when he did the other thing he’s done better than most tight ends this season, laying a block for Jacob Copeland to pick up 17 yards and make it 1st and goal.
The defense, per usual, were apt to give up big plays on one possession—like the three touchdown drives that went 96, 94 and 96 yards respectively—and yet still come away having given up only 4-15 on third down and six different players all tallying a sack.
Says Mullen, “Played a great defensive game. We've got to finish it there when we get into the clean-up time at the end of the game when we start subbing guys in. They've got to come in and slam the door, not give up the two garbage-time touchdowns that they scored there at the end.”
With Shawn Davis unable to go and Rashad Torrence getting injured early in the game, Trey Dean III became the primary safety opposite Donovan Stiner and Brad Stewart Jr. Dean had a sack of his own along with his eight tackles, second most in the game.
Speaking after the game, Dean reflected on his attitude that returned him to this point.
"My coaches prepared me you know. Whatever God’s got planned for me I’m going to continue to do as well. My coaches are going to always prepare me for whatever the circumstance is and continue to work hard. What Coach Mullen preaches every day is just go out there and give it your all, when the time comes, play makers going to make plays.”
The Gators—especially on offense—is full of playmakers. That has been of little question all season. But with a roster of playmakers and a quarterback who can seemingly put together two, four and long drives to the house with ease, why does it seems the Gators get in their own way and slow down the game, as they did against Tennessee?
On defense, the answer is a fairly simple. When up and in garbage time, younger players come in for experience and can give up more yardage and even scores as Mullen mentioned.
On offense, the playbook would ideally be balanced. The Gators are in no way balanced—versus the Vols, the 452 total offensive yards featured only 19 rushing yards—and lean on the passing game because it’s where they excel. When that’s the case, the running game isn’t as necessary, especially when all of the backs are just as lethal as pass catchers out of the backfield. When the passing game is that potent, it can feel like a traffic stop when turning to the run game.
“You’re trying to manage the game at different times, manage different situations,” explains Mullen.
"I think you guys know we want to try to stay balanced. We didn’t do a very good job of running the football at all [Saturday]. That’s on us. We’ve got to be better running the ball. We’ve got to be more physical up front. We’ve got to do a better job of running the football and establishing the run.
“I wish we could score at will. I don’t know if there’s a game this year we left more points on the field than we did tonight. Really disappointed that we left all those points on the field offensively. I’m looking at this, to score 31 points that was disappointing for me with the opportunities that we had to go score a lot more points during this game.”
If the Gators have any chance of defeat the Alabama Crimson Tide in two weeks, they’ll have to score more—at will even—and make stops on defense.
But for this weekend, they head home as SEC East Champions.
Says Mullen, “I think our guys are excited. Our guys are happy. This is what we work for is this opportunity to go win the East. But I think our guys are also very driven. We’re going to this win, it’s a very celebratory atmosphere in there, but I think our guys also know they’re going to be ready to get to work next week and get better.
"I think the goal is the win the East, because that’s what we can control coming into the season. You go to our guys and they want to accomplish an awful lot more than that. But that’s all we can control coming into the season and we were able to do that. Now we have the opportunity to control being SEC champions.
Adds Grimes, “this season it's been a lot of adversity, having to deal with COVID and COVID tests all the time, so knowing that we accomplished our goal at the end of the beginning of the season, to win the SEC East, is very phenomenal. Knowing that we're getting on the flight home victorious is something that we only can dream about, and dreams come true, so now we just have to go out and win the SEC Championship."
Mullen and Strikland had the years for divisional wins take off of the walls in Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, saying that wasn’t the goal. But on Saturday, Stricklin walked around the sparsely populated sideline and told all his coaches and players the same thing; this year, in a tough environment with an all-SEC schedule, it’s something to be proud of.
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