Was there actually a ray of hope in the win over Samford?

It there is a ray of hope to be discovered in this confounding roller coaster year of inconsistencies with the Florida Gators, it is what Dameon Pierce saw happen in the halftime locker room Saturday afternoon. Trailing D1AA Samford 42-35 was bad, but the way the Gators went about trailing was even worse.

There was that second Samford touchdown, a 58-yarder from Liam Welch to Michael Vice. Not only was there a blown coverage that allowed Vice to catch the ball all alone at the Florida 40, but you would have thought Vice was wearing Teflon the way Rashad Torrence slid off him at the 30. There was a simple swing pass out of the backfield by Welch to Jay Stanton. It should have been stopped for a short gain, but Stanton split two Florida defenders and turned it into a 40-yard touchdown. There was also a 98-yard kickoff return by Montrell Washington, who was surrounded by Gators between the 20 and 25 but no one laid a hand on him, so he broke through the pack and sprinted into the end zone.

The Gators gave up 358 yards in the first half, helping the Samford cause with five defensive penalties. All that offset the kind of offensive output you expect of an SEC team against a D1AA team that has a losing record. The Gators put up 35 points, 385 yards and scored on five of seven first half possessions.

And yet they trailed and looked bad doing it.

“I definitely felt a change in the locker room from the previous weeks,” Pierce said the Gators played far better in the second half to outscore Samford 70-52 to break a three-game losing streak. “In previous weeks sometimes the leadership wasn’t there but you could see guys are fed up and things started to click.”

There was yelling. There was screaming. There was even some finger pointing, particularly by defensive players who Pierce said “were the guys who were making all the noise in the locker room, telling guys to step up and start playing way better than we were playing.”

Pierce is one of these if you don’t want to know the answer, don’t ask the question kind of guys. The yelling, screaming and finger pointing he was alluding to are symptoms of a far greater disease that might go a long way toward explaining why it is that the Gators need to win one of their remaining two games just to be bowl eligible when there is enough talent to be in the hunt for a fourth straight New Year’s Six bowl game.

A lack of leadership is a killer disease for a football team. Dan Mullen attempted to surgically remove some of the problem earlier in the week when he dismissed defensive coordinator Todd Grantham and offensive line coach John Hevesy. The O-line obviously got the message the way they responded to interim coach Michael Sollenne – 717 offensive yards (10.4 per play), 253 rushing yards (7.2 per carry), zero sacks allowed.

The defense took a half to figure things out. Mullen said interim defensive coordinator Christian Robinson was making the right calls and doing a good job of getting the calls in quickly to offset Samford’s no-huddle, up tempo scheme but the Gators were slow to react, tackled poorly, blew coverages, extended drives with penalties and were too often in position to make a play, but just didn’t do it.

When Mullen got into the locker room the tension de-escalated. He made it a point quickly that things had to change from a “not you, you, you, you, you” to “me and we” mentality.

“We need to do this together and we need to turn it inside and go say, ‘Hey, there’s plenty of opportunities to go make plays on that field right now … there are plenty and we’re just not doing them,’” Mullen said. “I mean, I can go in there, yell and scream or do any of that [but] I just called them out, saying that’s what we need to do so stop with any of the you, you, you, or pointing or even asking anybody. Just take the ownership and go make the plays and believe in each other to go make it together.”

For the most part, it worked.

In the second half, Samford put together one touchdown drive – seven plays, 75 yards that was aided by a dubious pass interference penalty – and a drive for a field goal following the TD when there was a special teams breakdown on an onside kick.

“We said, ‘Hey we got to be ready for the surprise onside kick here,’” Mullen said. “We moved guys up … we had three guys right there. We didn’t get the ball and that gets into guys making plays.”

Other than those two drives that totaled 111 yards and accounted for all 10 Samford points, the Florida defense held the Bulldogs to 61 yards, a definite improvement.

The offense did what the offense is supposed to do in both halves. The Gators scored five touchdowns in each half. Emory Jones completed 28-34 passes for 464 yards and six touchdowns. He also ran 10 times for 86 yards and a TD. His 550 yards of total offense broke Tim Tebow’s single game school record. He also went an entire game without turning the ball over, the first time that’s happened all season.

A great offense and half a game of good defense. Special teams that struggled again. Twelve penalties for 94 yards (Samford had three for 30).

Another game with glaring inconsistencies, a problem all season long for a team that has proven in stretches that it is capable of playing with anybody in the country. Ten games played and we still haven’t seen what could be deemed a complete game in which offense, defense and special teams played with intensity and consistency for four quarters.

Inconsistent football teams can usually point to three problem areas – bad coaching, lack of talent and poor leadership.

In hindsight, Mullen hung on to Grantham and Hevesy much too long. If he intends to remain the head football coach at the University of Florida for more than next season, then there is no question more changes need to be made because Grantham and Hevesy aren’t the only coaches who have under-performed this season. Realistically, the only coach who should feel safe right now is wide receivers coach Billy Gonzales. Mullen has to take a total inventory of his football program and make whatever changes are necessary to his entire staff and not just his assistant coaches. That will not compensate for what happened in 2021 or those confounding dial-a-score losses in 2020 but it can go a long way toward ensuring there are no repeat debacles.

The Gators don’t have the level of talent that you see at Georgia and Alabama. But, as we saw in the way UF played both those teams for three quarters, there is enough talent. Take away that disastrous three-minute stretch at the end of the first half, and the Georgia game is a 13-7 deficit. Florida was outscored by Alabama 21-3 in the first quarter but outscored Alabama 26-10 the rest of the way. More talent definitely would have helped in both games, but Florida had enough to win. Mullen can eliminate some of the talent deficits with the top teams in the SEC by hiring assistant coaches who are better recruiters and bringing in a recruiting staff headed up by a Mark Pantoni clone.

Leadership? Well, Dameon Pierce probably pinpointed a very big reason why the Gators are 5-5 right now. Coaches can only provide so much leadership. If the coaches are the only ones doing the leading then there is every good chance what they’re telling players is going in one ear and out the other. At some point, the alpha males on a team have to take stock of what is going on and tell their teammates to either lead, follow or get the hell out of the way.

Perhaps that is what happened at halftime against Samford. Looking back over the previous three weeks, we can see how leadership played a key role in losses to LSU, Georgia and South Carolina. We don’t know what happened in the locker rooms after those losses, but you can bet the farm that if there had been the yelling, screaming and finger pointing followed by leaders stepping up, then at least two of those three losses probably would have been avoided.

The question now is was this a one-shot deal, or will there be carryover into next week’s game at Missouri and the following week at The Swamp against Florida State? If the leaders who took ownership in the locker room Saturday against Samford, are more than just talk, then it will spill over into the upcoming week of practice and we’ll see the Gators play inspired football against Missouri.

The hope is that the first half against Samford was a long-awaited wakeup call. If not, then the last two weeks of the season will be dreary.