By Franz Beard
TAMPA – We’ve seen this movie way too many times. We didn’t really need a re-run but that’s what the Florida Gators gave us Wednesday night at Raymond James Stadium.
The Gators came into this game with plenty to play for, which in itself is as difficult to comprehend as the fact that they were playing in the Gasparilla Bowl against UCF. The Gasparilla Bowl is low hanging fruit on a branch of the bowl tree. UCF has been here so many times it’s almost the winter home. For Florida, this game ranks lower than the Birmingham Bowl. You know how that one goes. Win and you get to go home. Lose and you have to spend another week in Birmingham. Yet, the Gasparilla Bowl is even lower. It’s almost incomprehensible that a team that had Alabama on the ropes not only had to settle for the Gasparilla Bowl but needed a win to assure itself of avoiding its third losing season in the last nine years.
The Gators played like they didn’t want to be here.
UCF? This was the Knights’ Super Bowl. In many respects, this was far more important than UCF’s Peach Bowl win over Auburn in 2017. You remember that one. UCF beat a crippled Auburn team to finish unbeaten, after which its athletic director proclaimed the Knights national champions, a never-ending source of ridicule in the five years since. Everybody knows the national title is illegitimate but by beating the Gators, 29-17, the Knights can lay a legitimate claim to the state championship in Florida. After all, they beat the Gators, who beat Florida State, which beat Miami.
You can bet the farm a State Champions 2021 sign has already been crafted, ready to hang just below that ridiculous national championship 2017 sign.
What was clear from the outset Wednesday was UCF coach Gus Malzahn, ironically the losing head coach when UCF beat Auburn to win the Peach Bowl in 2017, had the Knights ready to play. UCF played hard enough, smart enough and with sustained effort. The Knights played like a team that relished the idea of being there, and especially savored the idea of beating big brother. If you’re grading UCF give the Knights an A for preparation, an A for execution and an A+ for coaching.
The Gators? Is there such a thing as an F minus?
From a purely talent perspective, the Gators (6-7) had it all over UCF (9-4), but if the 2021 season has taught us anything about this Florida football team rarely plays to its talent level and quite often plays down to or below the talent level of the opponent. Florida lost seven football games this year. Despite the well-documented recruiting deficiencies of the last four years under Dan Mullen, only Alabama and Georgia had more talent than UF. That was two of the seven losses. In the other five – Kentucky, LSU, South Carolina, Missouri and UCF – the Gators had as much or more talent and yet they still lost.
Why did they lose? For the exact same reason the Gators lost to UCF. There are only so many times you can shoot yourself in the foot before you’ve blown it off completely. Interim head coach Greg Knox knew this was nothing more than a repeat performance of what will define the 2021 season.
Speaking to the media post game, Knox said, “It’s been a lot of different things. Personal foul penalties, jumping offsides penalties, holding penalties. Tonight, all of it. All of it came into play again. You can’t win big ball games when you make those amount of mistakes.”
It was more than just the penalties. You would need a calculator to keep up with all of Florida’s mistakes. There is no such thing as a perfect team nor is there such a thing as a perfect game, but good teams – winning teams that compete for championships – have a habit of identifying mistakes and eliminating them to the point that by season’s end they’ve been minimalized. The same mistakes the Gators were making all too frequently in September they were making against UCF, nearly four months since the season opener.
Too many mistakes by a team that never seemed to care if it got better is pretty much the story of the season and it’s as big a reason as any that Dan Mullen was dismissed as Florida’s football coach after the Missouri loss.
This is precisely why Billy Napier has been hired. He is the designated fixer and there is so much to fix that it is almost like he has a blank canvas to work with. We already know he can recruit, which is a necessity, and we know he can win. His four-year head coaching history at Louisiana also tells us he’s all about discipline and Lord knows the Gators could use a healthy dose of discipline. Disciplined teams don’t commit an abundance of stupid penalties at the most inopportune times. Disciplined teams don’t routinely blow assignments, miss tackles and miss critical field goals. Disciplined teams convert on third down (UF was 2-13) and generally speaking, complete a reasonable number of passes when there are receivers running wide open.
All the talent in the world can’t compensate a lack of discipline.
When surveying the damage from the Gasparilla Bowl disaster, it’s too easy to rag on Emory Jones. There is no getting around the fact he had a bad game, maybe the worst one he’s played. He completed 14-36 passes for 171 yards and he ran 10 times for 67. He held the ball too long too many times, locked in on one receiver when there was someone else open if he had just turned his head a teensy bit and missed several big plays if he only had put a little more air under some deep throws. There were at least four touchdowns that could have been had with a little more touch.
UCF put a lot of pressure on Jones, but it’s not like the Knights cleverly disguised their blitzes. Some of the throws under duress are the result of Jones making poor reads, but not all. Some of the bad reads were the fault of Florida’s offensive line that had more than a few snaps when they did a dandy impersonation of a sieve.
It should also be noted that Garrick McGee, Florida’s quarterback coach and the play caller in Mullen’s absence, had what can only be described as a baffling day. Quite obviously McGee saw something in the way the UCF secondary covered that made him think big plays could be had throwing the ball, but when the passing game lacks consistency and the other team’s defense can’t stop the run, you shift your focus to running the damn football. UCF had all sorts of problems stopping Florida’s running game, which netted 205 yards and averaged 6.8 yards per carry. On those rare occasions when McGee called an option, the Gators picked up big yardage, yet there was no commitment to exploiting the UCF defense running the ball on the perimeter.
Perhaps the passing game would have worked a lot better if McGee had decided to let Jones use his legs and option skills on the perimeter, forcing the safeties to cheat toward the line of scrimmage. McGee shouldn’t have abandoned the pass altogether, but ground and pound with option would have worked a whole lot better.
So the bad game isn’t all on Emory Jones’ shoulders. Garrick McGee pretty much set his quarterback up to fail by the way he called the plays. It’s kind of like baseball. When your pitcher can’t get the curve ball over for a strike, you go with something else that works. In this case Jones couldn’t throw strikes but he darn sure showed he could run the option. It should have been a no-brainer.
Unfortunately, the brains must have been left in the hotel safe or in the locker room.
Defense? Florida fans spent three-and-a-half years blaming Todd Grantham and demanding Mullen to replace him. Mullen fired him after the South Carolina game, but really, what changed? Christian Robinson is a bright young coach who nearly everyone says has a bright future in the game, but as the interim defensive coordinator, he pretty much called the game the same way Grantham did. With Grantham, the Gators missed too many tackles, consistently overran plays and blew assignments. Nothing really changed with Robinson. UCF ran for 288 yards on the Gators and had two backs each gain more than 100. The defensive line wore down as the game went on but too often they did their job only to have the linebackers overrun the play or miss the tackle. We’ve been humming that tune since September.
Give the secondary credit for shutting down the UCF passing game. With the exception of one long TDP pass late in the fourth quarter, they kept the UCF passing game in check. Take away that one play and UCF’s passing game was good for 4.0 yards per attempt. You’ll take that every day of the week.
Special teams? The lack of a scholarship kicker who could consistently get the job done came back to haunt the Gators just as it did in the loss to Alabama. Chris Howard badly missed field goals of 51 and 45 yards. Punter Jeremy Crawshaw averaged 44.7 yards on six punts, but he shanked one that barely crossed midfield. One play later, UCF broke open a 19-17 game with a 54-yard TDP from Mikey Keen to Ryan O’Keefe and that pretty much was the ball game.
Knox summed it up.
“You can’t make the mistakes we made,” he said. “There’s a lot of guys [in the media] who have covered us. A lot of you guys in here that have covered us this year and you’ve seen us make mistakes. You can’t make those mistakes and expect to win games. We just made too many again tonight.”
Yes, there were way too many mistakes but that’s the same story it has been for an entire season. The Gators never came close to putting it all together on offense, defense and special teams. Always there was something missing and even in the wins there were way too many mistakes that we waited to be corrected. There weren’t enough fingers to plug the holes in the dike. Plug one hole and there was another crack from which water poured.
We kept waiting for this team to mature. Eventually, we figured they would get past the silliness and stupidity. Well, we were wrong. It never happened.
This was at best a Humpty-Dumpty existence. The Gators kept breaking until finally, all the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put them back together again. Now, it’s up to Billy Napier to survey the damage, make however many changes are necessary and devise a systematic plan to put this football program back together again. It is not going to be an easy job and if we’re realists, we have to know that it might take more than one season to do it.
That is sure to evoke groans from Florida fans who want the football program fixed yesterday. They have heard “Patience, Grasshopper” four times since 2011. Will Muschamp spent four years but couldn’t fix the program that Urban Meyer said was broken. Jim McElwain promised an offense to go with the NFL defense Muschamp left him, but he couldn’t get it done and then compounded matters with that phony death threats story. Dan Mullen had three good years and then everything fell apart in year four. It might take hours on Dr. Phil’s couch to get to the root of what and how it all went wrong.
Now, it’s Billy Napier’s opportunity to step in and fix what is wrong. He’s been on the job less than a month, but he says all the right things. So far he’s done all the right things and the people he’s hiring all seem to be an upgrade over the people who are departing. Every bit as important, athletic director Scott Stricklin seems to have no problem whatsoever stroking the check to give Napier the tools he needs to make it all work.
So far he seems like the guy who can produce a brand new movie, one that has a happy ending. This old movie we’ve been watching over and over again needs to be burned.
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