Dan Mullen has built Florida into an offensive power, but not yet a complete program

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In a game that ends up 52-46, it’s often hard to pinpoint just a few plays that made the difference.

I mean, you could point to Alabama’s Najee Harris scoring just before the half to end any momentum Florida had and put the Tide up 35-17 going into the locker rooms.

Maybe you’d point to the fantastic interception by Florida safety Trey Dean, only for him to fumble it right back to Alabama after getting hit from the blind side (yes, that was targeting). After all, on the very next play, Mac Jones hit a wide open Devonta Smith to put Alabama up 14-7.

You could also point to the multiple errors Florida made on the defensive side of the ball in the first half, whether it be the Dean fumble, Zachary Carter getting called for illegal hands to the face on a third-down stop, or an inability to get off the field on third down (Alabama finished 9-15).

You might even point towards poor clock management by Gators head coach Dan Mullen (don’t worry, we’ll get there).

But there are two set of plays that don’t jump out as determining the outcome of the game, but I think do as good a job as any of illustrating why Alabama won the SEC Championship Game and Florida leaves Atlanta 8-3.

Hidden Plays

I call these hidden plays because they didn’t have an impact on the final score directly. But they are representative of what the tape shows is the main difference between these teams, so I think it’s a good place to start.

On this play, Alabama has five defenders in the box and two deep safeties. This is a look that the Gators should be able to run against. In fact, with 8:49 left in the game, that’s exactly what Alabama is trying to coax Florida to do. They’re willing to give up six or seven yards in exchange for time running off of the clock.

Often, offensive linemen have to combo block, where two linemen will double-team a defensive tackle initially with the guard tasked with then getting to the linebacker. But because there are only five defensive players, that isn’t necessary here.

But what we see is that while left guard Richard Gouraige (#76) gets a free run at linebacker Dylan Moses (#32), he’s unable to knock him back. Moses takes Gouraige on squarely in the hole and bends Gouraige back, and then is able to shed the block and make the tackle for minimal gain.

Contrast that with when Alabama was on offense.

On this play, tight end Jahleel Billingsley (#19) motions into the backfield. He then serves as the lead blocker for Najee Harris (#22). Note that the Gators have eight men in the box, but that Brad Stewart (#2) backpedals at the snap, meaning the number of blockers to defenders is even.

Florida linebacker Ventrell Miller (#51) meets Billingsley in the hole, but Billingsley keeps him squared up and pushes him back to where Miller is unable to make the tackle. Alabama center Landon Dickerson (#69) has gotten to the second level on linebacker Mahomoud Diabate (#11), Stewart has to take an angle around the official and misses the tackle and it’s a first down for Alabama.

But the takeaway here is that Florida’s offensive lineman couldn’t move Alabama’s linebacker. But Alabama’s tight end was able to move Florida’s.

The next set of hidden plays I want to highlight come in the passing game.

On third-and-9, Alabama decides to drop into a zone with only three men rushing. Trask’s initial read is Kadarius Toney (#1) heading out to the flat. But for some reason (Toney is open), he hesitates and pulls the ball down. He then awkwardly throws the ball to his check-down receiver, Malik Davis (#20). Yes, Toney was open, but Trask couldn’t make an accurate throw (and at least set up a fourth down try) because he felt pressure even though there were only three men rushing.

Again, contrast that with when Alabama was on offense.

This is the play right before the touchdown dagger to Harris going into halftime. It is third-and-3, which is a different situation than the third down Trask found himself in, but the principles are the same. Florida rushes only three (which they did almost this entire drive), Jones feels zero pressure and delivers a strike to his slot receiver (John Metchie, #8) in one-on-one coverage against Ventrell Miller (#51).

This is unfair to Miller, leaving him out there. But what is the point of dropping eight if you’re just going to give up the first down? And it’s hard to get a sense of it with this one play, but Florida kept rushing three and kept not getting to Jones as he drove the Tide right down the field on that drive.

I show these four plays to illustrate a point. In the trenches – when it really mattered – Alabama had a significant advantage. And at linebacker – when they needed someone in coverage – Alabama had an advantage, not because of its linebackers, but because of its pass rush.

Add to that having Najee Harris in the backfield, and you had a recipe for Florida not being able to get off the field.

Clock Management

Of course, Alabama might not have had the ball on that final drive of the first half had Florida paid a little bit more attention to managing the clock.

I get it. The mentality is that you’re just trying to score and expect your defense to be able to hold up for a minute. But as the head coach, you know what’s happened in the first half already for Alabama (4 drives, 4 touchdowns, not counting the INT/fumble) and you also have the ball coming out of the half. How much different does the game look if Florida pulls it to 28-17 with 30 seconds left and then brings it to 28-24 with the throw to Grimes to open the third quarter?

Mullen said exactly what I thought he’d say heading into halftime. He was just concerned with getting a score down there and wasn’t concerned about the details of when he scored. The problem is, that’s the way an offensive coordinator should think, not the head coach.

That would be forgivable – and probably just a footnote – had Mullen not bungled the clock again late in the second half. The obvious, neon-bright mistake was the timeout prior to the two-point conversion. But there was more than that.

First though, the timeout.

I trust analytics as much as anyone. And the numbers say that Mullen made the right move going for two there, as the benefit for being down six adds more win probability than having to go for two again later if they miss the try.

However, that’s only true if you don’t burn your second timeout planning for a two-point conversion with just over two minutes left in the game. There is no two-minute warning. Burning a timeout there left Florida with only one more opportunity to stop the clock. The defense did its job, but there wasn’t enough time for Florida to move down the field.

This is just an inexcusable mistake for a head coach to make.

Again, going for two is the right call. But if you’re calling the timeout because the play clock runs down, just take the five-yard penalty, kick the PAT and give yourself a shot. But on the telecast, unless you were really paying attention, you didn’t even know Florida had taken their second timeout. So…did Mullen call it to set up the play? Yikes!

That’s Kirby Smart-level game mismanagement and is going to haunt Mullen’s reputation moving forward until he exorcises this SEC Championship moment with a win.

But beyond that gaffe, the entire drive was an excercise in what not to do.

Florida took over on that drive down 14 with 4:59 and three timeouts left. They came out of it with 2:07 left and one timeout, down 6. It wasn’t just the timeout fiasco that caused almost three minutes to come off of the clock.

With 4:07 left, Alabama was called for pass interference on Kyle Pitts that moved the ball to the Alabama 46-yard line. After a drop by Jacob Copeland, Trask hit Nay’Quan Wright coming out of the backfield against linebacker Will Anderson for a first down. Wright went out of bounds, but the clock doesn’t stop on out-of-bounds plays until the game is under two minutes in each half.

Wright went out of bounds with 3:56 on the clock. Florida snapped the ball on the next play with eight seconds left on the play clock and 3:28 on the game clock. Another swing pass to Wright and two runs later and the clock was well under three minutes and the Gators had only moved the ball to the Alabama 20-yard line.

They sacrificed 1:42 to move the ball 26 yards. They were just incredibly deliberate moving the ball down the field when they had been throwing the ball down field the entire game with ease.

Then Mullen compounded the mistake not just by the timeout before the two-point conversion, but also the timeout after Grimes caught the ball for a 4-yard loss with 2:13 left. Because Florida had taken so much time to get into scoring position, that timeout had even more value, more value than the time saved. Florida would have been better off having Pitts score with a minute left than with 2:07 had they had all three timeouts.

Instead, Mullen chose the weird half-measure of running the clock almost all the way down on his offense’s drive, while simultaneously using timeouts in situations where they were not warranted.

Alabama deserved to win this game. But Mullen had a shot to help his team steal it at the end, and he failed miserably to do so.

Defensive issues

Of course, Florida wouldn’t have needed to “steal” this one if they could have gotten off the field four or five times instead of the two times in the third quarter.

If any play exemplifies the problems with the Gators defense, it’s this one.

Here, Alabama splits Najee Harris (#22) out wide. Florida sends Ventrell Miller (#51) out to cover him one-on-one. Harris was the second overall recruit in 2017 and ESPN has him listed with a 4.66 40-yard dash time on his recruiting profile. Miller is listed as having a 4.82 40-yard dash time by ESPN. Harris’ 20-yard shuttle time (4.16) is significantly better than Miller’s too (4.96), indicating he can change direction faster than Miller.

Alabama then shifts Harris at full speed across the formation, throwing the ball to him with a full head of steam with Miller trailing behind. Marco Wilson (#3) actually does a pretty good job of holding up until Harris comes barreling into him for a first down.

This isn’t Miller’s fault. Note that Amari Burney (#30) ends up covering tight end Miller Forristall (#87) in the flat. Burney is a converted safety. He sometimes struggles in run support. The same ESPN site has him at a 4.48 40-yard dash.

Harris should be his assignment.

Why Florida decided to take their least athletic linebacker and allow him to be matched-up on a guy who looked like the best player on the field is just beyond me.

And that’s really what this comes down to. The scheme that Florida put together didn’t make sense for the personnel that Alabama had out there. You saw Florida constantly shifting Khris Bogle and Brenton Cox from side-to-side, trying to gain an advantage up-front.

But when the Gators went to a cover-zero scheme at the end, it was Marco Wilson – and not Kaiir Elam, their best cover corner – matched up against Devonta Smith for an easy pitch-and-catch touchdown.

How you playing outside leverage there with no safety help inside?!?

That’s coaching.

— Thomas Goldkamp (@ThomasGoldkamp) December 20, 2020

Certainly, as 247Sports’ Thomas Goldkamp pointed out, there was more wrong on the play than the personnel being utilized, but Elam stood outside with nobody to cover as Wilson was five yards away from Smith when he caught the touchdown.

When Mullen took over, he said he was going to put his players in the best position for them to succeed. That was something that his predecessor most definitely did not do, and was one of the things he got a ton of credit for when Feleipe Franks improved in 2018 and when he switched from a run-heavy offense to a pass-happy offense under Kyle Trask in 2019.

But the same thing applies to his defensive coordinator. You have to put the players in a position to succeed. There is nothing to be gained by allowing Marco Wilson to sit out on an island against a Heisman candidate when there’s a better option to take the assignment. There’s no reason to have Ventrell Miller matched up in coverage against Najee Harris when Amari Burney is standing right next to him.

I get it. You have rules. You have a scheme. That scheme has worked in the past. But it hasn’t worked with these players and it clearly doesn’t take into account some of the limitations that they have.

They aren’t bad players. In fact, many of them were good just last year when asked to play lesser roles. Miller has been the best linebacker on the team against the run and excels in that role. But the fact that he is being isolated in pass coverage shows a defensive coordinator unwilling to adjust to his personnel.

The fact that I’m breaking down clock management issues on offense in a game when the Gators scored 46 points speaks to the level that Todd Grantham has allowed the defense to sink.

I wasn’t enthusiastic about the Grantham hire when Mullen brought him to Gainesville in 2018. I don’t think he’s as bad as Gator fans have made him out to be this year. But what I saw when I looked at his statistics back then was that he didn’t appear to make a major difference – either in on-field performance or in recruiting – at any his previous stops. He was an adequate choice.

Adequate may be good enough in Starkville. It may be good enough in Louisville. It wasn’t good enough in Athens, where the third-and-Grantham moniker began and after this year, has proved prescient.

But adequate isn’t worth $1.8 million dollars. Adequate doesn’t win the SEC. Adequate loses three games where your offense averages 39.3 points per game.

It’s time for Florida to find someone more than adequate.

Takeaway

Dan Mullen has some soul searching to do following this loss.

The first thing he needs to do is hire someone to help him with clock management and in-game scenarios (I’m available). You know as well as I do that Nick Saban has planned for every scenario that could occur in a game. Mullen going for two at least suggests he is working towards thinking analytically, but this is the third year in a row that Florida has run more clock than it should late in a loss (LSU and Georgia in 2019, Kentucky in 2018).

The second thing he needs to do is figure out what to do about the defense. I think it’s time to move on from Grantham, but he has to make that decision. If he does decide to bring him back, the pressure is going to ramp up on him because the fan base has made it clear that they’re fed up with a defense that can’t get off the field.

The third thing he has to do is ramp up his recruiting efforts.

Before he ever coached a game, I expressed concern that he wasn’t getting results on the recruiting trail that previous Florida coaches have achieved. My colleague Bill Sikes broke down historically what coaches have to achieve in recruiting to win the SEC.

I’m perfectly willing to admit that maybe Mullen can break free from the historical patterns by being a better developer of talent. But you can’t mangle the clock like he did in this game and then ask for a pass on building programs the way other championship teams have been built.

I do take comfort in the fact that every coach seems to experience a third-year dip, and Mullen damn-near won the SEC in his third year. Urban Meyer saw the dip in 2007 and lost three games with Tebow winning the Heisman because of a porous defense, so it’s not like these aren’t correctable.

But look at that Alabama team Florida just played.

Najee Harris, Alex Leatherwood, Patrick Surtain, Evan Neal and Dylan Moses are all 5-star recruits who played a major role in the Tide winning that game. In big games, the probabilities (and history) says that those kinds of players are necessary.

I am really proud of this Gators team. It’s one of my favorite.

They were down big at the half and clawed back to make it a game. They could have folded, but that just isn’t the personality of this team.

But I do think it’s worth noting that Florida was outgained 605 to 462. The Gators were outrushed 187-54. There will be lots of experts who declare that a new day is upon us, where you don’t even need to run the ball to put up a ton of points. In some ways, this is true.

But ask yourself about these scenarios.

• What if the referees had ruled Kadarius Toney’s catch at the one-yard line a fumble instead of being down with Florida down 28-10 (remember, the play wasn’t confirmed, but stood, based on replay)?
• What if Nay’Quan Wright hadn’t wrestled the ball away from the Alabama defender after Jacob Copeland’s fumble with Florida down 35-24 (it looked to me like Alabama recovered that ball)?
• What if Alabama hadn’t settled for a field goal after Trask fumbled deep in Florida territory with Florida down 42-31?
• What if Malik Davis’ fumble hadn’t been recovered by Jacob Copeland with Florida down 45-31?
• What if Alabama DB Josh Jobe hadn’t decided to be obviously offsides on the Trask fumble on his run from the one-yard line with Florida down 45-31?

That is a lot of things that had to go right for Florida to stay in this game. At each juncture, had the play gone the other way, Alabama would have had the chance to turn things into a blowout. Credit to the Gators for fighting back and preventing that from happening, but let’s not close our eyes to the luck involved.

Here’s the point. I can be proud of this team – and believe that Mullen is doing a good job overall – while still understanding that there are improvements to be made.

Mullen knows the same thing, at least in other areas of the game. This is the same guy who was seen yelling at Trask when his team was up big against Arkansas after a missed read. You can always get better, and you always need people to push you to get better.

Mullen said it himself afterwards. He – and the team – wants more than just getting to the SEC Championship. The goal is to win it.

He certainly has proven himself an offensive savant in his first three years in Gainesville.

The next step is to move beyond the offense to all of the other aspects of the program.