Emory Jones is going to be fine, despite spring struggles

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Spring practice is wrapping up, and there hasn’t been a whole lot of encouraging news coming from the offensive side of the ball.

The offensive line appears to be getting pushed around, the running backs are having trouble finding holes and perhaps most importantly, Emory Jones is struggling getting the offense into any sort of rhythm.

We always knew Jones would be a lightning rod coming into this season. He was the first big-time recruit that Dan Mullen was able to snag in 2018. He not only waited his turn behind Feleipe Franks, but also behind Kyle Trask after Franks was injured.

At the time, that was a disturbing sign. I mean, shouldn’t a prime-time recruit beat out a low-ranking back-up recruited under the previous regime? But then Trask proved himself to be an expert at reading defenses and extraordinarily accurate. Those two qualities offset any arm strength limitations and the Gators offense torched everyone they played in 2020.

So now Jones is going to be a magnet for criticism. If he can’t perform up to Trask’s standard, he’s going to be seen as a flop given the hype when he was recruited. And the fact that he is struggling in spring practice is making everyone nervous, particularly because the secretive nature of the practices doesn’t allow anyone who covers the team to give any sort of nuance.

But if we look at some of the things that Jones does well, I think there is reason to be encouraged that what we’re seeing and hearing this spring isn’t indicative of what we’ll see in the fall.

We know he can run the ball

Let’s be honest. There’s no way Mullen and Co. are going to let Jones get hit at all this spring. That takes away the thing that he’s shown he can definitively do to move the offense in his time in Gainesville.

Jones averaged 6.8 yards per rush attempt in 2020, and that was with everyone pretty much knowing the ball would be on the ground when he came in for special packages. But you can see what that did to even the vaunted Alabama defense in the SEC Championship Game.

Florida is in 01 personnel (4-wide, 1 TE, no running back) and then motions Kadarius Toney into the backfield. Alabama is extremely wary about getting beat deep on some sort of gadget play and so none of the defenders really shoot towards the line. Even though the play isn’t blocked perfectly, Jones is able to juke the Alabama safety and then power forward for a first down.

I hope that fans don’t lose sight of the significance here. Every second-and-5 in 2021 is going to be an opportunity for a big play. That’s because if the defense starts firing towards the line of scrimmage to stop Jones, it’s going to open up throws over the top.

In a spring scrimmage, you don’t run this play. You also don’t want Jones lowering his shoulder to get the first down. So be wary when you hear that Jones is leading a bunch of three-and-outs this spring. One of his biggest weapons is being taken away for this particular evaluation.

No, I mean he can really run the ball

There are dual-threat QBs and there are DUAL-THREAT QBs. Emory Jones is the latter.

Why do I say that? Well, because had he put up his 6.8 yards per rush average in 2020 as a full-time starting QB, he would have led every QB in the country in that category.

Now, this is a little bit unfair in college as sacks get factored into rushing yardage and Jones didn’t throw all that much. But Florida gave up 20 sacks in 2020 on 473 pass attempts (4.2%) so we’re not talking about a huge contribution to lost yardage should Jones replicate that.

In 2020, there were 103 QBs who averaged 14 pass attempts per game and played in 75 percent of his team’s games. Of those, only 22 averaged more than 4.0 yards per rush. Only three averaged more than 6.0 yards per rush.

Those three – Malik Willis (Liberty), Levi Lewis (Louisiana) and Jayden Daniels (Arizona State) – graded out extremely well using my Yards Above Replacement (YAR) stat, even though Daniels and Lewis were middling throwers (QB ratings in the 140-145 range). While Daniels only played four games for the Sun Devils, I don’t think it’s a coincidence that Liberty and Louisiana combined to go 20-2 in 2020. They had QBs who differentiated their teams on the ground.

Since 2013, the median yards per rush average for a FBS QB has been between 2.3 and 2.5. The median yards per pass average has been around 7.5. So if we want to measure how valuable a QB is to his team, the question is not what his averages in those categories are, but how much extra value he brings to each category to help his team move down the field. This fundamentally is what YAR tries to do.

So a QB who averages 6.8 yards per carry (as Jones did last year) brings somewhere between 4.3 and 4.5 yards of excess value every time he runs the ball. However, Jones averaged 6.9 yards per pass attempt last year, meaning he gave up 0.6 yards per throw in excess value every time he threw it.

But overall, that still means he created significant value at the position because he ran the ball 32 times and threw it 32 times as well. It translates to a YAR of 1.68 (in admittedly a very small sample size), which would have placed Jones 11th in 2020, just behind Justin Fields.

I’m not suggesting that Jones is going to be Fields. What I’m suggesting is that his ability to run is going to offset issues he might have throwing the ball and could potentially do so in a really big way.

For example, Malik Willis ran the ball 141 times for 944 yards in 2020 while throwing the ball 265 times. That was in a 10-game season, so we’re talking 14.1 rushes per game and 26.5 passes per game. Were Jones to put up the exact same averages that he had last season (and remember, his throwing was sub-par in 2020), his YAR would be 0.93, or right around where Jake Fromm sat in both 2017 and 2018.

In other words, that’s a QB that with a big-time defense can lead you to being able to choke away a national championship.

He’s going to be a better thrower than that

That’s the bare minimum for Jones though and I think there are reasons to suspect he’ll be better through the air than what he showed last season.

In Kyle Trask’s 2019 season, he threw 73 balls behind the line of scrimmage (20.1% of total throws). Those throws averaged 8.1 yards per attempt and relied almost entirely on his wide receivers. Out of Jones 32 throws last season, only three were behind the line of scrimmage (9.4%). But Jones did average 9.0 yards per attempt on those throws, indicating that easy yards will be there fairly regularly.

The Florida staff also rarely let him throw deep, as he went 1-5 for 25 yards with an INT on throws traveling over 20 yards in 2020. Now, maybe that’s indicative that he struggles with those sorts of throws, but then how do you explain this….

This is from the Georgia game in 2018 and this isn’t a guy who struggles throwing the deep ball. We all remember the interception against Ole Miss in the first quarter, but what you might not remember is that the defensive tackle was putting a helmet in Jones’ ribs as he released the ball.

He still shouldn’t have thrown it, but I’m not ready to say he isn’t accurate or can’t throw the deep ball because of that one throw, or even the five attempts he was given in 2020.

Takeaway

I have to admit that I’m not sure exactly what we’ll get from Jones through the air. But I keep going back to what he gave Florida when the lights were turned up bright in 2019 against Auburn.

Florida had just run an unsuccessful fake punt in its own territory. The Tigers scored to bring the score to 14-13 and on the very first play of the next drive, Kyle Trask went down with what looked like a serious knee injury.

In came Emory Jones.

Lamical Perine immediately ripped off an 8-yard gain followed by a 6-yard gain by Jones. Jones then proceeding to complete two passes over the middle to Freddie Swain to set up the Gators for a field goal to extend the lead to 17-13.

That was the score until Perine put the game away on his 88-yard masterpiece that brought the Swamp alive. But if you want to point to the Emory Jones effect, I think you could point to this: on that field goal drive, Perine had 3 carries for 13 yards (4.3 yards per rush). Absent that drive and subtracting the 88-yarder, he had 10 carries for 29 yards (2.9 yards per rush).

That’s the difference a player like Jones can make. The little 6-yard gain that I glossed over in my description above was on every Auburn player’s mind the minute Jones came into the game.

So if I’m a Florida fan, I don’t worry too much about him struggling in the spring. Mullen is purposefully taking away one of his most valuable contributions to the offense and testing what he can get from Jones through the air.

I’m sure it’s frustrating. That isn’t what Jones does best. It’s certainly not going to be as good as Kyle Trask last year, both because Trask was fantastic, but also because Kyle Pitts and Kadarius Toney were special as well.

But Emory Jones is special in his own way. He just isn’t getting to show it this spring.

He’s going to get to show it in the fall.

Thank you

Thanks to everyone for the well-wishes for our new arrival, Oliver. It’s been a bit of a whirlwind around the Miles house for the past 6 weeks since his arrival and finding time to write has been scarce. But it has made me glad that I do this to hear from all the people in Gator Nation expressing their support. Thanks!