Dan Mullen, Florida, out of answers as Gators fall to Missouri

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Florida fell to 5-6 in a 24-23 overtime loss to Missouri. Those words in themselves are a pretty damning indictment of where the program has fallen.

You shouldn’t lose to Kentucky at Florida. You shouldn’t lose to South Carolina at Florida. You shouldn’t lose to Missouri at Florida. And you sure shouldn’t lose to all three in the same season, not if you want to remain the head coach at Florida.

Dan Mullen’s selling point was always that he was going to ensure that the floor of the Florida program was secure. Yes, the Gators might struggle against Georgia and Alabama, but they were going to win the games they should. The ceiling was always the question, but the 2020 offense gave hope that with a change at defensive coordinator, Florida would be able to break through with the Clemson’s and LSU’s of the world.

But 2021 has shown us all – for those who weren’t convinced previously – that not only is the desired ceiling unattainable, but the perceived floor was a mirage as well.

Coming off of the Samford win, I wasn’t really sure what we were going to get. Had this one been a 40-point Missouri victory, I wouldn’t have been surprised. If the Gators had come out and buried the Tigers, I would have been surprised but not shocked. The fact that we ended up with inconsistencies on both sides for two 5-5 teams, and that the game went into overtime, seems like a fitting conclusion to the Gators SEC season.

So I’m left with a weird feeling, where I’m impressed that the Gators played as hard as they did on the road with an embattled head coach hanging on by a thread. But I’m also left with an empty feeling as all of the problems that have shown up all year showed up yet again.

This loss felt like the Kentucky loss all over again. Pretty good defensive play, poor special teams, perplexing play calling and clock management, and a team with superior athletes losing to a team that just made a few less mistakes.

I don’t feel bad after this game, just resigned. Because you can say that the players played hard for Mullen, and that is true. You can say that you’re proud of that fight from those players, and that is true. You can even say you see the talent on this team and expect that 2022 will be much better, and that is probably true.

But one thing you can’t say is that this was the Gator Standard.

Offense

If there’s one play that exemplifies this entire season, this is the one.

The staple of Dan Mullen’s offense is the read-option. The entire point is that the QB reads the defensive end and then if he doesn’t crash, he hands the ball to the running back. If he does crash down, then the QB keeps the ball and runs around the end.

One modification to the read-option is that you pull your tight end across the formation, which is what Florida does here with Kemore Gamble (#9). Once the play calls for this, the read changes because the pulling tight end can block the defensive end. Normally, you’d be reading the linebacker behind the defensive end, but Missouri doesn’t have anybody there.

This should have been a huge play for Florida. There’s just nobody there on the outside if he pulls the ball out and runs it himself. Handing the ball off to Dameon Pierce is doomed because of the alignment of the defense, which has nine defenders either in-line with, or to the right of, center Kingsley Eguakun (one deep safety isn’t on the screen).

Dan Mullen mentioned Jones missing reads coming out of the half and these are the things he was likely talking about. Jones then tried to pull the ball from the running back two plays later and put the ball on the ground. Florida had to settle for a field goal.

And settling was the operative word for the offense against Missouri.

The opening drive ended in a field goal after those two plays. The third drive ended in a punt from the Missouri 42 after having a first-and-10 at the Mizzou 38 and then having a false start force a punt rather than a fourth down try. The fourth drive ended in a field goal after a first-and-goal at the two-yard line turned into fourth-and-goal from the nine. The fifth drive ended on a fourth-and-1 after Xzavier Henderson was stopped just short of a first down with six minutes left in the half.

There will (and should) be plenty of criticism for Dan Mullen and his conservative play calling when the Gators took over with just over a minute left and essentially packed it in for overtime. But this game was lost in the first half when Florida could have been up by 14 points and instead were behind by three.

Defense

I’m so impressed by this defensive performance.

They’ve been maligned the past three weeks, and rightfully so. Their play against South Carolina was dreadful and was even worse against Samford. But they came to play against Missouri, and should be applauded for it.

Yes, they gave up a couple of big plays and weren’t able to hold down Tyler Badie late or in overtime, but they gave Florida a chance to win and that’s really all you can ask for from a unit that has struggled as much as this one has.

The night started with the defense finally doing something I’ve been critical of them for all year long: getting a stop after the offense takes over with a short field. This time it was after a terrible punt by Jeremy Crawshaw gave the Tigers the ball at the Florida 18-yard line.

The Tigers lost four yards and were forced to kick a game-tying field goal.

The second Tigers’ score came on a 34-yard drive that only had one big play (a 26-yard pass to Niko Hea), and the defense again bowed up to get a stop and force a 46-yard field goal.

And late in the game, with Missouri driving and Florida down to one timeout, the Gators again were able to get a stop. Trey Dean had just been called for a pass interference giving Missouri a first down at the Gators 30-yard line. The defense again was able to stop Badie on three straight runs, setting up the missed field goal.

Ty’Ron Hopper was all over the field, collecting 12 tackles and 2 tackles for loss. I thought Mohamoud Diabate was excellent as well (aside from his offsides on a fourth-and-1), despite only having two tackles. After seeing linebackers struggle for the past two years, it was really fun seeing those two show what they can do.

It started early for Diabate, as after the bad punt by Crawshaw, he made the most critical play of Missouri’s ensuing drive.

Missouri is trying to manipulate the linebackers with motion. They’re expecting Diabate to take a false step or two towards the fake out into the flat. Instead, he stays focused on Tyler Badie and accelerates to make the play.

And perhaps the thing I’ve been hoping for from the linebackers the most showed up on the most critical drive.

On this play, Missouri runs the counter. This is something Florida has struggled to stop for some time now. One of the reasons is because their linebackers have been timid.

But not so on this play. Diabate fires towards the line of scrimmage and knocks his blocker backwards. The defensive line does its job too, getting penetration to make the running back hesitate. But then watch as Hopper explodes into the hole and absolutely crushes Badie right as he gets into the hole.

Hopper is young. He’s going to make some mistakes. But he came to play tonight, much like the rest of the defense. I would have loved to have seen the defense finish this one off in overtime, but it’s hard to criticize a team that gives up 286 yards and only really made a handful of mistakes.

Just like the Kentucky game, the defense played well enough to win. Unlike the Kentucky game, I think we saw some things that should point towards better days in the not-too-distant future.

Takeaway

Emory Jones is not a bad quarterback.

His statistics actually were pretty solid in this game. He averaged 8.3 yards per attempt and he didn’t turn the ball over. His Yards Above Replacement (YAR) for the game was 0.34, or just above average. His QB rating was 141.3, or right around average.

And his statistics are pretty solid for the season. A QB rating of 153.4 overall with 19 TDs and 10 INTs and a YAR of 1.37. That should be good enough to win a bunch of games. It certainly should be good enough to do better than 5-5 (the Georgia loss isn’t on him).

In my preview, I showed running stats for Florida and Emory Jones. I’ll put those back here again.

The takeaway was that when Florida was efficient running the ball at QB, the team won (and scored points). When Florida was inefficient running the ball at QB, the team lost. Against Missouri, Jones averaged 2.6 yards per rush on 17 carries.

That means that the indecisiveness shown above when running the ball is a killer. If you hit a couple of those big ones and jump in-front, it opens up the passing game and makes Missouri play from behind. Instead, the Tigers were able to stay in the game, create one big play and then win the game in overtime.

I don’t blame Jones for that issue at this point. He’s in his fourth year in the program, but that is something that should have been repped with him from day one. The fact that it isn’t ingrained means that something fell through the cracks with the coaching staff, not just this year, but since he arrived in Gainesville.

So what about that coaching staff, including the head coach?

It’s pretty obvious that Dan Mullen is done. It’s not obvious because he’s lost the team. It’s obvious because he has lost the ability to generate hope within the fan base. Once you lose that, there isn’t anything you can do to get it back.

Scott Stricklin should have learned that watching this season, as Mullen kept Todd Grantham around even though Grantham had lost the fan base and by the time he finally made the move, the fan base had turned on him. Stricklin may have other issues he’s dealing with right now, but the decision-making process with Mullen right now is identical.

Is it fair? It doesn’t really matter. It’s reality.

The reality is that you can’t come into Gainesville talking about the Gator Standard and then only win two SEC games. Ron Zook didn’t do that. Will Muschamp didn’t do that. Jim McElwain didn’t do that. In fact, the last Gators coach to do that was Galen Hall in 1986, and back then they only played six SEC games.

The reality is you can’t talk about relentless effort and then have recruiting classes that rank 4th, 5th, 6th, 5th and currently 9th in the SEC. Now that the SEC season is done for Florida, the Gators are going to average a finish of 5.5 in his four seasons in the SEC. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that his recruiting ranking over that time is 5th best as well?

And Mullen was correct when he talked about his team being 0-7 in its last seven one-score games during his post-game presser. That record does indicate that the team has been unlucky, but it also emphasizes a point many of us learned during the McElwain era.

One-score games are usually 50-50 propositions. Even if Florida was 2-2 in those games instead of 0-4 this year, 7-4 still isn’t the Gator Standard. Even if they had gone 2-1 in those games instead of 0-3 last year, 10-2 still isn’t the Gator Standard. You just can’t rely on close victories consistently if you want to win big.

If Mullen wants to point towards those losses as a key reason for this team’s struggles, that’s fair. But then we have to point out that he was 6-1 in such games in 2018 and 2019. So if we more evenly distributed his now 6-8 record in close games over his entire Florida tenure, we’d be staring at something McElwainian.

Because that’s really what we’re left with if you look at the past four years in its entirety. In recent Florida coaching lore, the average finish in the SEC for Gator coaches goes, in order, like this: Spurrier (1.5), Meyer (3.7), Zook (4.3), McElwain (5.0), and Muschamp (6.8).

Mullen said that the reason that he let Todd Grantham and John Hevesy go was because he asked himself whether the team was better at that point in the year than they were at the beginning of the year. He didn’t think so and so he made the change.

The Gators have scored 13, 42, 42, 7, 17 and 23 points (24 points per game) in their last six SEC games after scoring 38 and 29 in their first two. One of those 42-pointers was against Vanderbilt and the other was when Mullen got an otherworldly performance out of a QB he steadfastly refuses to play in the second half.

Now consider that Mullen is an offensive coach, that Emory Jones is his hand-picked QB and that the vast majority of the skill players on offense are guys that he has identified and developed. Then ask yourself whether the offense is better now than at the beginning of the year?

Ron Zook got three years. McElwain got three years (with admittedly extenuating circumstances). Muschamp got four.

Are Mario Cristobal, Billy Napier or even (gulp) Lane Kiffin going to do better? You don’t know and neither do I. They could crash and burn. That’s always the risk when you make a coaching change and you have to weigh that with the risk of keeping things the same.

But if the head coach of Missouri trolling your team with a lightsaber after an overtime win at home isn’t crashing and burning, I’m not sure what is.

Change is hard

All the talk of firings this year has come against the backdrop of changes that are going on at my work.

One of my best friends decided to leave the company I work for recently. He did so for reasons that I understand and I’m happy that he has landed at a place that fits his personality and work style better than his previous situation. But it still is hard to swallow.

You build relationships at work with people that start as professional and eventually build into something bordering on friendship. Sometimes that morphs into closer relationships where you invite people into your world a little bit more and they really become your friends.

And sometimes that even morphs into relationships where you invite people into your thought processes and your flaws. I’m not sure everyone has that even in their own families, but I had that every day at work.

I guess I’m writing this section because I hope you all realize that Gators football is much the same way. There are people that we interact with every fall who at first are just acquaintances, sometimes just a handle on Twitter. Then that morphs into closer relationships where they become friends. And if you’re really blessed, some of those relationships turn into something much more like family. I know I have a couple of those developing right now that never would have happened without Florida football.

Treasure that. Because whether the Gators are 5-7 or 13-1, you eventually won’t remember the 2006, 2008 or even the 2021 season for the records or the trophies or the championships as you get older.

You’ll remember the time you spent with your dad, mom, brothers, sisters, sons or daughters. You’ll remember the acquaintances who became friends who became family.

That, my friends, is the real Gator Standard.

 

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