Florida embarrassed in Las Vegas Bowl

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Florida was embarrassed by Oregon State in the Las Vegas Bowl on Saturday.

Paired with the loss to Vanderbilt in November, this is now the second embarrassing loss for Billy Napier’s Gators in the past month.

There’s no shame in losing to Oregon State. The Beavers won 10 games this year and will end up likely ranked just outside the top-10 at the end of the season. There was a reason that Florida was more than a TD underdog coming into this one.

But I would say the same thing about the loss to Vandy. The embarrassment wasn’t in losing to Vandy (though that wasn’t great), but rather how the Gators lost to Vanderbilt. Repeated mistakes and poor discipline cost the Gators points in that game, and the same exact thing happened in the Gators bowl loss.

All of that puts the spotlight directly onto Billy Napier. He was brought to Gainesville to do two things. First, he was brought in to fix the recruiting issues that have plagued the Gators since the end of the Will Muschamp era. We’ll have more on that later this week in significant detail leading up to Early Signing Day.

But the second reason he was brought to Gainesville was to bring a discipline that wasn’t shown on the field under Dan Mullen. The thought was that the days of missed assignments, poor special teams, personal foul penalties and repeated false starts were over.

Given what we just saw, I’d say that the jury is still out on whether Napier can fulfill that second reason.

Coaching

As a coach, you can deal with physical mistakes. Players are going to get out of position or run themselves out of position or miss tackles. It’s the mental mistakes that just drive you crazy because those are the things you rep over and over.

So there we were, with the game tied at zero and the Gators with third-and-6 at the Oregon State 32: two straight false starts. Milller hit Jonathan Odom for 7 yards to set up a field goal attempt, but Adam Mihalek pulled his 52-yard attempt just slightly left.

On the next drive, while down 7-0 but driving with a first-and-10 at the Oregon State 38, what happened? False start. Miller ran for 7 yards on the next three plays – with a Montrell Johnson run for no gain in between – and Florida faced a fourth-and-8 at the Oregon State 36-yard line.

The false starts are bad, but they weren’t the worse mistake here in my estimation. That belonged to Billy Napier.

Those of us who use numbers for game analysis talk about probabilities. The reason is that not every decision is going to work out, but you want to make decisions that give your team the best chance to win. Look at these two situations:

• Fourth-and-9 at the OSU 35-yard line, 0-0 score, 5:49 left in the 1Q
• Fourth-and-8 at the OSU 36-yard line, 0-7 score, 13:00 left in the 2Q

These are almost the exact same decision. I’m fine with Napier going for it on the second fourth down. I’m okay with him kicking the field goal on the first fourth down. What I’m not okay with is choosing one of each because the probabilities associated with the decision didn’t change much at all.

Folks a lot more skilled at this than I over at @aisports4th have a tracker for fourth down probabilities. For the first fourth down, they have punting as the best option, followed by going for it and then a field goal attempt. So based on their numbers at least, Napier took the least likely option to get a win.

On the second fourth down attempt, they have going for it as the best decision, followed by punting and then a field goal attempt. In this case, Napier made the right decision.

These are close decisions. The difference between punting and attempting a field goal is only pegged at a 32 percent chance of winning vs. a 30 percent chance. But when your team isn’t more talented than the opposition, you need to grab every edge that you can and Napier just didn’t do that.

But that wasn’t Napier’s only decision-making gaffe.

Punter Jeremy Crawshaw boomed a 59 yard punt and a holding penalty was tacked on to drive Oregon State back to its own 15-yard line with 2:35 left in the half. Down 10-0, you know that Napier thought this might be his opportunity to get back in the game.

But Oregon State came right out and ripped off an 8-yard run and seemed content to let the clock run down. They ran the ball again on the next play and were stopped for a yard, setting up a third-and-1. But before that play, Napier called a timeout.

I get it. Napier wants to get the stop and get the ball back to his offense. He did something similar against Tennessee and it backfired, but Oregon State isn’t Tennessee’s offense. Of course, the other difference is that Tennessee was sitting at third-and-10 instead of third-and-1. In this case, context – and probabilities – matter.

Converting on a third-and-1 against this Florida defense had a high likelihood of happening. Oregon State was likely to run the ball on third down to try and pick up the first down. So let’s play this out with Florida getting a stop. Napier would have had to call another timeout, leaving his team with one left getting the ball back with about 1:40 left instead of 1:10.

But the downside was that Oregon State would succeed. Indeed, the Beavers dialed up a trick play to gain the yard and then had just enough time to drive down the field for a field goal attempt. QB Ben Gulbranson ran out of bounds with one second left to set it up.

The fact that the Beavers had the field goal blocked doesn’t vindicate Napier’s decision. Famous poker player Annie Duke calls looking at a result and deciding whether it was the right decision “resulting” and suggests that making decisions that way is how poker players go broke.

I’d actually ascribe “resulting” to Napier’s decisions to kick a field goal and then go for it earlier in the half. That’s not good.

Other Mistakes

Beyond the coaching issues, the Gators players had plenty of mistakes of their own. Here’s a not-so-short list.

• Two consecutive false starts prior to a missed field goal (-3)
• False start on first-and-10 prior to missing a fourth down attempt in OSU territory
• Third-and-12 pass interference on Jaddarius Perkins extending a field goal drive (-7)
• Unsportsmanlike conduct penalty on blocked field goal setting up OSU with good field position to open the second half
• Fake punt by OSU on opening drive of second half (-7)
• Offsides on third-and-5 at Florida 40 to give OSU a first down
• Personal foul for late hit on the QB
• Bring out kickoff to 19-yard line
• Blocked punt (kicked into own man) (-7)

By my count, that’s a 24-point swing. I texted my colleague Nick Knudsen that Oregon State wasn’t really all that good and I stand by that. Florida could have won this game, but they gave away points they just couldn’t afford to give away.

Not included in this list is the playcalling, which was really confusing to me. Billy Napier should have seen in practice what we all knew by the end of the game: Jack Miller is limited. Yet, he didn’t call consecutive runs by a running back until 7:55 was left in the third quarter and Florida was down 23-0.

The offensive line wasn’t good. But running the ball has been Florida’s bread-and-butter all year. The Gators have consistently run the ball more than they’ve passed it, and that’s with a more gifted player at QB.

And while the stat sheet says that Florida had 16 runs and 11 passes at the half, what it also shows is that Miller had 6 runs (only 2 designed) to Montrell Johnson’s 6 carries and Trevor Etienne’s 3. Since 4 of Miller’s runs were called passes, that puts Florida at 12 runs and 15 passes called, not exactly ideal.

Jack Miller’s Performance

Jack Miller was exactly who we should have thought he would be.

I wrote a article this offseason about his limitations and suggested he should be compared to Malik Zaire or Deondre Francois instead of an elite-level QB. We saw significant limitations in the Spring Game as well, particularly when it came to holding onto the ball and not pulling the trigger when he needed to.

We knew that Miller wasn’t going to be as explosive as Anthony Richardson. The hope though was that he could execute the pedestrian plays that Richardson had been unable to do all year long. Miller was unable to do so consistently.

This play – perhaps more than most – shows exactly what the issue was with Miller against the Beavers. The play ends up with a sack from our old friend Andrew Chatfield, but it shouldn’t have ever gotten to that point.

There are seven men in the box and a deep safety lined up in-line with Miller. This means he has three wide receivers and three defenders at the top. The outside corner drops at the snap with a linebacker coming over to help. Miller is staring right at his wide-open receiver, but just can’t convince himself to make the throw. Then, instead of stepping up into a well-formed pocket, he retreats to a place where Chatfield can get to and gets drilled.

Oregon State saw this indecisiveness. This was a second-and-11 so they weren’t quite as aggressive, but they blitzed on pretty much every third down throughout the game. The logic was simple: if Miller wasn’t decisive enough to make throws like this, he wasn’t going to get rid of the ball against a blitz fast enough to hurt OSU’s defense consistently.

That’s exactly what we saw.

The stat line actually doesn’t look too bad. Miller finished 13-22 for 180 yards and a QB rating of 127.8. That’s pretty much in-line with what we got through the air from Anthony Richardson all year long. The difference is that Miller had 13 rush attempts for 13 yards, which drug his Yards Above Replacement (YAR) – my proprietary stat for QB evaluation that takes running and passing into account – to -0.60, or well below average.

It also doesn’t take into account that a bulk of Miller’s yardage came on a 28-yard pass to Ricky Pearsall and a 38-yard throw to Thai Chiaokhiao-Bowman when the Gators were already down 30-0. Those were the only explosive plays of the day for the Gators and certainly fit in the too little, too late category.

But at this point, we did learn something about Jack Miller. He’s a backup QB. He had an opportunity to separate himself and perhaps even head into spring practice next year with a leg up on being the starter. But after this, we all know why Anthony Richardson didn’t run all the time. The Gators couldn’t afford to lose him.

Takeaways

I rarely struggle with this section because usually there are good things and bad to take away from every game. But that’s hard when you have a 30-3 drubbing that the best thing you can say about it is that you settled for a field goal on fourth-and-goal from the 23-yard line with 37 seconds left to avoid a shutout.

The Gators have struggled at times this year, but were never quite as inept as they were against the Beavers. I’d like to attribute that to motivation, but I just don’t think that’s the case. Rather, I think it’s because Anthony Richardson – for all of his flaws – papered over significant deficiencies with this team.

Some of that is going to be fixed with recruiting. Though the complete story there has yet to be told, there’s no doubt that Napier is recruiting at a higher level than his predecessors. Whether that’s going to be enough for the fan base is an open question, but for 10 or 11 games a year, Florida fans shouldn’t ever have to think they have a less talented squad moving forward.

But the lack of development on the defensive side of the ball is really, really concerning. Yes, there are guys playing back there who probably shouldn’t be starting at Florida. But the vast majority of those guys started last year and the unit was nowhere near this bad. The fact that Patrick Toney and Company haven’t been able to get more out of this squad, or show significant improvement as the season has gone on, is not exactly comforting.

And then there’s Napier.

I lauded him for his decision-making against Tennessee. I thought going for two points down 17 was great strategy and I loved the edges that he gave the Gators by going for it on fourth down repeatedly in that game. But ever since then, his decision-making has seemed to be a hodge-podge of leaning on analytics when it suits him mixed in with gut-feel.

Once again we saw Florida fall apart in the four minutes heading into the half and the four minutes coming out of the half, also a theme for this season. And after being gifted only a 10-point deficit coming out of the half despite only having two (2!!) yards of total offense in the second quarter, Napier’s halftime offensive adjustments resulted in a 150 percent improvement as the Gators gained five (5!!) yards in the third quarter.

There’s a difference between being beat and getting embarrassed. The loss to Kentucky and near loss to USF toed the line. But the loss to Vanderbilt and now this loss to Oregon State certainly qualify. It isn’t that the Gators lost; I think we all expected this was a tough matchup.

It’s that the Gators took two weeks of practice and made the exact same mistakes they’ve made all year.

I still think Napier has the ability to turn things around. He’s an intelligent guy who despite his “aw shucks” persona at the microphone after the game is going to use this experience to choose who the right guys are for his program moving forward.

Much of the mass exodus has already been announced, and I suspect there will be significantly more coming. The staff is going to have to reload, both through the transfer portal and through high school recruiting.

But to think that a hot shot transfer QB is going to fix all that ills the Gators is just naïve.

All I know is that I had the exact same feeling watching this bowl game that I did watching Florida get trounced by Oklahoma back in 2020 or by Georgia in 2017. Both times, the disappointment wasn’t just from the lopsided losses, but by the utter incompetence shown by the team.

After Jim McElwain’s 10-4 or Dan Mullen’s 10-3 initial campaigns, we may have been able to fool ourselves into thinking that they were the right guy to turn things around and that Florida was close to being back among the elite. We have no such illusions about where things stand right now.

Napier has a lot of work to do.