Florida looks unprepared, overmatched in 24-11 loss to Utah

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Florida fans can handle being beat (kinda). They can understand that Utah is a tough place to play and that the Utes have more experience (maybe). They might even be able to stomach having an overmatched but hard-nosed football team lose a tough game (perhaps).

But what they aren’t going to handle for very long is watching an undisciplined, unprepared and, quite frankly, lethargic team get their butts handed to them by every decent team on their schedule.

Because let’s be very clear about this: The Utah Utes are not a great football team. Not with Cam Rising out and Bryson Barnes filling in. Not with Brant Kuithe out as well. The Utes held out their two best players and still whipped Florida in a 24-11 win that wasn’t nearly that close. Congratulations to them for getting the job done, but that was a terrible performance by the Gators.

The offense was awful, snatching failure from the jaws of victory time-after-time in the red zone. Multiple false start and illegal formation penalties stalled drives repeatedly. The running game was non-existent (and rarely tried). The defense got punched in the mouth on the opening play and felt wobbly the rest of the way. And special teams cost the Gators at least 10 points.

It was just a catastrophic, total system failure in a game the Gators have had months to prepare for. Gators fans spent all day building themselves up and immediately got punched in the gut. But it’s not just the gut punch from this game that concerns me. It’s that there were so many mistakes that it’s hard to know where to start to prevent this from happening again.

Let’s take a look.

Offensive Line Play

The offensive line gave up five sacks and Florida had 21 rushes for 13 yards. Even if we eliminate the sack yardage, Florida had 13 rushes for 42 yards. Not exactly something to write home about. But sacks aren’t always just the offensive line’s fault, so let’s take a look at each one and determine where the blame lies.

The offensive line has its assignments right here. Utah brings its two linebackers on a blitz, leaving right tackle Damieon George (#76) and tight end Jonathan Odom (#87) matched up against Utah’s two defensive ends. George gets beat to the outside, but there is a clear pocket for Mertz to step up into and he has a man (Caleb Douglas, #4) coming open across the middle. But Mertz slips on the turf as he works his way up into the pocket. At that point, Odom’s man races to secure the sack.

 

Utah brings six men on this play again, with a linebacker holding back a little bit but not really in coverage. The key is that running back Trevor Etienne (#7) has responsibility for Utah safety Cole Bishop (#8). Damieon George (#76) also gets driven back into Mertz, flushing him into Bishop, who is able to roll off Etienne and right into the sack.

 

On this play Utah only rushes four men. Center Jake Slaughter (#66) initially neutralizes defensive tackle Keanu Tanuvasa (#57), who stumbles right out of his stance. But Tanuvasa spins and Slaughter falls down, allowing Tanuvasa a clear line straight to Mertz.

 

On this play Utah rushes five. The defensive end (Jonah Elliss, #83) and the linebacker (Karene Reid, #21) run a stunt, with Reid crossing to the outside and Elliss crossing to the inside. Right guard Richie Leonard (#67) sticks with Reid while left tackle Austin Barber (#58) switches onto Reid. That leaves two offensive linemen on Reid and none on Elliss. Center Jake Slaughter (#66) tries to get over but it’s too late, and Mertz is a dead duck.

 

This one’s on Mertz. Utah brings six rushers and Florida only has five blockers. When the tight end goes out into a route, the defensive end (Logan Fano, #0) has a free run at Mertz. But this also means Mertz has man coverage across the board. Montrell Johnson (#2) comes open across the middle but Mertz pumps and pulls the ball down, creating the sack.

The offensive line didn’t play great. But two of the sacks came because Etienne missed a block and Florida had Odom (a tight end) on a defensive end one-on-one. Another came because Mertz just held the ball too long when he should have known better. The mishandled stunt and Slaughter being beat are definitely on the line.

One thing you will notice is that only one sack came on a four-man rush. Florida didn’t handle the blitz well at all. To my recollection they ran one screen pass, a successful play design to Montrell Johnson, but never went back to that to slow down the rush. They also didn’t take advantage of the one-on-one situations those blitzes create.

Heismertz

I don’t want to be too negative about Graham Mertz because he did exactly what we should have expected given his track record. While his counting stats (333 yards, 70.5% completions) look great, his efficiency numbers do not.

Mertz’ 333 yards required 44 passes to achieve. That puts him at 7.6 yards per attempt. The average in college football last year was 7.6. Last season Mertz averaged 7.5. With his one TD and one INT, the result is a QB rating of 137.7, which is a below average performance.

But that isn’t the only part of Mertz’ performance. We also have the sacks discussed in the previous section. Yes, some of those were on the offensive line, but a more mobile QB would be able to pick up his offensive line when they didn’t come through, and Mertz doesn’t have that skill.

Using my proprietary stat, Yards Above Replacement (YAR), which takes into account a QBs rushing and passing contributions and where zero is average, -1.0 is bad, +1.0 is really good and +2.0 is Heisman-level, Mertz was at -0.95. For his career at Wisconsin, Mertz had a YAR of -1.02.

The most concerning thing to me was that Mertz only averaged 10.7 yards per completion. Considering he had 37-yard pass to Marcus Burke and a 40-yard pass to Ricky Pearsall, he only averaged 8.8 yards per completion on the other 29 completions. That suggests he was throwing into traffic quite a bit.

Here’s an example. There is 5:34 left in the game and Florida is at mid-field down 13 points. There is still time to make a run at it, but time conservation is critical. Utah is threatening at the line of scrimmage, but you’d expect the Utes to drop into a zone here because they want Florida to run clock. That’s exactly what they do.

Except they completely forget to pick up Eugene Wilson (#3) as he comes across the formation. Mertz fits the ball into Caleb Douglas (#4) for a 12-yard gain, but it was in a tight space where Douglas had zero chance to run after the catch. Had Mertz swung the ball out to Wilson he would have likely picked up 10 yards minimum, and he also would have had the ability to make a big play if he could make someone miss.

Here’s another example. On the telecast, Kirk Herbstreit was begging Mertz to throw the ball to Ricky Pearsall (#1). You can see why as Pearsall has a 10-yard cushion versus Douglas (#4), who has the DB playing right up on him.

Again, Mertz completes the pass. But Douglas isn’t going anywhere after the catch whereas Pearsall would have had a chance to pick up significant yards after the catch if he could have made one man miss with a running start.

Florida got first downs on both of these plays. But they also started this drive with 5:59 left on the clock and finally turned it over on downs with 1:39 left. Even if they had scored, the game was essentially over and a big part of that was not getting the ball to their players with space to run.

The Defense

Austin Armstrong’s defense actually played pretty well.

They gave up 24 points, 7 of which should be assigned to the offense after Mertz threw an interception deep in Gator territory. They wound up giving up 5.1 yards per play, which would have ranked 35th last season. And they only surrendered two explosive plays, which were the bugaboo of both Florida’s defense and Armstrong’s Southern Miss defense last season.

But the problem is that those explosives were absolute killers, none more so than Utah’s opening offensive play of the game.

This is an Armstrong special. He blitzes Jaydon Hill (#23) and leaves both his corners and safety Miguel Mitchell (#10) in man coverage with safety R.J. Moten (#16) providing help over the top. Both Mitchell and Marshall get beat. Moten is put in an impossible situation and decides to help Mitchell, leaving the throw open to the outside receiver.

Utah knew Armstrong has a reputation for being aggressive. They also knew that his defenses often give up big plays. So they went for it and immediately put the Gators on their heels.

The trade-off for allowing those sorts of shots is that you hopefully get pressure, but Florida didn’t get any pressure at all. They had zero sacks and really didn’t impact Barnes’ ability to step into throws at all. Whether it was a four-man rush, blitz or some sort of simulated pressure, Utah handled it well and had an answer.

Here’s an example of a simulated pressure where Armstrong brings Jordan Castell (#14) but drops Princely Umanmielen (#1) into coverage. Utah calls the double pass, which moves the Gators safety out of the middle of the field. The Utes likely expected to get running back Micah Bernard (#2) on a linebacker, but instead they got him on Umanmielen, an even better matchup.

You have to do tricky things if your guys can’t win one-on-one battles to get pressure. That compromises your defense if you don’t get home. Expect to see more of this as the season goes on.

Billy Taggart

It wasn’t long after the game that “Taggart” was trending on X.

I don’t really have much of a response to the accusation, as my main criticism of former Florida State coach Willie Taggart was that he had way too talented of a team to play so poorly and that his teams never seemed to be prepared. I have the exact same criticism of Napier after this game.

His team doesn’t know how to line up properly. They had critical illegal formation penalties last season, the most memorable a 27-yard run by Montrell Johnson was called back against Vanderbilt that likely cost the Gators a touchdown. Those issues still haven’t been fixed, as the Gators had two formation penalties that wiped out first downs deep in Utah territory.

His team doesn’t know how to properly field a punt. Whether it was having two players with the same jersey on the field at the same time (seriously!) or catching the ball inside their own 10 and setting up the offense with horrible field position, special teams were just atrocious. And that’s without even mentioning the missed 31-yard field goal or kick returns being brought out of the end zone when a fair catch is available.

His team doesn’t know how to run a 2-minute drill. Or at least it seems that way after the Gators took over with 2:46 in the first half and went backwards. And I have no idea what the Gators were doing taking 4 minutes and 20 seconds to go 33 yards when they took over down 13 points after Utah missed a field goal.

But the most disappointing moment of the night for me was on third-and-7 at the Utah 15 yard line early in the second quarter. The Gators were down 7-3 and took a delay of game penalty that pushed it to third-and-12. Mertz then ran for 11 yards and was short of the first down because of the penalty. You could blame Mertz for not calling timeout, but where was Napier?

How often have we seen a head coach sprint down the sideline to call a timeout for his QB? We see it all the time. But in a critical situation when his team could have gotten back in the game, Napier failed to do so. Given the team’s red zone struggles, they may not have converted. But Napier ensured they wouldn’t by not doing his job.

Takeaway

I picked Florida to win this game 34-24. I got the 24 part of that right, but whoo boy was I off on the 34 part.

On Stand Up & Holler this week, Nick continually reminded fans that Florida’s game plan should be “Feed 2, Feed 7,” meaning Trevor Etienne and Montrell Johnson. Those are the two best players Florida has, yet they only had 17 touches between them, seven of those through the air. I expected them to get 30 carries combined yet Johnson only had one rush for three yards in the first half.

Mertz isn’t good enough to carry this team. We should’ve known that from the Wisconsin tape, but we definitely should know that now. He’s not a terrible player, but he’s going to be limited without a running game. The fact that Florida never even tried to establish one just blows my mind.

Nick Saban. Kirby Smart. Dabo Swinney. Urban Meyer. Take your pick. None of those guys would tolerate the lack of discipline shown on Thursday night. Napier talked after the game about finding out who you are in difficult times. I think we can say the same thing about him.

Because this wasn’t just Florida getting beat. This was Florida embarrassing itself on national television and looking completely unprepared after an offseason of talking about cohesiveness, execution and attention to detail.

But that’s a significant problem. Because right now, there’s only two things we’ve gotten thus far from the Billy Napier era.

A lot of talk and a 6-8 record.