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Florida authors epic comeback to beat South Carolina

You don’t get comebacks like that very often.

When Florida had a field goal blocked and then gave up a 5-play, 69-yard touchdown drive to South Carolina in the fourth quarter, things looked bleak. The prospect of being down 11 points with 9:11 left in the game was daunting, especially for an offense that needs time to score and a defense that had failed to stop South Carolina all day.

But South Carolina botched the extra point to keep the deficit at 10. And then Florida went about piecing together a comeback in about the most difficult way possible.

The Gators managed to score two touchdowns while going 0 for 3 on third downs. Perhaps more impressive is that Florida scored 31 points in the final three quarters while going 1-11 on third downs. For an offense that hasn’t produced all year when struggling on third down, this was a welcome outlier.

There is plenty to fix. The defense looked lost at times giving up explosive play after explosive play to the Gamecocks. And you’re not going to be able to piece together fourth down conversions to score on a regular basis.

But as I often say, we only get 13 of these. You have to enjoy each one, and I promise you this was one I thoroughly enjoyed.

Mertz Shines

Probably nobody in Gator media has been more critical of Graham Mertz than I have this season.

It isn’t that Mertz has been bad. He’s actually exceeded my expectations. The problem was that because Mertz wasn’t going downfield, his completion percentage and QB rating were artificially inflated while his actual play on the field wasn’t contributing to consistent scoring.

It was the complete opposite in this game.

Mertz – who was averaging 10.5 yards per completion coming into this game – averaged 14.1 against the Gamecocks. He “only” completed 62.5 percent of his throws, but they were quality throws, which is why his yards per attempt (8.8) was 0.4 yards higher than his season total. And Mertz did all that without turning the ball over, throwing three touchdowns without throwing a pick or fumbling.

And then you had clutch plays like this.

South Carolina is showing a look that indicates they’re bringing the house. They end up dropping some players into coverage, but based on the routes Florida is running, Mertz knows that he essentially has one-on-one coverage across the board wherever he wants to throw it. He just needs to figure out how to get enough time to make the throw.

The blitzing defensive back (DQ Smith, #1) has Mertz dead-to-rights. Instead, Mertz sees him coming and manages to make him miss, buying time for a downfield throw to Pearsall.

Or this.

South Carolina is in a middle-of-the-field closed configuration with one safety deep (circled). So how does Pearsall get open down the seam? Mertz pump fakes to Kahleil Jackson (#22) who runs a double move. That safety in the middle heads in that direction to help.

Pearsall ends up open because the Gamecock corner is playing outside leverage, trying to force him inside to his safety help. He then runs an absolutely gorgeous route, faking a corner route and then going back inside down the seam. Because Pearsall gets his man to move outside and Mertz got the safety to move as well, there is just enough room to fit the throw in for the game-winning TD.

It’s worth noting that Mertz had this exact same look earlier in the game and threw an incompletion to Aiden Mizell because Mertz wasn’t able to get the safety in the middle to move enough. In this critical situation when Mertz knew he had to move him, he pump-faked, even though that probably meant he was going to get hit.

And then he made a perfect throw.

The Boardingham Comeback

Mertz doesn’t get an opportunity to play hero if it’s not for Arlis Boardingham.

We all hoped Boardingham would be a big part of Billy Napier’s offense last year but injuries kept him off the field. We had yet to see a lot from him this year either until he broke out with a 7-catch, 99-yard performance last week against Vanderbilt. The numbers weren’t as gaudy this week (5 catches, 55 yards), but Boardingham made what I view as the two key offensive plays of the game.

Boardingham is the check down for Mertz on this fourth down. Because South Carolina is dropping its zones to the sticks, there’s plenty of room for him to run, but he has to make one defender (DB Marcellas Dial, #6) miss and then outrun the other defenders to the sticks.

This is a difficult road to navigate for Boardingham. If he cuts the angle too tight, Dial will be able to get him to the ground by grabbing his legs. If he cuts the angle too wide, he won’t be able to get the first down. Boardingham goes just far enough that Dial can only get a hand on his hip and then darts upfield. The result is a game-lengthening first down.

But that wasn’t Boardingham’s most important contribution on that drive.

This was a “wow” play from the standpoint of Boardingham being able to tip the ball to himself and that it went for a TD. But there are two things to note here. First, the DB (David Spaulding, #29) recognizes what’s happening and grabs Boardingham’s arm and gets between Mertz and the tight end. That forces Mertz to loft the ball up over Spaulding and he throws it a little bit too high.

But behind all that commotion, Kahleil Jackson (#22) was unable to get inside position on his defender (Marcellas Dial, #6). Dial is sitting there waiting for a killer interception if Boardingham doesn’t tip the ball to himself. Considering this drive took over four minutes, that would have been an absolute dagger.

Instead, Boardingham brought the Gators to within three points and the comeback was underway.

Defense

Florida’s defense was awful.

The Gators came into the game allowing 5.6 yards per play, which ranked 75th in the country against FBS opponents. South Carolina exceeded that easily, averaging 7.4 yards per play and 10.4 yards per pass attempt. It’s not an accident the Gamecocks scored 39 points.

Florida got gashed for nine explosive (20-plus yard) plays that totaled 285 of the Gamecocks’ 465 yards. The first set up South Carolina’s first touchdown and eliminated any momentum the Gators might have had after going up 7-0 early.

Florida has seven men in the box at the snap. There are only six blockers. The Gators should be able to contain this run. But Caleb Banks (#88) gets driven backwards right at the snap by a double team. Princely Umanmielen (#1) jumps inside instead of holding the edge (red circle). And Tyreak Sapp (#94) isn’t able to catch running back Mario Anderson (#20) from behind because he’s able to break outside of Umanmielen.

Linebacker Shemar James (#6) doesn’t even get blocked, but Banks get knocked back so far that he isn’t able to get to the hole. Add to that a poor angle by James and Anderson is able to rumble 30 yards downfield before he’s even touched.

Those guys weren’t the only ones to make mistakes, and it certainly wasn’t just against the run. I saw a lot of criticism of Jalen Kimber during the game, but that’s why it’s important to watch the film.

This ends up a huge play for South Carolina and it looks like Kimber got beat in one-on-one coverage. But should he have safety help? The answer is that this is a single-high safety look like I showed with the Mertz touchdown to Pearsall earlier. The only difference is that Spencer Rattler absolutely stares down his receiver, but safety Jordan Castell (#14) is focused on the receiver to the wide side of the field.

Is he coached to do this? I would suspect not, given that the receiver Rattler is locked onto is Xavier Legette, the Gamecocks’ most explosive weapon. I also suspect not because just as in the example above, Kimber is playing outside leverage, forcing Legette back towards the middle of the field.

Kimber actually plays things pretty well for being out on an island. No, he doesn’t break up the pass, but he ensures Legette gets brought down after the catch. South Carolina ended up settling for a field goal.

I can’t be sure that this is Castell’s fault. Maybe the defensive design called for him to favor the wide side of the field significantly. But I also can’t be sure that it’s Kimber’s.

While the defense was bad overall, it did step up when the Gators had to have a stop. South Carolina got the ball with 4:36 left. After what I thought was a bogus roughing the passer penalty, all South Carolina needed was one first down to put the game away.

This is a similar play to the first one I showed above. This time, Umanmielen (red circle) holds the edge. The defensive tackles still get pushed back a little bit and the linebackers are a little bit lost in traffic. But Sapp (blue circle) is able to chase the running back down from behind for a loss. That completely changed the tenor of the drive and South Carolina got really conservative on second and third-and-long.

Takeaway

This was a huge win for the Gators.

That isn’t because South Carolina is a great team. They aren’t. And it certainly isn’t because Florida proved it is a great team either. It is maddeningly inconsistent, at best.

The defense is giving me Grantham flashbacks. The offense often operates on a razor’s edge between competent and catastrophic. And though special teams have started to stabilize, I can’t say with much confidence that I look forward to the times those units are on the field.

But I think this game cements that we can call this team one thing: tough.

They were able to pick themselves off the canvas after the opening season loss against Utah and smack Tennessee in the mouth. They were able to recover after getting embarrassed by Kentucky to put together two straight SEC wins. And when everything looked bleak down 10 against South Carolina, the Gators put together two huge drives to get a road win, something that has been hard to come by in Gainesville the past three seasons (the Gators were 1-5 on the road in Dan Mullen’s last season).

Mertz took a step forward in this one. And if his toughness was in doubt, it shouldn’t be after watching him take some punishing hits in this game and get back up over and over again.

Had you told me the Gators would be 5-2 heading into the bye week before the season started, I would have taken it in a heartbeat. I think I expected there to be a higher floor and a lower ceiling than what we’ve seen, but 5-2 is a successful start to the season even if it’s been a roller coaster.

Of course, 5-2 is important because of what’s coming. The teams on the horizon are going to be better than South Carolina and the Gators are going to have to play better to get those victories.

But it’s rare to get a comeback like this. Two that immediately jump to mind are Kyle Trask’s comeback against Kentucky in 2019 or Will Grier’s comeback against Tennessee in 2015.

But the other one I thought about was Feleipe Franks against South Carolina in 2018. That Gators team had gotten crushed by Missouri at home the week before and the crowd was booing Franks. On fourth down and down 31-14, the snap went over Franks’ head. He raced back to gather the errant snap and threw a ball that was deflected and landed in Trevon Grimes’ hands, who fought for a first down. Florida came back to win that game and then ran the table the rest of the year.

I don’t expect this Gators team to run the table. But the belief in that locker room that they can hang with SEC teams and that they’re never out of a game just grew in a big way.

Oliver and Evil Hearts

Often after dinner, me and my two-year old son Oliver will go down into our basement to play alone without the other kids. Sometimes we wrestle, sometimes we hit a ball off a tee or sometimes we watch one of his favorite shows: Word World.

That was what Oliver wanted on Tuesday night, and after I turned it on, he snuggled up to me on the couch and put his head on my chest as we watched. That was the moment I thought of when the photos of the babies who were murdered during the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel started coming across my X feed late this week.

These events have reminded many of us of the darkness that lies in the human heart. Sometimes because we live in western societies, we forget that unfortunate fact. We’re incredibly fortunate that we get to forget that most of the time, but it also insulates us from that truth: humans are inherently evil creatures. The Bible tells us this is the case as Jeremiah 17:9 says, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?”

Indeed, the values presented in the Bible and that have been inculcated into society over centuries are the foundation for the human rights we assert. They’re also the reason that most of us recoil at the thought of civilian women being raped and mutilated or babies being beheaded.

The lengths to which we’ll go to avoid reaching that conclusion are impressive. We’ve seen that with the Ivy League this week. The milquetoast statements from the likes of Harvard and Stanford have paled in comparison to their responses to other, in my opinion, lesser human rights atrocities. Not so at the University of Florida.

This statement by University of Florida president (and former senator) @BenSasse is such a wonderful ray of clarity, principle, and genuine warmth — in contrast to the cold, committee-written word salad from the Ivy League presidents. pic.twitter.com/vwVEuGWdVx

— Noah Pollak (@NoahPollak) October 11, 2023

I disagree with President Sasse on a lot, but I’m proud of that statement. Our Jewish friends deserve our affirmation of their human dignity. I’m a Christian. That means I have fundamental religious disagreements with Jews.

But Oliver went to bed last night knowing he was safe because his Dad was there to take care of him. And that’s what makes me tear up while writing this.

Because so did those Israeli kids.