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Florida loses Lagway, and the game, to Georgia

For the fourth straight year, Florida leaves Jacksonville licking wounds from a loss to Georgia. Unlike the three previous engagements, this one wasn’t an ass kicking, despite the 34-20 final score.

Florida tied the game at 20-20 with 7:29 left in the final quarter, but were unable to close the deal as Georgia promptly drove down the field for a go-ahead TD that they then followed-up with another quick score after an Aidan Warner interception.

That Warner was throwing a pass in this game probably tells you what the main story in this game is. The injury to D.J. Lagway not only robbed the Gators of a coherent offensive plan, but also harkened back to the good old days of 2013 when Florida fans got to watch Skyler Mornhinweg chuck the ball around against South Carolina and FSU.

The result is that the Gators are now 4-4 (2-3 SEC) after the first step of the 2024 schedule gauntlet. It doesn’t get any easier as they head to Austin next week likely without Lagway and a bunch of other defensive players who went down as well.

I thought there was a chance Billy Napier could get this team to six wins going into last week’s bye. Now, I unfortunately think it may take a miracle.

The QB Battle

Over and over last week, I said I didn’t really care about any other matchups on the field and that this game would come down to QB play.

The reason was that Carson Beck had been pretty average this season and there was a chance that D.J. Lagway could put up a spectacular performance. That would be the thing that would give the Gators a real chance.

It turns out that Beck was worse than “pretty average” in this one. He ended up with a QB rating of 128.9 (well below average) and a Yards Above Replacement (YAR) – my proprietary stat that takes a QBs passing and running efficiency into account – of -0.32 (also well below average).

His two interceptions in the first half not only ended up in 10 points for the Gators, but they both occurred in Florida territory (the plays started at the Florida 44 and 31), meaning they took points off the board for the Bulldogs and put them on the ledger for the Gators.

On the other side, Lagway acquitted himself well in his limited time, with a QB rating of 154.1 and a YAR of 0.77. That isn’t elite, but it was waaaay better than Beck. But when Lagway went down, Warner was just bad, with a QB rating of 47.9 and a YAR of -4.79.

His worst moment was the interception that sealed the game for the Bulldogs, and it’s instructive to look at what happened there to understand what some of his limitations may be moving forward.

This is the standard Napier flood concept. This is day-one install where you have three levels to choose from. You can either throw the ball deep to Aidan Mizell (#11), short to Hayden Hansen (#89) or intermediate to Elijhah Badger (#6). One of them has to have one-on-one coverage.

Warner throws to the right guy. He’s just late making that decision. I paused the video right when he turned his head to look at Badger. He then takes four steps before releasing the ball. The reason he had to gun it on a line is because he was late getting it out.

It’s a great play by the Georgia defender to come off Hansen and make the pick (as opposed to just knocking the ball down), but this is a play that Warner should have been running every day since he got on campus.

Yes, he’s a third stringer pressed into action due to injuries to the starter and the backup. Yes, we should not expect him to be D.J. Lagway or even Graham Mertz. But if you can’t trust your QB to throw a flood route in this offense, you’ve got a lot of work to do before heading to Austin.

Is the gap closing?

When D.J. Lagway went down in the second quarter, Florida was ahead 10-3. The Gators also had 109 yards of total offense compared to 177 for Georgia. That followed a first quarter where the Bulldogs outgained Florida 127-26.

Florida got plus field position from two turnovers in the second quarter. One they turned into a field goal and another they turned into a touchdown on a laser from Lagway to Aidan Mizell, but they had hardly been an offensive juggernaut.

The defense was opportunistic, but not great. Georgia averaged 5.3 yards per play in the first half and 6.2 yards per play for the entire game. Florida came into the game giving up 5.4 yards per play, so this was in-line with what we should have expected. The difference is that they were able to get a stop early deep in their own zone to force a field goal and then force the two INTs in their own territory to keep the Bulldogs at bay.

That continued into the second half, as Florida forced an interception on Georgia’s opening drive of third quarter to give Warner and Co. fantastic field position with a chance to push the lead to two scores.

On the interception, Florida only rushes four men, as Pup Howard (#10) comes on a zone blitz and Jack Pyburn (#44) and Shemar James (#6) drop into coverage. But look at how Howard rushes. I have the arrow pointing directly to Desmond Watson’s butt, as Howard essentially uses Watson as a shield to make sure he gets a free run at Beck.

Early in the first quarter, Florida had defensive tackle Desmond Watson out wide at defensive end and I took note that it was a bit odd. And when I looked back at the sack for Myles Graham in the fourth quarter, it came with much the same strategy or hiding the linebacker behind Watson.

You have to give them credit for doing those things, but we also have to acknowledge that once the magic turnovers stopped, they struggled to stop the Bulldogs.

After the interception by Jack Pyburn, Florida’s defense gave up an 8-play, 83-yard TD drive, a 3-play, 36 yard TD drive, a 7-play, 75-yard TD drive and a 2-play, 7-yard TD drive in six drives. I’m not saying that the defense is the reason they lost the game; far from it.

But let’s engage in a little thought experiment: had Florida thrown three interceptions vs. this Georgia team, would the game have been even close? Florida needed those turnovers to keep it tight, whereas Georgia was able to overcome them.

That’s still a pretty wide gap.

Where the game was lost

There are lots of plays you can point to when targeting where this game was truly lost. The INT I showed above is one. The special teams gaffe we’ll get to in a minute is another. But in my mind, this is the play where everything turned.

It’s third-and-2 at the Georgia 42-yard line. This is immediately after the Pyburn interception and Florida has a shot to go up 16-6 and give Warner – and the defense – some breathing room. Instead, Warner gets taken down for a two-yard loss, Napier doesn’t go for it on fourth down, Crawshaw gets off a relatively poor punt, and Georgia drives down the field for a game-tying touchdown.

Georgia is giving Florida this first down. They have six men in the box against Florida’s six blockers. You can make an argument that Florida should have just run power rather than a read-option here, but either should work with the numbers advantage.

You can see where I’ve paused the video that Florida has Hayden Hansen (#89) set up to block the Georgia outside linebacker and Marcus Burke (#88) set up to block the boundary corner. That means the middle linebacker will have to chase down Warner to the outside, which should give him time to get the first down.

But Hansen doesn’t block anybody. Burke doesn’t block anybody. Warner has to go wider than he would want to given the missed block on the linebacker and he gets taken down by the corner. Perhaps there’s something else that’s supposed to happen here that doesn’t because Warner did something wrong, but it sure looks to me like those guys just assumed Warner wouldn’t keep the ball.

Georgia’s defense certainly had something to do with this play blowing up, but you aren’t going to win a lot of games if you can’t run against six men in the box on third-and-2.

Another special teams mistake

After that play, Napier decided to punt on fourth down and Georgia tied the game. But the Gators still had an opportunity to take a 16-13 lead with a 51-yard field goal.

First, the decision to kick the field goal was made on third down. It was third-and-6 at the Georgia 36-yard line and Florida ran the ball for a three-yard gain. The Bulldogs were playing two-deep safeties and had its linebackers about a yard in front of the first down marker. The Gators were probably right to try to pick up the first down on the ground.

At that point, a 51-yard field goal isn’t a chip shot. Had they just missed, or even had they just dropped the snap, it wouldn’t have been a big deal. But instead, the Gators managed to lose 31-yards as the snap went flying past holder Jeremy Crawshaw deep into Gators territory.

This was a 10-point swing, as the Gators could have been up three but instead were down by a touchdown three plays later.

Takeaway

I’m not real keen on making every week a referendum on Billy Napier’s job status.

However, I feel compelled to make the observation that something like the flubbed field goal snap seems to happen every single week to this team. When it happens against Miami, the Gators get blown out of their own stadium. When it happens against Tennessee or Georgia, the Gators lose a close one that could have otherwise ended up in the win column. The common denominator is that the Gators lose.

What I said on my Patreon postgame show is that what this game reemphasized to me is that Napier teams don’t consistently control what they can control. Players are going to get beat sometimes. They’re going to throw interceptions or miss a field goal.

But you don’t see well-coached teams not block key plays correctly. You don’t see them botch field goal snaps or have too many men on the field to kick a field goal at the end of the half.

I refuse to blame Gators fans who are ready for a change. Losing sucks. And losing to your rivals sucks even more. The Gators are now 1-10 against its rivals under Billy Napier, and there always seems to be an excuse rather than a win.

As an example, Napier got up on the podium and gave this beauty of a quote to describe Aidan Warner’s preparation: “And look, he’ll continue getting better. Think about it now, just a few weeks ago, that guy’s standing around eating ice cream.”

I’m sure Warner’s a nice kid and he was thrust into a tough situation. But he averaged 3.0 yards per throw. He isn’t Joe Biden on the campaign trail. He’s the backup QB for a major college football program.

And right now, he’s part of a team that ensured that none of Georgia’s seniors knows what its like to lose to Florida.

The Dodgers and the Gators

My son loves Shohei Ohtani, so he’s become a huge LA Dodgers fan.  On Wednesday night, the agreement I worked out with his mom was that if the Dodgers were ahead in the 8th inning and had an opportunity to close out the World Series, that I was allowed to wake him up.

The reason is pretty simple: it’s not every day that your team wins a championship.

It seems like a good time to remind us all of this after watching Lagway go down and the Gators fourth loss to the Bulldogs. This time will pass. Florida will eventually be back on top of the SEC and the country. And when they are, we all will appreciate it all the more.

For Gators fans who were around for the Spurrier/Meyer years, they saw a level of winning that is unusual for any program. The Zook interlude was annoying, but even that guy won more than he lost when he wasn’t sleeping four hours fast.

But now we’ve been out in the desert for a while. Will Muschamp’s teams couldn’t score. Jim McElwain’s teams were even worse once Will Grier was suspended. Dan Mullen’s teams stopped playing defense. And Billy Napier hasn’t been the cure for what ails us either.

But a hamstring will heal. Lagway will be back. And as Ohtani showed, sometimes having the best player in the sport sets you up to climb the mountain.

One day, the Dodgers will be terrible when Ohtani leaves and my boy will rue that he didn’t appreciate this season the way he should. That’s the natural state of being a sports fan.

But next time the Gators are on top, I can assure you that I won’t be taking it for granted.