Post-Game Discussion: Florida at Utah

If that is true, this is going to be an awful year of watching football.

 

Flag on the play! lol

Pruitt went 16-19 (.457) from 2018-2020 (5-7-, 8-5 and 3-7), and Fulmer's last four years had two losing seasons. His other two years were baslcally Zookian. Phat Phil was at the end of the line, contracting Bowden and Beamer Disease, replaced for a year by Lane Kiffin, who went 7-6.

Ten years prior to Dooley: 83-44 (.653)
Ten years prior to Napier: 80-46 (.635)

Not very far apart, especially if you factor in the schedule.

Top 10 recruiting ranks for Tenn prior to Dooley: 6 of 10
Top 10 recruiting ranks for Florida prior to Billy: 7 of 10

Yes, I know rankings aren't everything, that there are numerous intangibles that affect the success or failure of the talent. But that applies to all teams. It is not like Florida is singularly snakebit. Prior to Dooley, Tennessee had two head coaches in a decade. Prior to Billy, Florida had three head coaches.

 

Napier does appear to be a great recruiter, at least on paper. He’s also a great interview and works well with the media and says all the right things. He absolutely kills it during Talking Season.

The problem is, so far at least, he seems mediocre at best at actually coaching the game of football and/or surrounding himself with assistants who are good at coaching the game of football.

Talking Season is over. This isn’t EA Sports where you can just recruit and create custom players and then simulate the pesky season on your way to a fantasy dynasty.

The games are here. You can’t stop the games. They’re coming.

 

agreed, I want to like Napier and he seems like a great guy. But I really dislike his offensive scheme - it's too slow, too methodical and too much unnecessary window dressing on every play. We take forever to get calls in and then try to implement last second pre-snap shifts with the play clock running out, waste pocket time with play/pump fakes on nearly every pass regardless of situation, and we don't seem to have any type of hot reads to beat blitzes. An internet chump like me could see Utah was bringing heavy pressure on the INT, but Pearsall still ran that relatively slow developing stutter step hitch underneath the clearing routes rather than adjusting and getting his head turned around quicker.

and like you mentioned, the predictability of our playcalls on third and long drives me up a wall.

I don't want to overreact to game 1 - we have a lot of young talent, and if we didn't beat ourselves constantly with dumb mistakes over and over we could've been right there in this game. And I'm not expecting this team to be very good, a 7 win season would be a success in my book. But it's really disheartening to see the Gators come out for Year 2 of the Billy Napier Experience and have that kind of performance. Wins or not, I have to see some kind of offensive adjustments and overall improvement from last year to this one to be able to stay positive about our head coach for the long term, and this was a terrible, horrible, no-good way to start.

 

Unless the OL plays as a unit, there will be more losses than wins in 2023. I believe the OL will get better, but, until that happens, the offense obviously will be painful to watch. Many are blaming Napier, but neither Spurrier or Meyer could have fixed the problem last night. Too many new parts, especially on the OL!

 

A combination of young inexperienced/average to slightly above average talent means the staff will have to do a masterful job of "coaching". Discipline is key. Being smart and knowing your assignment is key. It could be that it was the first game to some degree but what I saw was a team that doesn't look well coached. There are issues across the board based on last night's game, O, D and ST. Total team loss, and that includes the coaches. This team has a lot of work to do.

 

I never react same day. I sleep on it. That said:
That sequence where we get cute trying to draw them offside rather than ramming it down their throat - get a false start instead, miss the field goal, stop them and force a punt just to get a procedure penalty for the jersey was a 14-point swing most likely. Absolutely critical series of mishaps. The latter of which is totally on the coaching staff.
Lines of scrimmage are very average at best. D-line is deeper than it has been in previous years, but the peak of its play isn't much higher. New guys showed some flash, but will need to be coached up. Loss of Boone here amplified.
O-line is serviceable at best. There might be some room to grow here with the new talent but either way this HAS to be a priority in the portal during this cycle. We need ready to play talent now.

I like Napier and I think he does a lot of things right. And I went into last night with almost zero thought about the hot seat talk and thought there was very little that could happen to change that. But what I saw tonight seemed to come down to a lack of preparation. You can't get more than 300 yards out of Mertz and do so little in the running game plus shoot yourself in the foot with penalties that you only score 11 points, while the competition you out-gained in overall yardage puts up 24. You can't have players fielding punts inside the 5. You can't be getting the defensive calls in so late that the defense can't get set. All these things come back to coaching and the staff.

I really hope that some of this was just first game jitters because if not its gonna be a long season. I fully expected this to be year 2 of a rebuilding cycle. Im okay with talent gaps with opponents. But mistakes that are purely down to the coaching staff and basic preparation will get me wondering about the long-term feasibility of this staff.

 

Maybe they thought we couldn’t run on Utah, which would make no sense inasmuch as we killed them on the run last year.
I think we should have pounded the ball until it was ineffective and then mixed up the calls. Our flanker/WR running in motion behind Mertz looked sophomoric in a middle school kind of way.

 

He will never want an offense like that.

 

Napier seems to be very calm and collected over on the sidelines, which is usually going to be a positive. But after we forced the punt and had two number 3's out on the field to give them the first down again he should have lit a fire over there Saban style. We lost all momentum.

 

Think about it: remove the illegal procedure penalties and two 3's on the field at the same time, and this game would have had a different outcome. We kept creating momentum, and the illegal procedure penalties continually killed our momentum!!!

 

The reason Etienne didn't have 30 carries is because Utah keyed on the run, and the o-line played very, very poorly. Can't run if the o-line doesn't block. People were talking all pre-season about how good this line would be, but I never saw it. They proved me right last night.

Very poor execution on offense and special teams.

 

But what is the basis for that assumption, really? His first two classes were subpar, the first one understandably, the second not. If the answer to that is “Dude! We’re, like, sitting on a top-5 class right now!” Well, okay, but we won’t be with on-field performance like last night. Young men are not going to come play for a guy who looks like he’s not going to finish three seasons as head coach. And — no one has to like it; I don’t — but that’s what Napier looks like right now. Too much of what we saw last night was on coaching, not talent. Even if you really, really don’t want to change coaches again so soon, you had better believe that’s what our enemies are telling our commits. I would be.

 

An offense that produces everytime on the field!
You are correct.

 

Yup, get rid of one of the inept OL coaches and hire an OC. Maybe Billy can coach special teams himself and get rid of that awful "GaMeChAnGeR coordinator".

 

This will be a theme all year most likely. With teams stacking the box to stuff the run because under BN, stopping the run is how you beat UF. 0-6 when under 150 yards rushing, 6-2 when over. I'll just keep saying it, if I'm the opposing D coordinator my whole D is 5 yards from the LOS.

 

We have just not had any luck on OL since the end of last year. Tarquin, Braun, and White leave. Waites tears his Achilles, and then Godwin leaves before fall camp. It’s the position group you need to be the most stable and ours isn’t. Hopefully they can clean up things like the false starts before they go to Kentucky and USCe.

 

This right here sums it up well, the entire design is a trash heap, imho. The redzone offense is a snooze fest.

He came out throwing early and often, much like the Vandy game, with a similar result. Raise your hand if you thought Mertz would attempt 44 passes last night? Some say, well they couldn’t run the ball. He knew that before the start?? It was clearly a pass first game plan. Later in the game when they were driving by running the ball, he goes back to the pass and the drive stalls. Maddening!

 

For a bit of levity, I made a comment to my friend somewhere in the 2nd half that it was appropriate our center was named Slaughter, cause that was what it looked like.

 

I like Napier as a person quite a lot. Not sure as a coach. While I agree we need an OC, I think we are mistaken if we think it will solve many of our problems. We looked uninspired, tired, lethargic, ill-prepared, and not very good across the board.
I want to be optimistic but it’s hard to think this team is going to competitive this year.