Although it took several miracle plays to defeat South Carolina, I felt like the offense started to make positive strides in that game forward, at least out of necessity. More passes downfield, offense really opened up. Fewer horizontal passes which are glorified run plays. Other than UGA and FSU (without Mertz), I thought Napier finally turned the corner on his offensive playcalling. Was this misguided? Am I remembering incorrectly? Because what we saw on Saturday (I was there, melting in the east stands) was exactly what the offense was the prior 1.5 years. I don't want to create duplicate topics, but my spin is there WAS improvement in the offense last year out of necessity, and it just went all away in our opener this year.
You are sort of correct that the improvement "just went all away". What caused this to happen? 1, Napier has not changed his game play in two plus season. Miami openly admited this the other day. They read the keys they saw in the game films of last year and they reacted accordingly. 2, The offensive line play had not degraded from last season. It is just as bad this past Saturday as it was last year. Maybe worse. 3, The defense still looks like the defense that we had with Grantham from two season ago. The so-called upgrades in coaches in the past two season seem to be retrogrades.
If you look at the games in which our OL was dominated last year (UK, UGA) they pretty much looked exactly like this past weekend. Then top it off with Mertz having probably his worst game as a Gator, and you're gonna have a bad time.
I have to disagree, Miami would’ve put up 60 on Grantham. Ward would be an heisman candidate right now. Our defense under him was not the worst I’ve seen for Florida, it was one of the worst I’ve seen in CFB ever. Mullen may still have a job here if he had never made that hire. He reverted our whole identity as a DBU down to zero. So yeah, the defense still is not good. But it’s getting better compared to the state it was in.
I think Miami could have put 60 if they wanted and Cam Ward is currently one of the Heisman leaders. It was 38-10 halfway through the third and it definitely looked like they took their foot off the gas and coasted easily in.
It seems that BN goes into every season thinking his offense (power running, bunched formations, flood routes) will work. Perhaps later in the season he recognizes that his teams cannot defeat most (any?) good, well coached teams with a pedestrian, predictable offense. I expect the offense may look better moving forward with Lagway and perhaps BN realization that we must use more deception and take more risks. However, the great coaches adapt to optimize their talent and hide weaknesses. Any grudging motion in that direction last season is not very satisfying (especially since we still ended on a horrendous losing streak after dropping games we should have won or been more competitive in).
