Welcome to the Florida Gators, VBIII. (Photo credit: James Gilbert, Getty)
The Florida Gators hammered Long Island 55-0 to begin the 2025 season. How did it go down?
The turning point was:
Bryce Thornton scored the game’s first touchdown and it was abundantly clear that Long Island had no answers.
It was over when:
Florida A&M, the originally scheduled season opening opponent, backed out of the game and forced Florida to find a lone punching bag for an otherwise brutal schedule. Whoever this void was filled by was doomed from the moment they agreed to play it, and it turned out to be Long Island. At no point was this game’s outcome ever truly in doubt.
Grades for the Florida Gators:
Note: because of the vastly inferior level of competition, grades this week will be only done on the binary pass/fail scale.
Offense:
Pass. An eye-squint-worthy pass because of some suspicious play by the offensive line and the time it took for DJ Lagway to get in sync, but a pass nonetheless because he did grow more comfortable as the game progressed. And we saw Tre Wilson make his return. And Tramell Jones looked fantastic as the QB2. And… well, Vernell Brown III has arrived. This is a relatively easy passing grade to give despite the imperfections.
Defense:
Pass. The defense’s performance is why I’m only doing the pass/fail scale this week. Because they looked spectacular… against a Long Island team that was picked to finish tied for third in the not-so-mighty Northeastern Conference. There’s a big difference between the first five letters of that league and the first five letters of the league Florida plays in, and it was on full display Saturday night. We’ll get a much better gauge of this defense against a vastly improved USF squad before the Florida Gators travel to Red Stick. But for now, pass.
Special Teams:
Fail. Sorry, Vernell Brown, that was a nice punt return you had, and sorry, Tommy Roman, that was a nice 47 yard punt you had, but Trey Smack– thought to be a bright spot– missed three field goals. Field goal kicking is the one thing that really doesn’t change in terms of evaluating how the player does as the competition goes up and down, and against LSU and Miami, three missed field goals could make all the difference. I’m not too worried about this being a long-term issue, I do think Smack will rebound, but in terms of grading this one game, that was a failure.
Coaching:
Pass. We can quibble about some of the repetitive screen calls and some of the route concept, but I can’t get too mad about it in a game where Florida rolled up double nickels and pitched a shutout. And what I’m about to touch on next is a credit to Billy Napier and the Florida Gators coaching staff, too.
Three stats of the game for the Florida Gators:
Stat #1: 0. Florida racked up the grand slam of zeroes in this game: the good kind. Zero penalties. Zero turnovers. Zero points allowed. And most importantly of all: zero injuries. How about that strength and conditioning staff?
Stat #2: 20-19. That’s Billy Napier’s overall record at Florida, which is north of .500 for the first time since midway through his second season. He’ll try to keep it that way with a win over South Florida, which obliterated Boise State 34-7 on Thursday night.
Stat #3: 5. Florida has now won five consecutive games for the first time under Billy Napier.
The takeaway for the Florida Gators is:
I honestly have no idea, show me more data. We said in our pregame game-by-game predictions that this game would be by far the easiest, and well, that’s how it played out.
We’ll get that additional game tape next week and in the ten games that lay beyond. Even Mississippi State and Kentucky, as perhaps the two worst teams in the SEC, will put up a far better battle than Long Island did. This game told me almost nothing, other than that Lagway is indeed a human, who needs reps to look good like anybody else, and that Tramell Jones is locked in as QB2.
I have no clue how to gauge this defense. The level of opposition was so bad that, if you watched that game and knew nothing else about this team, it would feel equally likely that Florida will finish with the best defense in the league as it does the worst; this game provided zero insight as to where in that range they will fall. We knew George Gumbs and Tyreak Sapp were animals, we knew Myles Graham was poised to take a step up and become a leader in the middle level in his second year, and we knew that the defense as a whole was deep enough that it wasn’t going to miss Caleb Banks in a game like this.
And anybody who even remotely follows recruiting knew that Vernell Brown III is an uber-talented psycho-athlete who could make ridiculous plays simply by existing in the lineup. It was fantastic to see him ball out, don’t get me wrong, but let’s see him do it against the likes of LSU and Miami before we start generating Biletnikoff or All-American hype for the true freshman.
Long story short, let’s see how the next few games go before we start drawing conclusions.
