(Photo credit: Florida Gators football creative team)
With rumors swirling about the future of Billy Napier as the Florida Gators football coach, a laundry list of contributors unavailable for the game, and the quarterback controversy between Graham Mertz and DJ Lagway reaching a fever pitch, the Florida Gators football team managed to keep itself together and do something it hadn’t done since October 14, 2023: win a football game against an SEC opponent.
It wasn’t pretty for much of the day, it got especially hairy for a little while midway through the third quarter, and it left a lot to be desired overall on the defensive side of the ball, but the Gators managed to outduel Mississippi State, 45-28 for their first SEC win since beating South Carolina on the road last October. Or rather– they outlasted Mississippi State long enough to allow the Bulldogs to self-destruct their way to another defeat in new coach Jeff Lebby’s SEC debut.
Lebby, who inherited the shattered remains of an already struggling team from Zach Arnett, and his Bulldogs are clearly in for a long, aggravating rebuild. A mere seven days before Florida visited Davis Wade Stadium, Mississippi State was embarrassed 41-17 by a so-so Toledo team in a game that was 35-3 early in the third quarter before the Rockets got bored and went into clock-killing mode. Along the way, the Bulldogs were flagged for ten penalties and turned the ball over twice, featuring a fatal interception by Blake Shapen in the end zone down 28-3 at the end of the first half that ended any hopes of a comeback.
Mississippi State didn’t display quite the same flair for botchery against the Gators, but still did plenty to hand over the game.
The Bulldogs were penalized eight times for 70 yards. Two of those flags were for holding penalties that outright crippled their respective drives. MSU receivers also dropped several passes, including completely uncontested short screens. With the state Lebby’s program is currently in from both a talent and a cohesion standpoint, they’re the last team that can afford to make things harder for itself.
Billy Napier and Florida were just fine with watching them do so, though. And fittingly, it was the Bulldogs’ penchant for implosion that finished them off on this day.
Down 35-21 and facing a fourth and goal from the Florida one, Lebby opted not to try to plow through the line– which was generally working against a suspicious Florida defensive front– and instead called a speed option. But Florida linebacker Pup Howard played it perfectly and forced Shapen to pitch it to his running back in a panic. The ball was off-target and fell to the ground as a fumble, and Howard came out of the scrum with it.
Even some of Florida’s mistakes killed Mississippi State.
Having just commandeered a coast-to-coast drive and trying to cap it in style following the goal line stand, DJ Lagway took off on a play-action draw, bounced off a few tackles and made a dive for the end zone– but the ball popped out before he crossed the plane. Despite three different Mississippi State defenders having the first shot at recovering the bouncing ball, Florida offensive lineman Austin Barber somehow submarined himself through all three of them and wound up with the ball for a touchdown. That made it 42-21 with eight minutes to play, burying the Bulldogs in a hole in which they could not climb out of.
Florida did some things right in Starkville, to be sure. Graham Mertz was super efficient with a stat line of 19/21 for 201 passing yards and accounted for four touchdowns, Florida also rushed for 226 yards on the ground as a team and Chimere Dike broke loose for a 35 yard punt return. That’s all good, and worth shouting them out. So I will.
But at the same time, this Florida defense is its own horrifying handicap, and left an inept Mississippi State team in the game far longer than it should have.
After a mostly satisfactory first half, and seemingly poised to go to the break with a 28-7 lead, the Gator defense suddenly melted in the final 1:17 of the half and surrendered a six play, 75 yard touchdown drive, featuring two deep passes to Mario Craver through the Florida secondary and a 17 yard run by Davon Booth right through the Florida front. That cut the margin to 28-14.
For an encore, Florida’s defense began the second half by again submitting to whatever Mississippi State’s offense wanted to do– only this time, the Bulldogs didn’t have the clock to worry about. So this time, Lebby’s offense did it the ground and pound way, covering 76 yards in 13 plays– ten of which were running plays– and finishing it off with a perfectly placed ball from Shapen to a leaping Jordan Mosley in the end zone to draw within a single possession.
For perspective on how drastic the Gators’ defensive drop-off was: Florida had surrendered 105 total yards on the Bulldogs’ first six drives of the game. They gave up 151 on those next two drives.
And Austin Armstrong’s defense never really did recover beyond Howard doing his assignment on the do-or-die fourth and goal play, which only came after MSU’s offense bulldozed its way through the Gator defense to get down to the one yard line to begin with. That one play, plus Mississippi State running out of time a mere yard away from another score in the game’s waning moments, (granted, with backups in, but still) were the only stops Florida’s defense made in the entire second half. As a result, Mississippi State finished with 480 yards of offense.
The good news is that 480 yards is the fewest number of yards Florida has given up to an FBS opponent this year. So technically, it’s a step in the right direction for this defense. (I’m sure readers can just imagine the sarcasm in my voice here.)
The bad news is that 480 yards is also by far the most yards Mississippi State has put up against an FBS opponent this year. For that matter, not even against their FCS cupcake opponent Eastern Kentucky could the MSU offense eclipse 450 yards. Lebby’s squad could only muster 292 yards against a very mediocre Arizona State team and took advantage of garbage time when Toledo was blowing them out to finish with a deceptively weak 385 yards. And then they drop 480 yards on Florida, which recruits a markedly different caliber of athlete than those other schools– or even Mississippi State, for that matter.
And the really bad news is that there are no more teams as weak as Mississippi State left on the schedule. Central Florida, Kentucky, and Florida State all have holes and are beatable even for this Florida Gators football team, but none of them are the abject train wreck that Mississippi State is. So this defense is going to have to keep its collective head down and focus on getting better– and fast, or else they might just be responsible for the ultimate ignobility of losing at home to Central Florida.
It was nice to see Graham Mertz come away as the hero in this game. The level of QB play the Florida Gators football team got out of him last year was far better than what you’d expect from a 5-7 team, and he ended that season by literally sacrificing his body. Now, in 2024, he’s taking a lot of ricochet shots over something that isn’t his fault the past few weeks, and to be clear, he definitely can be a successful SEC quarterback if he gets a little help from his teammates, because he’s accurate and more than happy to take what the defense gives him.
My fear, though, is because Florida is out of cupcake opponents, simply taking what the defense gives him won’t be enough to win games. As the opponents get better, the natural talent advantage Florida’s offense had over Mississippi State won’t exist as the playing field levels, meaning it’ll be harder for his offensive line to block long enough to allow him to do that. What’s more, given how awful this defense looked in the first four games of the season, I’m afraid that we’re just stuck with another terrible defense this year. Thus, for the Florida Gators football team to overcome that handicap and win games, they’ll need a high-flying offense that can score points in bunches instead of having to grind it out each drive, which increases the possibility of a mistake.
If your offensive scheme is predicated on running a man in motion before every play that’s intended to “three yards and a cloud of dust” your way to winning the time of possession rather than hitting explosive plays– or better yet, being able to do either when you want or need to if you– a quarterback who can do the spectacular and make it look routine is going to at least make opponents have to game plan for both a QB scramble possibility and the additional dimension of the deep ball.
Billy Napier, of course, doesn’t have that high-flying offense exist anywhere in his brain, which means the Florida Gators football team won’t ever have it as an option under his stewardship. The same ultra-predictable play-calling and general vanilla offensive philosophy that got him fired as the offensive coordinator at Clemson in 2010 is still on display a decade and a half later. His refusal to hire an offensive coordinator after either the 2022 or the 2023 season proved that any offense he’s in charge of will be forever limited by his lack of creativity and versatility.
The closest he can ever come to updating his offense for the 2020s is installing a quarterback who can do it for him with both a running ability and a deep ball threat. And he has that QB on his roster; he simply won’t play him. Never mind that Lagway is a freshman and is bound to make some mistakes as most freshmen do; even if he does take some lumps, he still forces a defense to respect two additional elements that Mertz simply doesn’t have, so unless he’s throwing four picks per game, you have to roll those dice if you’re serious about winning.
But Napier won’t do that either, opting instead for a platoon system where Mertz plays two out of every three drives and Lagway plays the other one. In a way, that’s even worse than picking the second-best QB as the starter, because that’s an easy way to pointlessly yank whichever QB just led the touchdown drive out of the groove he’d found. Making matters worse, he thoughtlessly announced to the entire world before the game began on Saturday just for maximum predictability purposes.
Luckily, Mississippi State’s defense is so helpless that knowing what was coming ahead of time wasn’t going to help them. Against any other team on the schedule other than maybe Samford, it’s almost surely not going to work out so seamlessly.
The bottom line, at least in the super short term, is Florida finally broke into the win column in SEC play. And that’s great. It certainly beats the alternative.
It’s also somewhat reassuring that Florida also seems to have broken whatever strange voodoo spell Mississippi State has historically had on Florida in their home stadium. The venue in which Steve Spurrier’s national powerhouse Gator teams were shocked by far inferior Mississippi State teams in both of his trips there (1992 and 2000), as well as served as the death sentence for Ron Zook in 2004when his #19 ranked Gators lost to a 3-8 MSU team that lost to Maine that same year, seems to have lost its “house of horrors” status for Florida. The Gators have now won three straight games there– 2009, 2018, 2024– despite making a lot of mistakes in all three games. So that’s good to know, too.
Sadly, that was the only one of Billy Napier’s problems that was fixed with this win. No other issue with the Florida Gators football program under Billy Napier, past, present, or future, was resolved. Florida showing that it is actually not allergic to scoring more points than an FBS team lined up against them is the only thing this win accomplished, and without any of the major issues that led to Florida losing all those games in the first place being addressed, combined with better opponents coming every week the rest of the way, there’s real reason for concern the Florida Gators football team will stay out of the losing column for much longer.
Honestly, I do understand those who criticize me for being mostly negative after a win– I truly do get it– but the fact is that one win over a historically irrelevant program that’s currently struggling even by its low standards doesn’t fix the porous defense Napier is tossing onto the field for a third year in a row. Nor does it fix the three straight off-seasons that were wasted without an SEC football-caliber strength and conditioning program. And it especially doesn’t help matters in the QB decision department. If anything, it might embolden Napier to say, “hmmm, well, we scored 45 points and won the last time I did the platoon thing, so surely it’ll work again vs. Central Florida!” and then ride that strategy to yet another loss to a team that’s less talented but better coached. Bonus points if the newly-inserted QB makes a bad throw or misses a read or a check because he got taken out of the rhythm he’d settled into just because Napier said so. (By the way, that goes for either QB– Mertz or Lagway– whichever one he yanks from the game.)
Because Florida now has a bye week, that’s where this program will sit for the next two weeks. Despite rumblings that Texas A&M would be the last game Billy Napier ever coached, he survived another week– at least as far as the public knows. I’d love to be wrong and shut the Central Florida fans up with the talking point of “You lost to Billy Napier,” but I’ve got a sinking feeling that we’re due for yet another embarrassing home loss to an inferior opponent that dominates us on the line of scrimmage as we collectively spend three and a half hours next Saturday night alternatively screaming about the strength and conditioning program being a punchline and bad evaluations by Napier & Co on what he claimed was supposed to be his best roster he’s ever had.
Looking for me to be more positive? Here it is: if I’m right, this next loss for Billy Napier will be his last. So at least there’s that.
