Florida Gators 2021 preview: Expectations high with new QB leading Gators
Florida enters 2021 riding a three-game losing streak with just three weeks to prepare before the Gators get Alabama in Gainesville.
The offense lost its best players to the draft and the same defense that sank UF’s College Football Playoff hopes in spite of an all-time offense didn’t do much to improve this offseason.
Still, the expectations for coach Dan Mullen in Year 4 at Florida are high — UF comes in at No. 13 in The Associated Press Top 25 poll and No. 11 in the Coaches’ poll. The way Florida won (and lost) games a season ago will not be how it goes about its business with a new quarterback behind center.
It’s finally Emory Jones’ time behind center. After sitting in waiting behind Feleipe Franks and Kyle Trask, Jones gets the reins to an offense that will revolve around the run, his strong suit. He’s a fast, powerful dual-threat quarterback with a strong arm. His skill set allows Mullen to tip the offense back in favor of the rush after allowing Kyle Trask to throw the ball the majority of the time in 2020 en route to a Heisman Trophy finalist finish.
Jones won’t have the same shiny toys that Trask had at his disposal. The Gators’ top three receiving options from a season ago — Kyle Pitts, Kadarius Toney and Trevon Grimes — all left for the NFL. Florida returns some production at receiver, namely Jacob Copeland and Justin Shorter, but the strength of this offense is the running back room that’s loaded with homegrown talent (Dameon Pierce and Malik Davis) and former five-star transfers (Lorenzo Lingard and Demarkcus Bowman).
UF finished just outside the top 10 in points per game and led the nation in passing yards last year. Both of those metrics are prime for drastic regression, which puts pressure on the defense. The defensive line and linebacker group both have standout players returning — Zachary Carter, Brenton Cox and Ventrell Miller are all back. The biggest weakness for this defense was not up front, though, it was the secondary. The Gators yielded 257.5 passing yards per game last season, which ranked 100th in the NCAA. With the offense likely incapable of putting up 40 points on any given Saturday, it has to limit its opponents in the passing game and keep Alabama and Georgia from doing so. Kaiir Elam is a preseason All-America at corner, but he can’t do it alone.
The SEC schedule is never easy, and Florida gets No. 1 Alabama in the regular season for the first time since 2014. Outside of Alabama, the yearly bout with No. 16 LSU (in Baton Rouge) and a date in Jacksonville with No. 5 Georgia stand out as the toughest games of the season for Florida. The Gators lost to a Tigers team it should have handled last season and beat a Georgia team that figured its offense out after the Gators romped to a win.
UF could very easily lose all three of those games and find itself vying for a high-profile bowl game as a consolation prize thanks to a ranking buoyed by high preseason expectations. Winning one of the three should be considered a success considering the turnover this team faced. If the Gators take two of them, it could spell an improbable return to the SEC Championship Game and would be a master class coaching job from Mullen.
Florida was a talented team in 2020 that couldn’t get out of its own way. It pushed the eventual national champion Crimson Tide to the brink a week after virtually eliminating itself from playoff contention thanks to an inconceivable penalty against LSU. The Gators can’t just lean on talent the way they did last season, and its SEC foes reloaded while the team was depleted by more draft departures than usual.
Mullen has a good track record with mobile quarterbacks, though, and Jones knows the system well. When Florida hosts Alabama early in the season it will be a good indication of just how competitive this team will be.