Florida Vets Look Like Freshmen in Shaky Debut

by Year2 on Sep 5, 2010 12:00 PM EDT in SEC Football

It was not an auspicious start for Florida's offense.

Having now slept on what I saw in Gainesville yesterday, I am fairly confident we won't see that again. A lot of key players were out, three guys on the O-line were playing out of position, and the first-game jitters were in full effect.

That said, it wasn't any of the young guys who were the real problem. Aside from Josh Evans's comically stupid pass interference penalty and Mike Gillislee's fumble a femtosecond before being down, the freshmen and sophomores looked all right. The veterans were the real problem:

Senior Mike Pouncey couldn't find the quarterback on a litany of bad snaps.
Junior John Brantley fumbled a couple of those bad snaps.
Junior Deonte Thompson and senior Carl Moore dropped passes.
Senior Emmanuel Moody fumbled a standard toss sweep and got nothing done between the tackles.
Juniors Jeff Demps and Chris Rainey had fumbles in the open field.

It was far and away the strangest game I've ever attended in the Swamp, and I hope I never see one like it again. You would think that veteran players won't play like freshmen into the indefinite future, so Florida might turn out all right after all. Yesterday's game was just a snowball rolling down hill, where one thing just lead to another. After a while, you just knew they weren't going to gain their composure again.

That said, a repeat performance will get them beat next week against USF. If they're going to, ahem, snap out of their first weekend funk, they had better do it quickly.

Tweet Comment 7 comments | 0 recs |

Do you like this story?

Comments

I have to wonder if Mike Pouncey was doing that in practice

What was going on there? Is there an explanation for why the Center play was so bad?

Also, Emmanuel Moody was very unimpressive. I’m cutting Brantley some slack, though. When you’re taking bad snap after bad snap, you’re just going to fumble one or two of them. From what I saw (and I left for tailgating for my own game after the first quarter, so enlighten me if anything changed), Brantley actually looked decent, and if the receivers hadn’t had butter all over their hands, he could have made some good drives.

"You know, we had a lot of fun tonight. But there's nothing funny about vapor lock! It's the third most common cause of cars stalling. So please, take care of your car and get it checked!" -Joe Namath

by billycthulhu on Sep 5, 2010 12:34 PM EDT reply actions

In the post game interviews on Gainesville radio, everyone said that snaps had not been a problem in practice. Since all the preseason practices were closed, we have no idea if that’s true or not, but that was the story from everyone.

Absent the bad snaps/fumbles, Brantley was fine. He was hamstrung by the scheme a bit, as Addazio called almost no intermediate routes. Almost everything was either swing/screen passes or deep bombs. Aside from an overthrow on a deep pass to Moore, he was sharp. The coaches were clearly uneasy about doing anything in the middle of the field because of how bad of shape the line was in (not to mention the bad snaps throwing off rhythm), so we didn’t really get to see the real offense. But, when the snaps were on target, Brantley was pretty efficient.

Team Speed Kills -- SBNation's SEC Blog
If you're so inclined, follow me @Year2

by Year2 on Sep 5, 2010 4:09 PM EDT up reply actions