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Monday Down South: Is it too soon for Florida to panic? Or already too late?

Matt Hinton

By Matt Hinton

Published:

Weekly takeaways, trends and technicalities from the weekend’s SEC action.

Stained The Swamp

Look, Miami might be pretty good. Like, first-round-bye good. Based on his performance in The Swamp, portal gem Cam Ward is probably going to shred most of the defenses he sees this season. Granted. But Florida is not the kind of program that grades itself on a curve, and there is no way to spin Saturday’s 41-17 home loss to the Canes as anything other than a dark omen.

The stakes were plain enough going in: If the Gators were going to have a realistic shot at eking out 6 wins against a nightmare of a schedule, Miami had to be one of them. Instead, they woke up on Sept. 1 already staring down the barrel of their fourth consecutive losing season — one that’s all the more the depressing for being all too predictable.

The tone was set on Miami’s first offensive possession, when an apparent 3rd-and-10 stop by Florida’s defense was negated by a penalty for roughing the passer; instead of settling for a field goal, the Hurricanes hit paydirt two plays later to go up 7-0 and never looked back. More than just a deflating start to the season, that sequence felt like a bad case of déjà vu: The Gators also gave up an early touchdown set up by a stupid penalty in last year’s opener, a 24-11 loss at Utah that served as an accurately bleak forecast for the rest of the year. The ’24 campaign opened under the same cloud, which shows no signs of lifting anytime soon. Altogether, Miami scored on 6 of its first 8 possessions and outgained Florida more than 2-to-1 in total offense, 529 yards to 261.

Obviously, the sand is running out on Billy Napier, whose record vs. power-conference opponents now stands at 7-15 with 6 straight losses. Napier’s defenders have sometimes pointed to a diminished talent base that fell behind the curve under his predecessor, Dan Mullen, who was respected on the Xs and Os side but never known as a particularly energetic recruiter.

Maybe that line would still have some traction if this was a winning team whose biggest problem was struggling to get over the hump against Georgia, rather than what it actually is: A thoroughly mediocre outfit that has yet to show any signs of progress on Napier’s watch. Florida’s current roster ranks 12th nationally in 247Sports’ Team Talent Composite — 2 spots ahead of Miami’s — and 11th according to the Blue-Chip Ratio. What little patience was left in the bank in Year 3 was reserved for a product that could at least pass for competitive, whatever that meant after taking the schedule into account. It definitely does not cover getting taken to the woodshed in your own stadium by an in-state rival with a well-earned reputation for underachieving in its own right.

Normally, I’d rather be the guy warning against overreacting to an opening-day flop than banging the gavel. But anyone who can look at a slate that still includes 6 more ranked opponents (plus Texas A&M, UCF and Kentucky) and still chart a course to bowl eligibility for the team that took the field on Saturday needs to be admitted for heat stroke. It’s not just that the Gators were bad in Week 1: 3 years into the Napier era, what does the good version look like? What do they have to hang their hats on, even in theory?

Not the defense. As badly as Napier wants this to be a hard-nosed, defensively-driven program, it’s going in the opposite direction. Florida finished near the bottom of the SEC in both total and scoring D in 2023 under first-year coordinator Austin Armstrong, going up in flames over the second half of the season. Rather than starting over from scratch, though, Napier kept the 31-year-old Armstrong aboard and brought in a former colleague, journeyman Ron Roberts, to serve as a mentor. (Exactly how their duties break down isn’t quite clear; in addition to co-defensive coordinator, Roberts’ official title also includes “executive head coach.”) But 8 of the 11 starters against Miami were holdovers from last year, and they picked up right where the ’23 team left off, giving up 7.7 yards per play.

Not the quarterback, either. Graham Mertz has some wily vet qualities, especially when it comes to avoiding the negative play — in 2023, he finished with the highest completion percentage in the SEC and lowest interception percentage in the entire Power 5. He won’t get you beat, as long as the defense and ground game are holding up their end of the bargain. When they’re not, he’s a sitting duck. In Year 6, whatever play-making ability he might have possessed as an underclassman at Wisconsin was beaten out of him a long time ago. On Saturday, Mertz was 0-for-4 on attempts of 20+ air yards and 1-for-9 on pressured drop-backs, per Pro Football Focus, including 3 sacks, a fumble, and an ugly INT on what turned out to be his final snap of the day.

If there was anything remotely resembling a silver lining, it was the belated appearance of Mertz’s understudy, 5-star freshman DJ Lagway, who got a huge ovation when he entered the game and went on to lead Florida’s only sustained scoring drive, a 9-play, 58-yard touchdown march on his second series. Lagway looked good on the drive, going 3-for-4 for 31 yards as a passer and adding a 16-yard gain on the ground. Of course, by that point it was strictly cosmetic, and even Lagway’s garbage-time debut was mixed; his other 2 possessions resulted in a 3-and-out and an interception, respectively.

But when Napier cued up the film on Sunday morning, what else did he see to reassure him? Benching a struggling incumbent for a fledgling teenager one game into the season might be a panic move, just the kind of energy Napier was desperately hoping to avoid giving off.

But brother, it’s panic time.

Mertz reportedly suffered a concussion on the hit that ended his afternoon; his status for this weekend’s date against Samford is TBD, but there’s no reason to rush him back against an FCS doormat. Instead, it represents a relatively low-stakes opportunity to let Lagway take the offense for a test drive in the 1 remaining game the Gators are assured of winning without the drama of an outright demotion. If his audition is a hit, then it’s time to seriously consider abandoning the low-risk approach for the kind of upside that gives them half a chance when the defense gives up 38 points in the first 3 quarters. Because it’s plain enough there’s no one waiting in the wings who’s suddenly going to solve that.

After Saturday, frankly Napier is left with very little choice. The status quo is a slow, sad slog to irrelevance. The only really unacceptable risk now is to continue to double down.

Georgia: Bullying by the book

At some point over the past few years, Georgia officially supplanted Alabama as the league’s standard bearer for routine, workmanlike dominance, and the Bulldogs’ 34-3 win over Clemson was a classic entry in the genre. Aside from featuring a couple of blue-chip national brands, the game itself was forgettable in exactly the way Georgia games tend to be: The Bulldogs led 6-0 after a first half befitting of that score, and didn’t pull away until a sudden burst of offense in the second half turned a mutual slugfest into a one-sided romp.

Carson Beck put up a good-not-great stat line (23-for-33, 278 yards, 2 TDs, 0 INTs) without completing a pass of 20+ air yards. At the end of the day, UGA racked up 447 yards of total offense on 7.5 yards per play — an explosive number, on paper — without any individual player hogging the spotlight or the box score. The defense put Clemson’s offense in a chokehold in the first half and kept squeezing until most of the nearly 8 million people who tuned in felt themselves nodding off: Only 1 of the Tigers’ first 9 offensive possessions ended in Georgia territory. (That drive yielded their only points, courtesy of a field goal that cut the deficit to 13-3 midway through the third quarter, but after failing to covert a precious goal-to-go opportunity into a touchdown the decision to settle for 3 may as well have been waving the white flag. UGA’s offense responded with a touchdown drive that effectively put the game on ice.) At no point was the outcome even a little bit in doubt, regardless of the margin at any given moment on the scoreboard.

https://twitter.com/GeorgiaFootball/status/1829966994738946127/

So yeah, yet another standard-issue Georgia beatdown of a serious opponent, ho hum. Kirby Smart‘s Dawgs are so fundamentally sound in the blocking-and-tackling department that it’s easy to take for granted, even against the likes of Clemson. But the boring stuff still adds up. PFF charged Georgia as a team with a grand total of 2 missed tackles on the afternoon, severely limiting the Tigers’ yards after contact on the ground (44) and yards after catch (54). By way of comparison, PFF dinged Clemson for 8 missed tackles, while nearly two-thirds of Georgia’s total output came after contact/catch. Beck was pressured six times by Clemson’s ferocious d-line, sacked once, and otherwise not touched.

Anyway, at the end of the day nobody’s really interested in any of that. Once the score was out of reach the basics were no match for the takes, which were almost entirely aimed at the losing side. Georgia may be just plain old Georgia, but Clemson? The Tigers are officially also-rans, again, their decline from the ranks of year-in, year-out contenders extending into its fourth season and counting. By now, the diagnosis is well-rehearsed.

The lowest-hanging fruit is Dabo Swinney‘s refusal to engage with the transfer portal, which at this point almost reads as spite for being asked about it nonstop. Swinney is not wrong when he insists most of the players in the portal are just guys, not difference-makers. The current roster is as as well-stocked as ever, coming in 5th nationally in the Team Talent Composite and 10th in the Blue-Chip Ratio. The few transfers who could crack the two-deep for the Tigers are replacement-level, at best. But the portal allergy not only makes for a convenient scapegoat: It also makes the cracks in the facade that much more visible. The bigger concern: The post-pandemic version of Clemson is a developmental program that is falling behind the curve in development.

That’s most obvious behind center, where junior QB Cade Klubnik is no closer to living up to his 5-star billing than the guy he replaced, DJ Uiagalelei. Klubnik finished with dismal numbers on Saturday in terms of efficiency (96.3), Total QBR (40.8), and EPA (-2.1) in his 15th career start. But the same can be said for his surrounding cast, which continued to look as juiceless as it has over the past 3 seasons. The Tigers’ longest gain on the ground covered just 9 yards; the only downfield completion came on a highlight-reel grab in traffic. If a Clemson receiver ever managed to get separation against Georgia’s defensive backs, it happened strictly off-screen.

Meanwhile, it was lost on none of Swinney’s critics that both of Beck’s touchdown passes went to transfers playing their first game in a Georgia uniform, Colbie Young (Miami) and London Humphreys (Vanderbilt). The 6-3, 215-pound Young was recruited specifically as a red-zone target, and delivered in that capacity right away; Humphreys, a true sophomore, came aboard after breaking a 49-yard touchdown against UGA last year in Nashville, and scored Saturday in virtually identical fashion. There’s no need to overstate the case here: Georgia is a developmental program, too. Young and Humphreys were 2 of only 4 former transfers who saw meaningful snaps for the Dawgs on either side of the ball, along with fellow wideout Dominic Lovett and tight end Benjamin Yurosek. But their respective skill sets were suited to particular roles, and they both made an immediate impact in them.

https://twitter.com/GeorgiaFootball/status/1829942848818757815/

Obviously, Clemson has a lot more work to do to close the gap than identifying a couple of productive role players. We haven’t even touched here on the departures of long-time coordinators on both sides of the ball. (This column does need to see the light of day by Monday.) The quarterback situation remains an albatross, and not only against the Georgias of the world. But recruiting hype notwithstanding, let’s not pretend anybody ever had Cade Klubnik pegged for the second coming of Trevor Lawrence. The guy after Klubnik isn’t going to be that, either, or the guy after him. If stumbling into the second coming of Trevor Lawrence is what it’s going to take to get the Tigers back to where they want to be, they’re going to be in limbo for a good long while. Until then, the longer they wait to join the rest of the sport in competing for the best available talent, the wider the gap is going to get.

LSU: Losing its edge

LSU fans spent all of last season waiting for Harold Perkins Jr. to look like his dominant freshman self as a pass rusher, and lamenting the fact that he was lining up significantly more often in space than on the edge. The architect of Perkins’ sophomore slump, defensive coordinator Matt House, was sent packing last December on the heels of a disastrous campaign for the defense as a whole; the new DC, Blake Baker, arrived from Missouri vowing to implement a more “aggressive, attacking style” with an emphasis on havoc, renewing the prospect of Perkins pinning his ears back on a regular basis in Year 3.

The early verdict based on Sunday night’s 27-20 loss to USC: More of the same.

Perkins was on the field for 54 of LSU’s 63 defensive snaps against the Trojans, per PFF. On the vast majority of those, he was stationed as a conventional off-ball linebacker, logging just 10 plays on the edge and 4 in the slot. His dozen pass-rushing reps (both off the edge and as a blitzer) came up empty: Zero sacks, zero hits, zero pressures.

On USC’s game-winning 2-minute drill in the fourth quarter — the definition of an obvious passing situation — Perkins didn’t come after Trojans QB Miller Moss a single time, or threaten to. Instead, he loitered passively in short zone coverage on every play, recording a couple of tackles in the process but otherwise making no impact. USC drove 75 yards in 8 plays for the winning TD without facing a 3rd down.

Following the loss, Brian Kelly vented in his postgame press conference about dumb penalties, complacency late in the game, and a failure to finish after taking a 17-13 lead into the fourth quarter. He banged the table for emphasis. The absence of his most talented pass rusher from the pass-rushing rotation on the game’s most crucial series of passing downs went unmentioned.

Regardless of his production, Perkins’ deployment remains and will continue to remain a sore point for two reasons. The first, and most obvious, is the raw explosiveness that made him a rising star in the first place, and which he still flashes when given the chance. Although he didn’t register as a pass rusher, he did make one of the most eye-opening plays of the game in the first half when he knifed into the backfield so quickly he was able to account for both the quarterback and the running back on a zone read — an emphatic reminder of what he’s capable of when he’s on the attack:

The other reason is the fact that the Tigers are in dire need of all the pass-rushing juice they can get. They’re not cranking out next-level edge rushers in Baton Rouge like they used to. Excluding Perkins (who still led the team last year in both sacks and pressures despite dropping into coverage about twice as often as he rushed), no other edge rusher in 2023 finished with more than 2.5 sacks or 22 pressures on the year. Against USC, LSU generated pressure on just 6 of Moss’ 40 drop-backs, per PFF, even while blitzing on nearly half of them. That number includes a pair of sacks by senior Sai’vion Jones, and does not include 3 passes batted down behind the line of scrimmage. But on the significant majority of reps that he was kept clean, Moss was 25-for-31 for 356 yards and a touchdown.

Getting the most out of Perkins’ unique skill set is not just a matter of parking him on the edge. At 6-1/225, he’s not big enough to hold up full-time against the run, and his future as a pro is most likely in a traditional off-ball role. Micah Parsons he is not. While he’s still on campus, though, he is arguably the best pure speed rusher in the college game, part-time or otherwise. Whether giving him the chance to prove it against USC would have made any difference down the stretch, we’ll never know. But the Tigers can’t afford to keep wondering.

Superlatives

The best individual performances of Week 1.

1. South Carolina DEs Kyle Kennard and Dylan Stewart. Kennard and Stewart were the 2 most anticipated additions to South Carolina’s defense, albeit for different reasons: Kennard, a 5th-year transfer from Georgia Tech, came with meaningful Power 5 experience; Stewart, the gem of Carolina’s incoming recruiting class, came with 5-star credentials. In their first game as Gamecocks, they each dominated in their own right, combining for 11 QB pressures, 4 sacks and 4 forced fumbles in a down-to-the-wire, 23-19 win over Old Dominion that owed everything to the defense.

https://twitter.com/GamecockSheriff/status/1830329635327840476

If you didn’t know Stewart’s name before this weekend, now is the time to learn it. The consensus No. 1 edge defender in the 2024 class was a full-fledged nightmare right out of the box, posting the weekend’s top overall PFF grade among all FBS defenders (95.2). On top of his production, he was also clutch: With South Carolina trailing 19-16 midway through the fourth quarter, Stewart came through with the biggest play of the game, landing a blindside hit on ODU quarterback Grant Wilson that jarred the ball loose inside the Monarchs’ 10-yard line; the Gamecocks recovered, setting up what would turn out to be the winning touchdown 2 plays later.

In fact, Carolina’s only other touchdown also came courtesy of a forced fumble, after Kennard set up the offense inside the ODU 5-yard line on the first series of the game. They can’t go on bailing the offense out every week, but the pass rush is going to be fine.

2. Vanderbilt QB Diego Pavia. It took Pavia about a half-hour in a Vandy uniform to cement himself as a Dore for life. In his first start in Nashville, the New Mexico State transfer accounted for 294 total yards (190 passing, 104 rushing) and 3 of Vanderbilt’s 4 touchdowns in a 34-27 overtime stunner over Virginia Tech, completely altering the vibe around the program in the process. Without getting too carried away about their prospects going forward, it’s enough for now to know that the Commodores are not hopeless and that Clark Lea is not coaching for his job on a weekly basis.

3. Georgia DB Malaki Starks. A free safety by trade, Starks spent most of his time against Clemson in the nickel (“Star,” in local parlance) following an injury to projected starter Joenel Aguero. He looked right at home, to put it mildly, posting the top overall PFF grade among Georgia defenders as well as the top coverage grade, lately the result of his acrobatic, game-clinching interception in the fourth quarter..

https://twitter.com/GeorgiaFootball/status/1829957093132288365/

Starks is well past the point in his career when he needs viral highlights to reinforce his All-American bona fides, but hey, it can’t hurt. If the move to Star sticks, expect plenty more where that came from.

4. Alabama QB Jalen Milroe.. Milroe ushered in the post-Saba era in Tuscaloosa in explosive fashion, accounting for 279 total yards and 5 touchdowns in a 63-0 massacre over Western Kentucky — a margin that cleared the 31.5-point spread twice over. Although he only attempted 9 passes (completing 7), Milroe averaged 28.6 yards per completion with TDs covering 22, 84 and 55 yards, the latter 2 both courtesy of 5-star freshman Ryan Williams on his first 2 career receptions.

5. Ole Miss QB Jaxson Dart. I don’t like acknowledging inflated stat lines against FCS doormats in this space, but Dart’s line against Furman went above and beyond the rate of inflation. He was nearly perfect, going 22-for-27 for 418 yards and 5 touchdowns to 4 different receivers before calling it a day at halftime. The Rebels led at that point 52-0, and went on to win 76-0.

Fat guy of the week: Georgia OL Tate Ratledge

The Dawgs’ longest-tenured starter up front was solid as a rock against Clemson, as usual, shutting out Tigers pass rushers (zero sacks, hits, or pressures allowed) while posting the top PFF rushing grade among Georgia’s starting five.

I vow not to put Ratledge in this spot every week, but I can tell already it’s going to be a challenge.

Honorable mention: Georgia RB Nate Frazier, a true freshman, who accounted for 107 yards and a touchdown on a dozen touches against Clemson in his first college game. … Alabama DB Keon Sabb, a Michigan transfer, who picked off 2 passes in his first game for the Crimson Tide. … Texas A&M edge Nic Scourton, a Purdue transfer, who had 4 QB pressures, 2 tackles for loss, and swatted a pass in the Aggies’ loss to Notre Dame. … South Carolina DB Jalon Kilgore, who pulled down the game-clinching interception, broke up 2 other passes, and allowed just 2 completions on 7 targets in the Gamecocks’ defensively-driven win over Old Dominion. … LSU WR Karen Lacy, who had 7 catches for 94 yards and a touchdown in an impressive debut as the Tigers’ No. 1 receiver against USC. … And Tennessee QB Nico Iamaleava, making his first start in Neyland Stadium, who passed for 314 yards and 3 touchdowns in the first half alone of a 69-3 blowout over Chattanooga.

–     –     –
The scoring system for players honored in Superlatives awards 8 points for the week’s top player, 6 for 2nd, 5 for 3rd, 4 for 4th, 3 for 5th and 1 for honorable mention, because how honorable is it really if it doesn’t come with any points? The standings are updated weekly with the top 10 players for the season to date.

Catch of the year of the week: Vanderbilt WR Quincy Skinner

https://twitter.com/VandyFootball/status/1829923766924951776

 

Quote of the Week

“When you get beat like that, that’s on the head coach. Complete ownership of an absolute crap second half. Sometimes you get your butt kicked and we did today.” – Dabo Swinney, to reporters following Clemson’s wipeout loss to Georgia.

Moment of Zen of the Week

https://twitter.com/VandyFootball/status/1830033476072194056

Matt Hinton

Matt Hinton, author of 'Monday Down South' and our resident QB guru, has previously written for Dr. Saturday, CBS and Grantland.

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