One of the goals of any team heading into the season is to play a complete game, offensively, defensively and on special teams in order to secure victories.
For the No. 8 Florida Gators, the team came close enough to that against the Missouri Tigers after responding to a two-week bye-period with a resounding 41-17 victory.
While many would say a 41-point effort from the team's offense, and three points allowed by the team's starting defense to be a "complete game", Gators head coach Dan Mullen views it differently. Perhaps due to the high expectations that he has set, especially offensively, for his team this season.
“I think it was closer to a complete game. I don’t know that it was," said Mullen on Tuesday.
"I don’t know what a complete game to me would be. Like score on every play, and they get minus-five yards every play. Maybe that would be perfect of everything. I thought it was. You look, 1, defensively we played at a much, much higher level. I thought, special teams, one of the things that you deal with, when you get into the special teams part of the game, if you look, we had a lot of guys in place."
The Gators offense played exceptionally following a couple of stalled drives that led to two field goals and a couple of punts, aside from that, the Gators did score on nearly every drive the starting offense was in place, including five out of six drives after the two-field goal, two-punt affair.
While Mullen agreed the offense "started slow," he did mention that perhaps it was due to the team's offensive prowess over the first few weeks of the season. At one point during that, Florida was scoring a touchdown on 70% of its drives, the highest efficiency in college football, according to Pro Football Focus.
"One thing, we’ve got to be cautious of offensively is, you know, I mean, we punted three times in that game. We’ve punted three times the whole season," said Mullen. "I’d love to say hey, ‘We’re going to score on 80 percent of our possessions this year. That’s probably a little unrealistic. It’d be a heck of deal. I wouldn’t be sad. But we set a very high standard, right?
"When you say we struggled a little bit on Saturday, maybe we played a little bit more normally on Saturday and not to an extremely high level that we’ve been in. Obviously it’ll be a big challenge this week playing such a great defense.”
Perhaps the Gators did simply play more "normally" on Saturday early, but the end result remained - the team had success offensively, as it has the entire season heading into Week 4.
The Gators have set a high standard, offensively. But, what the team hadn't seen at this point into the season was the high-level play from the team's defense - a defense that allowed Missouri to rush for just 40 yards on 22 carries (1.7 yards-per-carry) and converting just three out of 15 of its third downs.
Moving forward, Florida will want to continue to put together a complete game, including on special teams. While the most-talked-about aspect of the special teams unit will be the kicker, punter and return specialists, Mullen made sure to mention how its coverage units - full of new players due to the number of absentees on Saturday -, played on Saturday.
"There’s a lot of other guys out there on the field," said Mullen. "So I was really happy to see a lot of – we had a lot of guys that got the opportunity to go make plays and be on special teams and get their first action even on special teams. Those guys did pretty good. It was – that’s a hard one. We need to get much better there, though. We need to get a lot better. Hopefully, we get some guys back with special teams that help a lot and increase that depth where you are looking at special teams."
Heading into one of the most important weeks of the season against the Georgia Bulldogs, Florida will hope to continue to strive to become a complete team, and it may begin early and often with its offense filled with high expectations.
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November 04, 2020 at 11:10PM
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Gators' Mullen Cautions Complete-Game Talk, Remains Confident in Offense - Sports Illustrated
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