Kentucky football: Five things to know about the Florida Gators
Five things to know about Florida heading into Saturday’s game against Kentucky:
1. Dan Mullen is The Man
The Florida Man. After a couple of post-Urban Meyer missteps with Will Muschamp and Jim McElwain, the Gators lured Mullen back to Gainesville from Mississippi State, where the former Florida offensive coordinator went 69-46 in nine seasons. The reunion is paying dividends. Mullen is 27-6 as the UF coach.
Mullen has been particularly tough for Kentucky to handle. Yes, the Cats dinged him in 2018, defeating Florida 27-16 in Gainesville for their first win over the Gators since 1986 and the first win in UF’s home stadium since 1979. Overall, however, Mullen is 9-2 versus Kentucky. At Mississippi State, he won seven straight over the Cats before Mark Stoops and Co. beat the Bulldogs 40-38 in 2016.
The 48-year-old from Drexel Hill, Pa., attended Ursinus College, in Collegeville, Pa., where he played tight end on the football team. He was an assistant at Wagner, Columbia, Syracuse and Notre Dame before coaching quarterbacks for Meyer at Bowling Green in 2001-02. Mullen followed Meyer to Utah and then Florida before becoming head coach at Mississippi State in 2009.
2. Quarterback Kyle Trask is a Heisman Trophy candidate
If Heisman voters want an expert opinion on whether Alabama quarterback Mac Jones or Florida quarterback Kyle Trask is more deserving of the trophy, they might ask Kentucky fans after Saturday.
Last weekend, Jones completed 16 of 24 passes for 230 yards and two touchdowns with one interception in the Tide’s 63-3 thrashing of the Wildcats in Tuscaloosa. Now, Brad White’s defense faces Trask, who has only completed 174 of 246 passes (70.7 percent) for 2,554 yards and 31 touchdowns with just three interceptions on the season.
As longtime Gainesville Sun sports columnist Pat Dooley explained on my podcast, Trask is a great story. He played behind current Miami quarterback D’Eriq King in high school in Texas. He suffered a couple of injuries that set his progress back. And he only got his chance to Florida’s No. 1 quarterback when starter Feleipe Franks was knocked out of last year’s UK-UF game in Lexington.
Trask entered the game on Florida’s first drive of the fourth quarter with the Gators trailing 21-10. He took the visitors 62 yards in six plays to pull Florida within 21-16 with 12:41 left. Two series later, he engineered a 66-yard, four-play TD drive that included a 30-yard pass to Kyle Pitts. Trask’s 4-yard touchdown run on a quarterback draw put Florida ahead 22-21 with 4:11 remaining. When Josh Hammond scored on a 76-yard jet sweep with 33 seconds left, Florida celebrated a 29-21 win.
3. Kyle Pitts is back for the Kentucky game
The best tight end in college football missed Florida’s last two games after suffering a concussion in the win over Georgia from a vicious hit by Bulldogs safety Lewis Cine. Pitts sat out the Gators’ 63-35 victory over Arkansas and last week’s 38-17 win at Vanderbilt. He’s expected to return Saturday.
The 6-foot-6 junior from Philadelphia has 24 catches for 414 yards and eight touchdowns on the season. He caught eight balls for 170 yards and four scores in Florida’s 51-35 victory over Ole Miss in the season opener. He followed that up with a pair of touchdown grabs no four catches for 57 yards in the Gators’ 38-24 victory over South Carolina.
Pitts is far from Florida’s only offensive weapon, however. The speedy Kadarius Toney has caught 42 passes for 503 yards and seven touchdowns. Trevon Grimes has caught 22 passes for 347 yards and six scores. Virginia Tech transfer Justin Shorter has caught 16 balls for 195 yards and three scores. With Pitts out, tight end Kemore Gamble has caught eight passes for 142 yards and three touchdowns.
4. Kentucky facing Todd Grantham again
Saturday marks the 11th season the 54-year-old Grantham has coordinated a defense facing the Kentucky offense. After spending 1999 through 2009 in the NFL with the Indianapolis Colts, Houston Texans, Cleveland Browns and Dallas Cowboys, Grantham joined Mark Richt’s staff at Georgia. He left in 2014 to become the DC for Bobby Petrino at Louisville. Grantham spent 2017 at Mississippi State with Mullen before following his boss to Florida in 2018.
How has Kentucky fared against Grantham? He’s 8-2 against the Cats. In 2010, Grantham and Georgia beat UK 44-31. Georgia won 19-10 in 2011, 29-24 in 2012 and 59-17 in 2013. At Louisville, Grantham’s team won 44-40 in 2014 and 38-24 in 2015 before losing 41-38 in 2016. At Mississippi State, Grantham beat UK 45-7 in 2017. At Florida in 2018, the Gators lost 27-16 in Gainesville before winning 29-21 last season.
Grantham’s defense got off to a bit of a slow start this season, giving up 35 points to Ole Miss, 24 to South Carolina and 41 in a three-point loss at Texas A&M. The Gators have improved of late, however. Stoops, who knows Grantham well, says his counterpart loves exotic defenses and it has just taken awhile for a young Florida defense to learn the scheme.
5. Florida-Kentucky has been competitive in recent years
That has not always been the case. UK’s 60-point loss at Alabama last week brought back horrific memories of the 73-7 blowout loss at Florida in 1994, the 65-0 blowout loss at Florida in 1996 and the 63-5 blowout loss at Florida in 2008. And Florida had mastered Kentucky for 31 straight years before the Cats’ historic win at The Swamp in 2018.
The series’ combined scores over the last three years is Kentucky 75, Florida 73. UK lost to the visiting Gators 28-27 in 2017 thanks to a couple of schematic errors saw UK fail to cover Florida receivers. Both scored. After the 11-point win in Gainesville in 2018, Kentucky squandered an 11-point lead in the eight-point loss last season. And that was with backup quarterback Sawyer Smith at the helm for the Wildcats.
“This is probably (Kentucky’s) biggest game of the year, coming here to play,” Mullen said this week. “I think our guys understand that this team is coming in here thinking this is their biggest game of the year. If you don’t prepare the right way, you’re going to be in trouble.”
This story was originally published November 27, 2020 at 10:30 AM.
