OR BLOCKED EACH OTHER
1. Look, there are many delightful things about the Florida spring game. The first is that no one cried. No one decided they hated football, and wanted to stop playing it forever.
2. No one blocked each other. This was so important to the program, because if there was one thing that absolutely, positively could not happen during the Florida spring game this year, it was one player on the Florida offense blocking another in the course of a play. Players may have made many mistakes on film, but the one that the definitely did not make was reaching out, grabbing a hold of someone's jersey, and finding out that that someone was playing on their side of the ball. Kurt Roper, you are an improvement already.
3. This being the spring game, the options on defense were fairly limited, and all anyone was watching anyway was the new-look offense. That new-look offense has some of the same concepts as Brent Pease's offense, and that should not send you vomiting into the nearest trash can so stop come back here COURAGE. Courage, dammit.
4. That offense relies a lot on running basic run plays out of a spread set with the threat of a QB run, or in other words the bulk of what teams not named Alabama or Stanford have been doing in the run game for the past fifteen years or so. Off that, you throw a few play-action passes off the rollout, have a few standard base passing plays you can't get into too much trouble with, and then run the whole thing using a b-back/H-back type to adjust the blocking and run a few pass routes. You run the whole thing fast, get the defense tired, and maybe score points.
5. That is a novel concept in Big Dumb Will Muschamp football, and this was a spring game, but in Florida's triumphant win over Florida let's be positive, and say nice things? That the offensive line looked coherent, and blocked well? That Ahmad Fulwood, Quinton Dunbar, and Demarcus Robinson caught balls thrown from the hands of quarterbacks, and did not instantly bat them into the air like volleyballs waiting to be caught by giggling DBs? That Jeff Driskel, coming off a broken leg, ran with ease and had a decent-to-good scrimmage?
6. More importantly, the part of the offense that sort of worked at times over the past two years-- the run game-- looks like it's going to take Mack Brown and Kelvin Taylor, and let them work in space? Instead of ramming them into the line, Verdun-style, for four quarters? Oh, that is promising. Both have wiggly hips capable of making linebackers and DBs look palsied in an instant, and getting them one on one in clean space with spread sets could be delightful. Throw in the eight to ten carries Driskel will hopefully get, and you've got a nasty run game that needs only a perfunctory passing game to work well. (And that's how low the bar is right now: PLEASE GIVE US A PERFUNCTORY PASSING GAME, AND WE WILL REJOICE.)
7. Florida might have a kicker, which with a team in offensive recovery mode will still sadly matter more than it might for most teams.
8. We repeat: no one blocked each other, cried, or felt like quitting football after watching it. For the first time in seven months, that includes us. When the floor for your football team has bottomed out to such a spectacular depth, even seeing the lights of the basement in a spring game can be called sunrise. (On what, we don't know. But it's better than the last Florida football thing we remember seeing, and we suppose that can be called the lowest form of optimism imaginable.)