Florida Football: Billy Napier touches upon what went wrong on 4th and 17

Florida football was one play away from knocking off 9th ranked Missouri on Saturday. That’s not hyperbole, if the Gators stop Missouri on 4th and 17 the game is over, Florida is 6-5 and heading to a bowl game.

But alas, they didn’t and Billy Napier touched upon what he think went wrong on the conversion.

Florida Football: One play away

For the second time in three weeks, Florida wins with literally just one play flipped. Against Arkansas it was the doomed field goal sequence that led to a missed kick from Trey Smack that sent the game into overtime.

Against Missouri, Florida couldn’t get a stop on 4th and 17 and the Tigers would go on to kick their own field goal to win the game.

At his press conference on Monday, Napier said the following on the failed stop:

"“On the 4th and 17 call, we just have to do a little bit better job in the hook areas of the field. There’s players in position there, we just have to have a little bit more awareness.”"

When asked to expand:

"“We called what we called and I think we have players in the area of the completion. We need to do a little bit better of a job distributing in our zones. We did rush four. Hindsight is 20/20, there’s other options, and we spend a ton of time on these fourth down gotta have it scenarios and we went with what we thought was best at the time. Often times it’s not about what you do it’s how you do it. There’s a coaching a player element to both.”"

Since Napier didn’t elaborate on the exact call, it appeared to be some form of quarters coverage. Jaydon Hill is along the outside, Jason Marshall gets left with two receivers in part because Mannie Nunnery doesn’t fall back to the first down marker and is left covering grass.

So ignoring that Princely Umanmielen is held on the play and it goes uncalled, it does seem a bit like a brave endeavor if Florida’s plan was to have a linebacker matched up against Missouri’s top receiver Luther Burden. Unless Marshall was supposed to pass off his guy and come down on Burden, relying on your backup linebacker to drop 20 yards into a zone doesn’t seem like the best use of resources.

Florida will take on FSU this Saturday inside The Swamp. Napier’s entire press conference can be found here.