No more excuses are left for Will Muschamp as his tenure as the head coach of the Florida Gators football team should be coming to an end very soon. Maybe he’ll last the entire season, even if he doesn’t deserve it, but his days in the position are numbered.
Jeff Driskel might be one of the reasons Muschamp is sinking without any hope of anyone saving him. The Junior quarterback who didn’t look so great to begin with during his Freshman season and missed a big chunk of his second one due to injury is one of the worst in the nation so far.
He’s ranked 124th among 124 qualifying quarterbacks with a 95.5 rating. He’s thrown only six touchdown passes (tied for 102nd) and only five other quarterbacks have more interceptions than him so far (10 this season). He’s completing just 53% of his passing attempts, ranked 111th in the nation and his 5.1 yards per attempt are better than only one other quarterback in college football: Danny Etling of Purdue.
The Gators are 94th in passing yards and 61st in rushing yards. They’ve now lost two consecutive games at home, including by 29 points to a Missouri team that a week earlier was shutout by Georgia. Their only wins have been over Eastern Michigan, Kentucky (in three overtimes) and at Tennessee, a 3-4 team, and that also came by just one point in an ugly 10-9 final score.
Muschamp had a good run early on. After a successful tenure as a defensive coordinator for Texas from 2008 to 2010, he got the Florida job. A 7-6 season was followed by going 11-2, losing in the Sugar Bowl to Louisville, which was a sign of things to come. They went 4-8 in an injury riddled season in 2013, but no improvement has really been shown this year.
A new offensive coordinator can’t hide the bad job Muschamp has been doing – whether it’s recruiting, picking his poison with a quarterback that can’t throw the ball but isn’t enough of an elite runner or surrounded by elite players to make up for that flaw.
It’s not just his fault, obviously, but Florida have gotten used to very short down periods in the last 20 or so years. Muschamp, overall, has taken the program backwards, similar to the case of Brady Hoke, who is also an image of a dead man walking towards the moment he gets fired. Unless Muschamp pulls off some magic in the upcoming games, which includes playing vs Georgia and finishing things off against the Seminoles, it’s hard to believe he’ll still have a position at the university by the time December gets here.