Alabama’s staff mentioned that the team was affected by the noise at the Swamp a few weeks ago. Florida found out what that’s like on the road against Kentucky this week. The Gators committed 15 penalties on Saturday for a loss of 115 yards.
Eight of those penalties ended up being false starts thanks to the raucous environment created by the Lexington faithful. Florida linemen and running backs jumped all night as they guessed at the snap count and stalled out on offense.
“The penalties were not working for us,” head coach Dan Mullen said. “I’ll be honest with you, we had 382 yards to 211 and I think that was a big factor. If you look at it … the penalties weren’t small, you’re looking at taking third downs off the board … Those are the issues. The mental errors were just – you can’t do that and expect to win a game making that many mental errors.”
Starting quarterback Emory Jones admitted that the noise level got to the team at times during the game. He agreed with Mullen on the number of penalties being too high, but Jones is already looking to get his team back on track after the crushing loss.
“I mean, we all said that the season can go one of two ways,” Jones said. “Be pouty, be sad and lose out, or we can stay focused, get back to the drawing board and tell ourselves we are going harder than ever before and win out. That’s what we were going to do and we’re going to try our best to go
out there and do our job every week.”
Before this game, Florida only struggled with penalties in the season-opener against Florida Atlantic. In the three games prior to the Kentucky matchup, Florida committed 17 penalties for just 157 yards.
Discipline will surely be a talking point throughout the week for Dan Mullen, and the expectation is for a much cleaner game back at home next week against Vanderbilt. A road trip to LSU after that will be a nice test before the big matchup in Jacksonville against Georgia takes place on Oct. 30.
“We have to get better,” Mullen said. “That’s something we are going to look back at. But give their crowd credit. They were loud and came with energy. Their guys played hard. But you can’t do that, it’s just a lack of mental toughness.”
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