My fear

[Escambia94]

Right--we're on the same page now.
The coaches (like the folks out there who are still hung up on "the beautiful ball he throws" and how "he tore it up in highschool") need to step back and remember: Brantley has had a whole season now to show what he's got HERE. At this level your performance is judged by your results, and (at QB especially) NONE of it matters if you can't or won't do all the "little" things that raise the play of everyone around you.
In this way, Jordan Reed has shown all the signs an OC should be looking for in a quarterback, while Brantley (with a whole lot more opportunity to do so) has not.
...

Moving John Brantley aside is the proverbial "no-brainer".
..

I just looked over JB's high school stats. "Brantley broke Tebow's HS TD record". So what? Tebow added 60 more TDs on the ground to his 99 TDs in the air. On top of that, even slow-ass Brantley was able to scramble in high school. Who 'effing cares? This is college football, for big boys. Brantley played at a 2A. Tebow played at a 4A. There is little difference between a 4A and a 5A, but a 1A and 2A are pretty much nothing but podunk schools and Catholic schools. So what? The biggest school Ocala Trinity plays is Pensacola Catholic (my wife's old school). Pouncey could quarterback a Catholic school! "But JB has a laser for an arm!" So what? I can fire a laser 50 feet above a receiver too, and I can come up with a ton of excuses. The sun was in my eyes. The o-line didn't block for me. My contact lens was falling out. Global warming. Excuses, excuses. What has JB done for us lately? Jack ****! Want to know where JB stands statistically right now? Right below his loser dad, and just below his loser high school coach. Take that, Brantley! Where are the excuses now?

Lowest rated starting Gator QBs since 1978:
1. Kyle Morris 1988 101.9
2. Larry Ochab 1979 110.3
3. Kerwin Bell 1986 112.1
4. J. Brantley III 2010 118.8
5. J. Brantley IV 1978 124.3
4. Kerwin Bell 1987 124.8

Throughout the history of college football, when the offense is not moving they yank the QB. The more QBs you use, the worse the team. In 1979, we went through 4 QBs--Tim Groves, Tyrone Young, Johnell Brown, and little Larry Ochab. Kerwin Bell was the first Gator QB I followed, but he was actually the best of the rest in the mid-1980s--all the other scholarship QBs left due to NCAA troubles with the team. History tells us that little Brantley is the best of the rest, or is he? It looks to me like we have other options--Reed and Burton. Speaking of the option, the elder Brantley played in an offense that was transitioning from an option to a pro-style (if you can call it that). The coach converted a decent quarterback to wide receiver (Cris Collinsworth). Quarterbacks got shuffled all the time in this period until we settled on Wayne Peace in the early 1980s. Before that, it was hard to find one QB that "earned" the right to be the de facto starter every year. The elder Brantley only started one year, losing out to Terry LeCount in '77.

More than likely, our biggest fears will come true. Addazio will call the plays in 2011. JB will be the de facto starter no matter how well Reed improves or how well Driskel learns both pages of the playbook. The 2011 team will need to have enough playmakers to overcome our inept offense, or it will look like 2010 and lose 3-4 games and mark the beginning of the end for the Meyer Era.

 

[DRU2012]

Yep--only (judging by how dark and suspicious the grumbling has gotten already THIS year) by the end of a debacle like the actual on-the-scene reality of the events you describe, it won't be the "beginning of the end" by then, it'll just be "The End", at least for Urban Meyer at Florida...My God, I don't WANT to have to live through an episode of "The 22 Stooges"--"Live! At Home in the Swamp!--losing to the SOW again to close out "The Meyer Era".
Bad enough already that I have to suffer the glee with which the local sports guys salve their Longhorn hangovers by proclaiming "the huge shift in Florida Football Power with Urban Meyer's Gators' decisive, devastating loss to the Seminoles this past weekend"--over and over. You get the whole mouthfull when they mention it , which is often; they really hate Urban Meyer here (he's supposed to be some sort of "anti-Mack Brown", don't ya know?), and have had a kind of paranoid resentment/obsession with the Gators for some years. Don't really know what it's about or why it so quickly grew to such proportions (I think it has something to do with thinking our success, fame and notoriety was somehow rightfully theirs), but I like it.
Now I read in the Austin American Statesman (Sports, 11/28/10) that since "(insert above mouthful here)", "...the team we all thought was on its way to replacing Southern Cal as the nation's marquee program has quickly" blah blah blah and I'm left thinking, "Was that IT?" Has the high water mark been reached and then slipped away? Is it all downhill from here?
It doesn't HAVE to be. We KNOW that. That's why we are as frustrated and impatient as we are.
We are NOT coaches, but the big problems, the main few things that can and SHOULD be changed don't require either a genius OR a coach to recognize. "Make the changes, Urban!" The details we'll leave to you and the new guys you bring in, no problem.