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Former Gators cornerback Keiwan Ratliff joined the Gator Nation Football Podcast to discuss what went wrong for Florida against Tennessee.

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Eleven wins in a row … down the drain.

Neyland Stadium was rocking like it hasn’t rocked in more than a decade. Knoxville celebrated what it hadn’t seen since 2004.

The Tennessee Volunteers snapped their losing streak to rival Florida, and Gators fans are looking for someone to blame. To be fair, most of them have already found someone to blame. There are a few scapegoats to hitch your wagon to after the Vols’ 38-28 victory.

Some have pointed their fingers toward the defense and defensive coordinator Geoff Collins for a lack of variety in the play calling. Florida surrendered 35 points in the second half and gave up 498 yards of total offense, while Tennessee quarterback Joshua Dobbs lit up the Gators’ secondary with 319 passing yards and four passing touchdowns.

If there’s anyone who knows about playing defense for Florida, it’s former Gators cornerback Keiwan Ratliff. He joined the Gator Nation Football Podcast to discuss the loss, and he talked about what happened to the Florida defense in the second half.

“Honestly, the thing that went wrong was a lack of communication. You could see on a few of those big plays that those weren’t just guys being beat by somebody better than them. Those were guys being beat by being in the wrong position. Most of the time, when you have a defense that’s as athletically gifted as [Florida], the only way you get beat is by beating yourselves. And communication is the easiest way to beat yourselves,” Ratliff said.

Having said that, though, Ratliff doesn’t believe the defense should completely shoulder the weight of this loss, because at some point the offense needed to step up and move the chains.

It didn’t, and Ratliff felt the offense contributed to a worn out defense.

“Bottom line [Tennessee] made a few more plays than [Florida] did. I don’t think the defense played as bad as it looked because they were on the field so much. The offense went three-and-out, I think, four or five times in a row. And the greatest defense in the world gets tired, so at some point the offense had to pick up a few first downs just to let those guys stay on the sideline, catch their breath, make a few adjustments, make a few changes, and then come back out and regroup,” he said.

Many have highlighted the offensive play calling as a problem for the Gators. There’s a clear difference between playing to win and playing not to lose, and Ratliff believes the latter was the case.

“I felt like they kind of said, ‘Okay, we put enough points on the board. Our defense is playing great. Let’s put it on the defense’s shoulders and go out and finish this game off,” instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna’ keep our foot on the gas pedal and try to put up 60.’ And anytime you start playing conservative, that’s what gets you beat. Any time you say, ‘Let’s not put too much on his plate, on Austin Appleby’s plate,'” he said.

It’s not as though Appleby, who was starting in place of the injured Luke Del Rio, wasn’t capable of stretching the field vertically. He found wide receiver Antonio Callaway early in the game for a big pass play that put the Gators in the red zone and set up a three-yard touchdown pass to tight end DeAndre Goolsby.

To Ratliff, if Florida had continued to do that in the second half, the ripple effects would have been different, and the game might have finished with a different outcome.

“But if you remember, early in the game, they came out and right away took a shot deep. Things like that put defensive backs on their heels, puts defensive coordinators on their heels. And I felt like if [Florida] could have kept doing that in the second half, even when [Tennessee] got the momentum going, took a shot or two, even if we didn’t complete those shots, it’s in the back of those guys’ minds that, ‘Hey, they’re gonna’ try us.’ So now, they may have called their defense a little bit differently, and those guys may have played a little bit differently,” Ratliff said.

Regardless, a loss is a loss, and McElwain will get his guys ready to make another road trip to Vanderbilt this Saturday.

The Gators lost to the Commodores in 2013, 34-17, under Will Muschamp, for the first time since 1988 — two years before Steve Spurrier took over the program.

Del Rio isn’t scheduled to return until Oct. 8 when Florida hosts LSU. Even with Les Miles no longer overseeing the Tigers, LSU will be a tough contest. Florida could make solid use of the Vanderbilt game as a buffer to get its mind right before welcoming the Bayou Bengals to The Swamp.

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