What Florida should expect from Tennessee

If there’s a common theme this week about the Florida-Tennessee game, it’s that the teams are nearly mirror images of each other. Neither is close to its historical peak, and they seem to have similar strengths and weaknesses.

In this preview piece, I’m going to explore to what degree they are similar and different to help you get an idea of what to expect.

Passing efficiency

The starkest difference between these two teams is in completion percentage for the two starting quarterbacks.

Jarrett Guarantano looked very much like the redshirt freshman he was in 2017, but he has come out hot in 2018. He looks almost like an entirely different player, and it shows in his 72.2% completion rate. His worst game at passing was the Vols’ win over FCS East Tennessee State, so he actually moves up the rankings when you look solely at FBS vs. FBS competition. In that realm, he sits third nationally at 75.6%.

As you might expect, his completion rate is that high because he is making a lot of shorter throws. He’s been right on the money with those shorter throws, however. Here are three good rhythm passes he had on Tennessee’s 17-play touchdown drive against the Mountaineers. The third one is probably the best of them, hitting Josh Palmer in a small window in the defense.

He is decently accurate down the field; Palmer caught a deep throw that was only slightly out of bounds against West Virginia, and Guarantano did complete a pair of deep heaves against UTEP’s woeful defense. However, he rarely throws it long.

Feleipe Franks, meanwhile, has a completion percentage of 53.2% on the year. His best passing game was against an FCS foe, though, so it falls to a miserable 47.2% against FBS opponents. That’s outside the top 100 nationally for FBS competition.

To be fair, Franks’s pass targets have dropped nine passes already. He also has thrown it away twice and had one pass batted down at the line. Therefore, using Pro Football Focus’s adjusted completion percentage formula, which adds drops to completions and removes throwaways and batted balls from attempts, Franks has an adjusted completion rate of 67.6% overall and 62.7% against FBS opponents. Those are more than respectable rates.

They’re also well below Guarantano’s completion percentage without any adjustments at all. Again, some of the difference is play choice, as Franks attempts more long passes that have a lower chance of completion.

Regardless, prepare for the game to feel like Franks is completing only about half his passes while Guarantano completes almost everything. If the trends of the first two games continue, that’s not far off from what we’ll see. It’ll be up to the Gator defense to make sure that those completions stay short and don’t move the sticks.

Offensive line woes

Both offenses have been lackluster so far; you’ve seen the Gators, while the 24 the Vols scored on UTEP was actually the lowest the Miners have allowed in three games that also include FCS Northern Arizona and UNLV. Poor line play has been a major reason why for both teams.

Like Florida, Tennessee is weakest up the middle. West Virginia defensive tackle Kenny Bigelow basically moved into the Tennessee backfield and made himself a nice steak dinner in Week 1.

The performances of the teams do diverge from there, though. Bill Connelly’s advanced stat profiles of the teams show where some differences lie. The following figures in this section have garbage time filtered out, and garbage time is defined in Connelly’s system as times when “a game is not within 28 points in the first quarter, 24 points in the second quarter, 21 points in the third quarter, or 16 points in the fourth quarter”.

For one thing, Florida’s running backs are better at avoiding defenders and getting something out of nothing. That’s seen in stuff rate, which is the percentage of the time a ball carrier is stopped for no gain or a loss (and sacks aren’t included here). Tennessee’s stuff rate on offense is 23.6%, meaning nearly a quarter of non-garbage time rushes have done no better than getting back to the line. That’s 103rd nationally. Florida’s stuff rate is 13.0%, a little more than half of the Vols’ rate and 19th in the country.

For another, Tennessee’s line is leaky when passing in non-obvious passing situations. On what Connelly terms “Standard Downs” — which is anything but 2nd & 8 or more and 3rd or 4th and 5 or more — the Vols have a sack rate of 13.2% of drop backs (not including QB scrambles). That is dead last in the country despite two of the team’s three games coming against ETSU and UTEP. Franks meanwhile has only been sacked on 3.9% of standard down drop backs, which is right around the middle of the pack nationally at 62nd.

Franks has a similar sack rate on passing downs at 3.7%, but that’s actually good for 36th in the country since defenses tend to get more sacks on obvious passing downs. Guarantano has yet to be sacked on a passing down, though, as he’s mostly just fired off quick, short passes in those situations. You can see that in Tennessee’s explosiveness on passing downs being ranked 128th in the nation.

Ultimately, both teams have played only one good defense. Florida had a stuff rate of 12% and a sack rate of 8.3% against Kentucky. Tennessee had a stuff rate of 35% and a sack rate of 11.1% against West Virginia. The Mountaineers have the single best front seven player among the opposing defenses in Bigelow, but overall Kentucky’s defense is better than WVU’s is.

In the battle of disappointing lines, Florida’s is probably better than Tennessee’s is. Faint praise, I know, but line play will go a long way to deciding the contest in Knoxville.

Kinds of breakdowns

So far, the Florida and Tennessee defenses have been similar in their propensity to give up explosive plays. How they’ve done it has been very different, though.

The Gator defense has allowed big plays most often through missed tackles and blown coverages in the secondary. The tackling did look better against Colorado State than the horror show of tackling that was the Kentucky game, but UT, while not having a Benny Snell on the roster, will be bigger and more physical than the Rams were. The very controlled and not terribly vertical pass game of the Volunteers may help Florida out some on the busted coverage front, but we’ll see.

Tennessee’s primary problem with giving up big plays is that it faced a well-oiled machine in West Virginia that had one of the country’s best quarterbacks throwing to one of the country’s best wide receiving corps. The young Volunteer secondary never had a chance.

UT’s defense has also gotten itself into trouble on occasion by not covering a large swath of the field, allowing the offense to beat them on the edge. I made up a quick video showing what those breakdowns looked like.

Dan Mullen and his staff know about these issues and will probably try to design some formations to gain these same kinds of advantages. In a game expected to be close with an over/under in Vegas that’s below 50 total points, a single big play generated from an alignment mismatch could very well decide the game.

Tennessee is going to pull out all the stops to beat the Gators this weekend. We will probably see some things from the Vols in this one that they haven’t shown yet this year.

If the Gators are going to come out on top, they’ll need to keep the UT short passing game short, maintain their advantage of having the better of two bad offensive lines, and find a way to exploit the Tennessee defense’s occasional tendency to leave a major portion of the field uncovered. A big special teams play or two would help as well. This game will be won or lost on the margins, so every play will count.

David Wunderlich
David Wunderlich is a born-and-raised Gator and a proud Florida alum. He has been writing about Florida and SEC football since 2006. He currently lives in Naples Italy, at least until the Navy stations his wife elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter @Year2