You don’t need me to tell you that it’s best to turn the ball over as little as possible. It is instructive, however, to look at just how much it can hurt a team to do so. I can tell you that the 2022 Gators are hurt more by turnovers than other recent Florida teams, so let’s dive in and see why.
A primary stat I’m going to use here is points per drive. If a team is averaging seven, then congratulations, you’re scoring a touchdown every time your offense touches the ball. No one does that, obviously, but if you can get above three points per drive you’re doing well. Getting to around four or more would be elite for a season.
I’m looking at offensive points per drive, and I’ve filtered out things like non-offensive scores, turnovers on special teams or defense (e.g., a DB losing a fumble after getting an interception), and drives that run out the clock at the ends of halves.
Status quo
The Gators have had 67 drives in seven games so far this year. That comes out to just 9.6 drives per game. Pick-sixes by the defense have robbed them of a couple of drives, but even giving the offense two more possessions doesn’t get them to an even ten per game.
My comparison points for this piece are last year (to see year-over-year change), 2020 (the best UF offense post-Tebow), and 2018 (which had an offense that was very good at avoiding turnovers). All three of those offenses averaged between 11.2 and 11.7 drives per game. This year’s team still has a chance to raise its average, but it’s a low rate so far.
The 2022 defense’s inability to get off of the field is part of the reason why the drives per game rate is so low. Also, the offense has moved at a leisurely pace. Take the LSU game, where Florida had two drives of more than five minutes and another of more than six. If the offense didn’t sometimes break off long touchdown plays — like when they had a pair of two-play touchdown drives against the Tigers — they probably would have even fewer drives on the year.
UF has lost ten turnovers on the season between seven interceptions and three lost fumbles. That fact means UF turns the ball over on right about 15% of drives. This rate is a bit higher than the 13.8% of last year and 13.4% in 2020, but all three of those are much higher than the 2018 offense’s 8.6% rate.
As I noted, the ’18 team had an unusually low turnover rate. It is an attainable rate, however, as evidenced by the fact that the team did it.
Points per drive
The 2022 offense is averaging 3.04 points per drive on the season. Yes, this figure is inflated somewhat by the Eastern Washington game, but the 2021 and 2018 teams also had chances to beat up on FCS competition. The ’18 team did it twice, in fact. The only the 2020 schedule is in a different zip code with it only having P5 competition.
Anyway, the ’20 attack with its Heisman finalist, all-timer of a tight end, and human joystick of a receiver scored 3.46 points per drive. At 11.2 drives per game, it averaged 38.7 offensive points per game.
The ’22 offense lags the ’20 unit by 9.5 points per game. The deficit of .42 points per drive explains 4.0 points of the difference. However, the fact this year’s offense gets 1.6 fewer drives per game explains 5.5 points of the difference.
In other words, UF is plainly leaving points on the table by not having more offensive drives. The Gators could cover more than half the points per game distance between themselves and the vaunted 2020 attack simply by running the same number of drives per game.
The 2021 offense scored the fewest points per drive of any of the four teams I’m looking at here at 2.63. Coincidentally, that means this year’s attack at the open date is exactly halfway in points per drive between the 2021 and 2020 offenses. It’s a 0.42 points per drive gap both ways.
The 2018 offense, however, didn’t fare much better than last year’s. It scored 2.77 points per drive.
Yet, both the 2018 (32.2) and 2021 (30.7) offenses scored more offensive points per game than the 2022 offense has (29.1) because they simply had more chances. Those other two were basically even in drives per game (11.6 in ’18, 11.7 in ’21), while the 2022 offense is a full two drives per game behind both of them (9.6).
Enter turnovers
In a lot of ways, the 2018 and 2021 offenses were eerily similar. The 2021 offense had 152 drives to 2018’s 151. Their rate of scoring touchdowns was just half a percentage point off: 34.9% in ’21 to 34.4% in ’18. Dan Mullen’s first offense punted slightly more with 56 of them compared to his last offense’s 52.
Yet, the 2018 offense scored 1.5 points per game more. Why?
Turnovers are the likely answer. The 2018 team had eight fewer turnovers and five additional field goal attempts (20 vs. 15). Toss in the fact that Evan McPherson made a higher percentage of them than Chris Howard and Jace Christmann did, and the ’18 offense got 24 more points off of field goals than the ’21 offense did. The offenses were 19 total points apart in the same number of games, which is less than the difference in field goal scoring.
We can’t run the drives again to see what the 2021 offense would’ve done had they not turned it over so much. However, eight of Florida’s 2021 turnovers came in opponent territory. Two of them were picks in the end zone. Two other turnovers came on the UF side of the field but within five yards of the 50. Minus the turnovers, Florida almost certainly would’ve gotten more field goal attempts and probably a touchdown or two as well.
The 2022 offense is turning it over 1.4 times per game, which is close to the rates of the 2020 offense (1.5) and 2021 offense (1.6). All are well behind the 2018 team’s 1.0 per game.
However, the 2020 and 2021 offenses scored more in part because they had more chances to make up for their sins. The ’21 offense had 10.1 non-turnover drives per game. The ’20 offense had 9.7 non-turnover drives per game, which is about the same number of total drives this year’s team gets per contest.
The ’22 offense has just 8.1 non-turnover drives per game. That really doesn’t leave a lot of wiggle room to make up for their own giveaway-and-a-half they average per game, much less the issues the defense has been having.
The offense could try running some tempo to quicken the pace, but that runs the risk of increasing the mistake rate of an already mistake-prone offense. The issue of pace really comes into focus with the Tennessee game, since the Volunteerss are one of two teams (along with Ole Miss) to average fewer minutes of possession per game. Even with UT trying to go quickly for three quarters and Florida stealing a possession via onside kick, they still only had ten series to work with. Two drives went over five minutes and a third went over six, and even the one punting drive went about two-and-a-half minutes.
The defense getting off the field faster is absolutely the best solution to the issue, but it’s not like they’ve been trying to let opponents chew up so much clock. There is a lot of work to do there, and it may not get better until next year once the team has had the chance to upgrade the roster via recruiting and the transfer portal.
The bottom line is this: as long as the 2022 offense is going to have so few drives, every turnover hurts them worse than turnovers hurt prior UF attacks. A lot of the questions about this year’s offense — why don’t they score more, why doesn’t Receiver X get more targets, why doesn’t Tailback Y have more carries — come back to the team just not having that many plays and drives.
The LSU game was UF’s first turnover-free game of the year. The 2020 and 2021 offenses also managed just one turnover-free game against P5 competition, but they had more margin for error by having more possessions. Even as not giving the ball away wasn’t enough against the Tigers, the Gators still need to keep doing that to have any chance to maximize the team’s potential this season.