LSU’s defense has struggled mightily in 2023. It wasn’t all that great to begin with, and it has since lost key players to injury. The secondary has really been hit hard by maladies, so it’s tempting to say that’s where Florida should attack the Tigers similar to what the Gators did to South Carolina.
UF may end up trying to push the ball down the field with the pass if they fall behind by enough, but that’s probably not the path to victory. For as much as Graham Mertz has exceeded expectations, he’s no Jayden Daniels. Daniels is probable for the game, as LSU apparently has a rather streamlined concussion protocol. And for as well as Eugene Wilson and Ricky Pearsall have played, neither is Malik Nabers.
If this game ends up a track meet, UF will lose. The Gators have done well against the defenses towards the bottom of the conference, but they make too many mistakes to think they’ll score on nearly every series. Something will happen — a run into a stacked box goes nowhere, Mertz gets sacked or overthrows a deep ball, a lineman misses an assignment — and drives will stall out. The Tiger offense hasn’t been hurting itself with miscues near as often.
The best chance Florida has to win is to sit on the ball and play keep away with the run. Doing so will shorten the game and reduce the total number of drives in the contest. If you remember from statistics class in college — you took stats, right? — a smaller sample size enables greater variance. Greater variance means more extreme outcomes are more likely. That cuts both ways and means a blowout loss is more likely, but it does make a UF win more likely too.
The Gators have played only two offenses from the upper half of the league. One was Georgia, and the Bulldogs scored on seven of their ten real drives (albeit with a couple being short fields after turnovers). The other was Tennessee, and in that contest, UF successfully possessed the ball and rode out the second half with a lot of rushing plays.
However, it’s too vague to say that LSU and Tennessee are both in the top half of the conference in offense. The Tigers have just over 700 yards more than the Volunteers do in the same number of games. They average about 1.5 yards per play more than the Vols do. That’s a difference of 4.5 yards across three plays, which is almost half of the distance to go in a fresh set of downs.
UF’s defense is reeling. It performed very well in the first four games of the year. That includes the Utah game, which, the first play aside, was a good defensive outing. Ever since then, it has only looked good against a very down Vanderbilt team.
Those first four games may have been schedule-induced fool’s gold. Utah was without its starting quarterback and future NFL tight end, and half of those initial contests were against the only non-P5 competition for the season. The Tennessee game stands as the one matchup that doesn’t need too many qualifiers.
Away from home against healthy offenses, the defense has had a hard time getting stops. Kentucky bulldozed them, South Carolina shredded them, and Georgia did both.
As of a couple weeks ago, they’re also missing their only above-average inside linebacker in Shemar James due to injury. The edges are thin with Justus Boone and Jack Pyburn lost for the duration as well. The secondary is full of a lot of shaky tacklers, and playing time is in flux as the UF coaches are still trying to find the right combinations. And, as a bonus, it’s not unusual to see Florida with four or more true freshmen on the field at once. Throw in some communication issues when outside the Swamp, and you should keep your expectations for the Gator defense quite low.
Even if Daniels is limited or ends up not going, the combo of Garrett Nussmeier throwing to Nabers and Brian Thomas is more than potent enough to put plenty of points on the board. And if Daniels does go, the greatest threat to his health might be from him potentially collapsing from exhaustion from continually weaving his way through the UF defense for 20+ yard chunks on the ground.
If Florida wants to pull off the shocker and book a ticket to the postseason in the process, the path to doing so is dragging the game down into the muck. The offense needs to control the clock with Louisiana natives Montrell Johnson and Trevor Etienne and then hit some play action shots in the intermediate-to-deep zones.
There isn’t any margin for error, so Billy Napier needs to find a way to break his own tendencies after the initial scripted drive. The Gators can’t afford to always play-action boot Mertz out to the right on the first play after getting inside roughly the LSU 30 lest Harold Perkins remind everyone that a bad defense can still have elite athletes.
The Gators are two-touchdown underdogs, and Tiger Stadium at night is one of the toughest environments in which to play in all of sports. The deck is stacked against them. However if they manage to slow things down, take the crowd out of the game as best they can, and keep the ball away from the superlative Tiger offense, they’ll give themselves their best chance to leave with a win.