Advanced stats review of Florida’s shocking loss to LSU

It’s rare that a coach can legitimately use “no one’s giving us a shot” as pregame motivation, but Ed Orgeron could’ve if he wanted to. Whether he did or not, his Tigers went into the Swamp and came away with as surprising a win as anyone’s seen on the Power 5 level in 2020. Let’s pull it apart to see what there is to learn from the experience.

This review is based on Bill Connelly’s Five Factors of winning, and sacks are counted as pass plays. I removed the kneel-down at the end of the first half from the efficiency/explosiveness numbers.

Explosiveness

Everyone has a different definition for what counts as an “explosive play”, but I go with runs of at least 12 yards and passes of at least 16 yards.

LSU has been terrible about allowing big plays this year, something I documented in my overconfident (sigh) Friday article. The Gators got plenty of them without allowing a ton, so this phase of the game wasn’t a big problem. The miscommunication on the 36-yard LSU touchdown pass was bad, but that was an exception, not the rule.

The four explosive runs match the effort against Ole Miss for most on the season, but the rate in that one was 16.0%. This was by far the best UF has been at generating big runs. The explosive passing rate was also way up after declining for a bit with 21.4% against Kentucky and 17.4% against Tennessee.

Efficiency

The main measure here is success rate. Watch this short video if you need to brush up on it.

Despite the Tigers having three extended drives, UF won the efficiency game handily. UF was at least ten percentage points higher than the Tigers were in rushing, passing, and overall. The Gator rushing attack actually was very efficient, believe it or not.

I usually don’t remark on the red zone part, but that area is where the Gators ground to a relative halt. UF’s success rate outside the red zone was a terrific 52.9%, breaking down into 57.1% on the ground and 51.4% through the air.

Kyle Trask’s pair of one-yard touchdown runs were the only success plays the Gators had inside the Tiger 5-yard-line (success rate inside the 5: 22.2%). Aside from them, a 5-yard Dameon Pierce rush on 1st & 10 at the 19 was the only rushing success play inside the 20 (rushing SR in the red zone: 37.5%). Trask took two red zone sacks, but every completion he made down there was a success play (passing SR in the red zone: 40%).

LSU’s worst quarters efficiency-wise were the second and fourth. Those were also the Tigers’ top scoring quarters. More on that later.

UF also scored more in the second than it did in the first, but that came down to some big plays making up for inefficiency and having more success on third down than first or second for a spell.

Efficiency by Player

Like last week, Trask attempting close to 50 passes allowed him to accumulate a lot of raw yardage in a game in which he didn’t play his best. He finally had what could be considered a truly bad game by his own standards instead of a ho-hum performance due to the three turnovers .

Johnson throwing three touchdown passes against no picks makes his passing efficiency look better than I think how he really performed. If you told me before the game that he’d complete fewer than 60% of his passes for less than seven yards a pop with a passing success rate under 40%, I’d take it in a heartbeat. That should be the line of a losing quarterback.

I can’t say enough about Toney in his final game in the Swamp. On a night when you could question players’ visible efforts, there wasn’t a bad thing you could say about him.

UF really, really missed Pitts. You can draw a straight line from his absence to the red zone struggles, but also the other tight ends combined for two catches on six targets for 2.0 yards per target. That’s grim for an offense that loves to use the tight end. Florida sometimes uses Shorter’s size like it does Pitts, but his stats here are the same as Gamble’s.

Davis appeared to be the best back on the night, and the numbers confirm it. Pierce, being less dangerous in the passing game, was easier for LSU to stop. Davis doing his thing, Toney acting as a changeup, and Trask doing short yardage combined for a decent-enough rushing game.

Field Position

UF’s turnovers coming deep in Tiger territory helped the Gators eke out a win this phase of the game. I will give the defense some credit here too. Yes, the 36-yard TD pass is partly why LSU didn’t spend a ton of time on the Gators’ side of the field. However, there were a lot of possessions in this contest and the Tigers didn’t get terribly far in a lot of them.

Finishing Drives

A trip inside the 40 is a drive where the team has a first down at the opponent’s 40 or closer or where it scores from further out than that. A red zone trip is a drive with a first down at the opponent’s 20 or closer.

This factor and the next are where Florida lost the game. Getting just 27 points on seven red zone trips is poor for what the UF offense has been doing. Mullen showed no confidence in his red zone offense from the start, as he sent Evan McPherson out for a field goal on the Tigers’ 3-yard-line on the first drive. He did something similar later by putting McPherson on the field from the LSU 5-yard-line.

They came up empty on four scoring opportunities — the goal line failure, both of Trask’s interceptions, and the final missed field goal. LSU got both scoring opportunities and red zone trips on a smaller share of its possessions, but it cashed them in better than the Gators did.

Turnovers

LSU won the turnover battle 3-0 and forced a turnover on downs. That’s how you overcome a 191-yard deficit in total yardage and 3.4-yard deficit per play (8.3 to 4.9).

The Tigers directly turned two of the turnovers into ten points with the pick-six and first half-ending field goal. When you consider that both interceptions and the turnover on downs came in McPherson’s field goal range at the least, the swing in this factor looms larger once you account for points taken off the board for the Gators.

Overall

Toss out the freebie field goal, and the Florida defense defended 13 drives. It allowed 27 points in those 13 drives. That is not lockdown defense like what we saw from the Gators a dozen years ago, but almost no one can play that level of defense anymore. In a game with ten drives for each team, this performance equates to allowing 21 points.

Again, that’s not spectacularly good, but it should be enough when paired with one of the best offenses in school history. Florida’s defense showed up plenty, forcing eight punts. That total includes one after the Florida offense went three-and-out while pinned deep, giving LSU the ball inside Gator territory to start.

I won’t say the offense wasted a superior defensive effort, but for the first time this year, the defense was not an obvious weak link when compared to the offense. The end result was a loss.

And that’s really it, isn’t it? Once we saw early on that lockdown defense was never going to happen, this team was always going to go as far as its offense could carry it. By extension, it was going to go as far as Kyle Trask could carry it.

Trask is fantastic, but he is not at the level of a 2019 Joe Burrow or Tua Tagovailoa. He has looked human at times in almost every game, never more so than against LSU. Even so, his spectacular performance is the only reason why Florida ever had its name in the playoff hunt. If he played even at the level he did last year, I don’t think the Gators ever would have gotten to No. 6 in the polls or an 8-1 record.

Florida is simply not elite yet. They’ve been showing us that fact almost every game this year, but it’s never more clear than after an unexpected loss. As Mullen has said over and over, it really is harder to go from 11 to 12 wins (on the scale of a normal schedule here) then to go from four to ten.

The recruiting prior to Mullen’s arrival was not good enough for that. The recruiting since his arrival, when adjusted for post-signing day attrition, also has not been good enough without faster player development than there’s been. Some of Mullen’s signees have been great, like Pitts. But three years in, there are still a lot of McElwain holdovers throughout the starting lineup, and not enough of them are guys the new staff has developed into stars like Trask or the defensive linemen.

And despite all that, plenty of the numbers above show that Florida should’ve won the game. It’s hard to have those explosiveness and efficiency advantages and lose. A lot of things had to go wrong.

The final takeaway is that while UF isn’t elite, it’s close. Getting across that last mile, though, is what separates the legends from the merely very good.