Advanced stats review of Florida’s sleepy win over Vanderbilt

If you were expecting another massive blowout on Saturday, you don’t know your Gator football history. A noon game on the road at Vanderbilt the week after a big win is a classic recipe for the Gators coming out relatively flat, and we certainly saw that on Saturday. The potential for a giant final margin was there given the quality levels of the teams, but the ghost of Jefferson Pilot yet haunts the field in Nashville.

Even so, a good second half made the numbers look better and ensured a comfortable, if not effortless, win.

This review is based on Bill Connelly’s Five Factors of winning, and sacks are counted as pass plays. I excluded the final drives of each half that only served to run out the clock.

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.

These rates for Florida are about spot-on for this season, which makes them a little low for what you’d expect against a previously mediocre Vandy defense. Kyle Trask has hit explosive gains between 25 and 38% of the time in every game, so this was right down the fairway. The run game is sometimes lucky to get any explosive gains — it had zero against both Texas A&M and Georgia — but this was at the high end for them in 2020.

The passing explosiveness for Vanderbilt’s Ken Seals is higher than you want to see, but he had a knack for getting just on the right side of the line here. He had four completions for exactly 16 yards and another for 17. Regardless, UF shouldn’t be giving up that many longer completions to a Commodore true freshman who doesn’t have one of Vandy’s occasional receiver pro prospects to throw to.

Efficiency

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

UF was kind of boom-or-bust on this front. The good drives were very efficient; the bad ones were very much not. The upshot of six of nine drives being scoring drives is that the good ones outweighed the bad ones. Seals moved the ball on UF way too much, but the guy has real potential. He already looks like he could turn into the best quarterback they’ve had since Jay Cutler, and not just based on this one game.

It’s a sign of the times that when you see two quarters in a row at or below 50% for Florida, you say, “ah yes, I see the problem right there”. Expectations change that quickly.

Vandy got things going early but fizzled out before garbage time. They used some tempo early to surprise the Gator defense, but apparently they ran out of those plays and stopped doing them.

Efficiency by Player

The standard of recent contenders and winners is such that this kind of line, muted slightly by a couple attempts on the final drive that I excluded, doesn’t materially move the needle for a Heisman campaign. Doing this against a bad team is table stakes.

Seals does have potential, but the only other game he’s played this well was against the Ole Miss defense that’s taking a gap year. The product they’re putting on the field can get the team to 8-1 or 9-1, depending on if the LSU game gets made up, but it won’t be close to good enough in Atlanta.

Toney finally had another chance to shine after a couple games in which defenses pulled out all the stops to stop him. Shorter doing more and more each week is one of the underreported headlines of this year.

The yards per carry and success rates are up year-over-year, but it’s because the Gators actually do get about five yards per rush, plus or minus. It’s not like last year when it was mostly futility with one or two random long runs to make the bottom line look prettier.

Field Position

Vandy’s shanked punt into the visitors’ bleachers is the only reason why Florida’s ASP is not its own 18. Other than that, the Commodores made the Gators work from a field position standpoint.

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.

Being up over four points per drive is a terrific number, generally speaking. If there’s a beef to be had here, it’s (once again) that the defense didn’t get off the field quicker to give the offense more chances. Vanderbilt had three different drives with 11 or more plays that each took longer than four minutes.

Turnovers

It was an even battle at 1-1. Both came late after UF had control, so they weren’t that consequential. Neither led to points off turnovers.

Overall

Florida had nine drives against Vandy before the final score appeared on the scoreboard. It also had nine drives before the same against South Carolina. The offensive performance against the Commodores felt worse as it was going on than the one against the Gamecocks. However, the drive results were almost identical, just in a different order:

vs. SC: TD, TD, fumble, FG, TD, punt, TD, TD, INT
vs. VU: TD, punt, punt, FG, TD, TD, TD, fumble, TD

The Gators had a second punt instead of a pick on Saturday, but otherwise it was five touchdowns, a field goal, a fumble, and a punt.

The difference in feel is pretty obvious. After the opening touchdown drive, UF failed to get in the end zone on three straight drives. The defense also did a better job early on against South Carolina than it did against Vanderbilt. The game state showed Florida well in control earlier against the Gamecocks.

But Florida gained 6.6 yards per play on Carolina versus 7.7 against the Commodores. UF had one turnover instead of two on Saturday, and the run game was a little more explosive and the pass more efficient than in Game 2. For the entire game, the Gators were better on offense in Nashville.

I alluded to it above in the efficiency by quarter section, but expectations for this Florida team have skyrocketed as the output has. It’s gotten to the point that Trask throwing fewer than four touchdown passes is now a cause of frustration.

Feleipe Franks threw four touchdowns in a game once for UF, against Charleston Southern in 2019. Luke Del Rio did it once, against a mediocre Kentucky team in 2016. Will Grier did it once in the 2015 ambush of Ole Miss. Jeff Driskel did it once, against South Carolina in 2012. John Brantley did it once, against Furman in 2011. Austin Appleby, Treon Harris, Tyler Murphy, Skyler Mornhinweg, and Jacoby Brissett never did it in orange and blue.

Tim Tebow himself threw four touchdowns in a game just twice, against Kentucky in 2007 and Troy in 2009. Chris Leak did it three times, only one of them against a team above .500 (2004 South Carolina, 6-5). Rex Grossman’s longest streak of at least four passing TDs was three games, all in 2001, with the first two consisting of eventual 3-8 Kentucky and 2-9 Mississippi State.

You get the picture. What Trask is doing this year as a passer is something we haven’t seen from a Gator quarterback in at least two decades. It only emphasizes how good he is in 2020, and by extension how good the entire offense is too, that anyone could construe this as a down performance.

The offensive execution against Arkansas might be the best the team does all year. It’s so incredibly hard to do that, especially against SEC defenses. The Vandy game saw the lower end of the execution spectrum after what Trask and Mullen both described as a subpar week of practice.

The timing of such is understandable. After doing what they did to the Hogs with a winless Vanderbilt team next, it’s hard not to think you’ve got it figured out well enough to get the job done.

As it happens, they did have it figured out well enough to get the job done, but not to the best of their abilities. As I said Friday, the period before the SEC Championship Game is a real test of Mullen’s talking points about The Gator Standard. Who is playing to a standard, and who is just looking to get by clearly inferior opponents?

We have two or three more games to find out before they take on by far the best team the Gators have seen this year.