Advanced stats review of Florida’s steady win over Tennessee

Florida has exceeded most expectations on the season, which means folks are reevaluating the Gators almost every week as they try to find the team’s true level. Opposing teams are also reevaluating them and trying to make adjustments against what they’ve been doing. There are a couple of ways you could see how Tennessee did that in the numbers below.

This review is based on Bill Connelly’s Five Factors of winning, and sacks are counted as pass plays. I excluded the one-play drives that ran out the clock at the ends of the halves.

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.

Here is the first way the adjustment shows up. Florida’s passing explosive rate dropped for the second straight week to a new low for the season. It peaked at 38.5% against Texas A&M and 37.0% against Missouri, and it bounced around between 25% and 29% for three games. However the rate then dropped to 21.4% against Kentucky and now this against Tennessee.

The Vols played a lot of soft coverage with one or two deep-dropping safeties. It was a departure for the normally aggressive Jeremy Pruitt to call such soft coverage. The Vols were determined to keep passes in front of them, and as the percentage shows, they succeeded more than any other UF opponent. Until Florida adjusted to the scheme, the only explosive passes were catch-and-run efforts from Kadarius Toney.

Efficiency

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

One of the stories of the game for me is just how ineffective the Gator rushing attack was. The 14.3% rate is easily the lowest of the year, with 22.9% against Georgia being the next-worst.

It wasn’t just a good Tennessee defensive front beating UF’s offensive linemen. The Volunteers appeared to be ready for specific run plays with an extra man by the ball carrier. It happened enough that I think Florida needs to do some self-scouting to make sure they’re not tipping their hand. It’s no coincidence that by far the Gators’ two longest runs came on misdirection: the seven-yard reverse to Toney early on and the one explosive run for 17 yards on a reverse to Jacob Copeland.

The tradeoff for keeping the Florida explosive passing rate so low was allowing the efficiency to be so high.

It was the Vandy game that the announcing crew first remarked that defenses were dropping tons of players to combat the Gators’ pass attack (Arkansas had done the same the week before, but it defends everyone by using five or six DBs). The trend continued against UK and Tennessee, but Dan Mullen has yet to go all-out on punishing it with short passes from the jump.

His plan to combat it has been with the run, but the run largely didn’t work against the Vols. It took a quarter for him to adjust, with six running plays in the first quarter versus just one in the second. Hence, you get a jump in the success rate from the first to second quarter.

Efficiency by Player

This was Trask’s first game under nine yards per attempt, but you know most of why that is from the past two sections. This also tied the opener for his lowest completion percentage on the year. Pressure was part of it, as he had some throwaways or iffy passes under duress.

Maybe it was the cold or something else, but he was just a bit off at times even without a defender in his face. He had a few throws to open receivers that were a little off target, turning them into difficult or impossible grabs. It’s a testament to how good Trask is that completing more than 70% of his passes for 433 yards, four touchdowns, and no picks qualifies as “he was a bit off today”.

Tennessee was determined to protect Bailey early on, as he only passed on passing downs — 2nd & 7 or more, 3rd & 5 or more — until midway through the Vols’ third drive after it was already in the second quarter. Even then, his first two throws not on explicit passing downs were on 1st & 10. I never thought he’d keep the Vols competitive with his arm, and apparently neither did Pruitt.

Shrout put up Trask-like numbers — well, “a bit off today” Trask-like numbers — in garbage time. It wasn’t until the game was already decided that anyone the Vols trotted out there could stand up to what was, by some measures like explosiveness and completions as I covered above, one of Trask’s least-special games.

Trask locked onto Pitts early, at one point throwing into triple coverage and at another tossing a throwaway pass a mile above his tight end’s head. Good plays later kept Pitts’s yards per target up anyway.

I think this mix is probably what people envisioned before the season: Pitts, Toney, and Grimes stand above the rest in targets with a balance of other receivers and running backs below them.

I thought UF’s run game wasn’t functional after Georgia. Oh was I wrong. This is a non-functional run game.

Tennessee’s terrific linebacker Henry To’oTo’o said after the game that UF threw so much because it was trying to pad Trask’s stats. No, dude. UF threw so much because you and your friends completely and utterly shut down the Gators’ rushing attack.

Field Position

Florida pinned the Vols inside their own 10-yard-line on four occasions. Three of the the ensuing drives ended in touchdowns, though two were in garbage time. Those, plus Tennessee returning four kickoffs with an average return of 17.3 yards kept the Vols relatively backed up all game.

The Gators’ ASP was their own 23 if you take out the failed fake punt and Davis’s onside kick recovery. Those two events aside, there wasn’t a lot of good field position to be had.

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.

UF pushed its points per drive upward off of last week’s low of 2.43, so that’s a plus I guess. It bumps up to 3.10 without the final punt drive that occurred between the Vols’ two garbage time scores.

If you take out those two meaningless scoring drives, UT’s points per drive drops to 0.88. That’s a terrific number for the Gator defense, full stop.

Turnovers

The only turnovers were of the on-downs variety. Each team had one, and neither team got points off of those thanks to a missed Evan McPherson field goal and a Tennessee punt.

Overall

I called this game a steady win in the headline because it was a fairly straight line from start to finish. In Solid Verbal parlance, it was a Crock-Potting: Florida kept the game on a slow simmer and, UT backdoor cover aside, there were never any outbursts of points. The now-customary touchdown right before and right after the half were the closest thing to it, but there was a 20-minute period of literally no football being played between those drives.

If you’re looking for evidence that the Gators are trying out things to get ready for Alabama, you won’t find it in this game. You won’t find much in the several preceding contests either.

It could be that Florida’s coaches simply don’t see a reason to test a bunch of stuff out. They might be more or less happy with what they’re doing and are simply using these games as practice to hone those strategies.

It also could be that UF is holding stuff back for the Bama game. They’re putting a few things on film for the Tide to think about — a couple of flea flickers against Arkansas, Grimes in the Wildcat against Vandy, Toney passes against Arkansas and Kentucky, a fake punt against UK, the reverses against Tennessee — but otherwise are keeping things bland to then unload the special stuff in Atlanta.

Plenty of fans are worried that the former is true. I see it almost every day of every week in one venue or another. It’s true that the 2020 team is Florida’s best since 2009, but is it good enough to beat 2020 Alabama? It certainly could, but I don’t think many look at the two teams’ play from the last three weeks and decide that UF should be the favorite in the game.

There is something to the latter, though some of those distinctive elements were probably just matchup things and not a concerted effort to make Nick Saban’s army of analysts work harder. The reverses were effective against the swarming Tennessee defense. The flea flickers were a fun way to pull in Arkansas’s dime defense in run support before hitting a longer pass. UF scouted UK’s special teams very, very well.

I can’t answer which is right, though as per usual, the answer is probably a little of both. Mullen has done well game planning against Saban-derived defenses, carving up Kirby Smart before taking his foot off the gas and counterpunching effectively against Pruitt. His last game against Saban while at Mississippi State was by far the closest he got to winning in the series. I’m not worried about the scheme coming up short.

One more game, and we won’t have to argue this point anymore. Florida clinched the East win the win in Knoxville, and maybe just doing that was enough for one day.