Florida Gators vs. LSU Tigers advanced stats review

Florida came up short in Baton Rouge, unable to keep up with the torrid pace of the LSU offense’s scoring machine. Maybe it’s just the proximity to Texas, but the Tigers are more equipped to do an impression of a Big 12 team than the Gators are this year.

Let’s dig into the numbers and try to make a proper autopsy out of this. Sometimes you learn more from losses than wins, so this is what there is to learn. This review is based on Bill Connelly’s Five Factors of winning, sacks are counted as pass plays, and LSU’s two clock-killing drives at the ends of the halves are excluded.

I will periodically compare this game to LSU’s match with Texas to give some perspective. The Longhorns are the other high quality team the Tigers have played besides Florida, and it’s hard to really grasp LSU’s offense since this is the first time they’ve ever looked like this.

Explosiveness

Everyone has a different definition for what counts as an “explosive play”, but I go with runs of at least ten yards and passes of at least 20 yards.

Per usual, Florida did a lot of passing in the 11-19 range without a lot of them turning into 20+ yard plays. LSU actually did the same, which is normal for them against the better defenses they’ve faced.

The real killer was the explosive runs. If Florida’s defensive line could’ve taken care of the rushing game with help from David Reese, that would’ve been huge because then everyone else could deal with the highly efficient passing attack.

Instead, the Tigers were above average in success rate (see below) and incredibly explosive with the run. That made the task impossible. Texas only gave up 12.5% explosive runs to LSU, and not coincidentally the ‘Horns were in a closer game at the end.

Efficiency

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

The rushing success rate figure there is not a bad outcome for defending this year’s LSU, but that passing success rate is heinous. Forget Texas, which allowed a 58.1% passing success rate to the Tigers. Utah State, which has a good defense for a Group of Five team but still has G5 athletes, allowed 56.4%. Vanderbilt, which might be the worst SEC team in a few years, allowed 53.8%.

This was a bad, bad, bad pass defense outing. LSU is fantastic through the air, but there’s no other way to say it.

Florida was efficient enough to be able to execute its plan to sit on the ball and chew up clock, but they ran an awful lot given the discrepancy here. Granted this was their first time north of 34.3% rushing success rate against an FBS opponent, so it was going to be hard to get Dan Mullen not to run the ball with that being the case.

However each of Florida’s four punt drives had a common theme: rushing on passing downs. Lamical Perine ran for a loss of one on 2nd & 10 following an incompletion, Malik Davis ran for one yard on 2nd & 10 following an incompletion, Lamical Perine ran for one yard on 1st & 20 following the holding penalty, and Emory Jones ran for one yard on 2nd & 8. Third-and-long followed up all of these, and again, they all precipitated punts.

The Gators did run on 2nd down passing situations a couple times on their scoring drives, but none of them other than unplanned Kyle Trask scrambles really worked. The rest led to passing situations on 3rd down, and UF was able to pick up the conversions then. It was a piece of conservative play calling from Mullen that didn’t serve the team well.

Efficiency by Player

This was Trask’s first time under 60% completions, but I think a lot of that was him going downfield more and throwing fewer run-substituting screens and swings. With the run game actually showing some efficiency, that made sense.

Burrow was phenomenal. I have said elsewhere in trying to console Gator fans that he’ll do this to everyone, but I didn’t realize just how good he was in this one. I don’t see him as anything but a valuable asset in future games, but he won’t quite do this to everyone.

I haven’t been putting anything but QB lines up for opponents, but the LSU receiving table is pertinent. Burrow only targeted four guys, and he only threw at Moss three times and Sullivan once. The hyper-efficient LSU passing game was a three-man operation (plus good blocking from the line) between Burrow, Chase, and Jefferson. That makes it worse, really. Burrow barely targeted anyone else because he didn’t need to.

Pitts and Jefferson were clearly the top dogs in the game plan, and they mostly came through on it. Pitts quieted down some in the second half once LSU figured out what to do with him, but that’s when Jefferson took over. I was not expecting Swain to be third in targets since it seemed he had a quiet night, but that’s because Trask was only able to connect with him twice. I was not expecting that after he shredded Auburn.

Quarterback runs were the reason the Gators had a decent rushing success rate, as the handoff game to Perine and Davis was characteristically inefficient. It’s just not getting better. The two receiver runs worked, though. I do wonder how many carries per game Kadarius Toney would be getting at this point had he stayed healthy.

Field Position

The Tigers had a little bit of advantage in average starting position, but given how things went down, it didn’t matter much. Only once did starting field position matter at all, when LSU went eight plays and 37 yards before punting in the second half. Everything else was either a drive that covered the whole field or a three-and-out.

LSU didn’t spend a lot of time on the Florida side of the field because it gained yards in such big chunks. Two of the Tigers’ touchdowns even were longer than 50 yards.

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.

Getting six scoring opportunities in ten drives normally would be a pretty good rate, but that’s simply not enough against this year’s LSU — especially if you only turn two thirds of them into points. The early missed field goal was the only time LSU failed to convert a scoring opportunity.

For comparison, both LSU and Texas got eight trips inside the other’s 40-yard-line on 11 drives. The Tigers turned all eight into points, though they did kick two field goals. Texas had two turnovers on downs at the goal line early, which were their only failures to convert scoring opportunities into points.

Turnovers

Florida only had one, but it was a back breaker. Trask threw a pick into the end zone, and LSU then went and got points on the ensuing drive. That’s a 14-point swing, and UF went from potentially tying the game at 35 to down 42-28 with under six minutes to go. It’s not Trask’s fault the defense was awful at stopping the Tigers from scoring, but that deficiency meant the team as a whole couldn’t survive any giveaways.

The closest LSU came to coughing it up came late in the third quarter when Brad Stewart baited Burrow into throwing directly to him on an RPO. Stewart was a fraction of a second late in going for the pass, and he merely deflected it instead of intercepting it. That would’ve been huge, as it would’ve given Florida the ball inside the LSU 35 down seven. The Gators needed the momentum swing that a turnover would’ve given, but alas.

Overall

Florida fans mostly seem to be second-guessing things on offense, whether it’s Mullen putting Jones in the game deep in his own territory for a three-and-out, Trask’s choice to throw into the end zone on the interception, or play calling on the turnover on downs. I get it; Gator fans have long seen the game through the lens of offense.

It’s hard to ask the offense for more than it gave, all things considered. The offensive line is what it is, and that’s always going to handicap the run attack. Still, Trask did things he’s never done on the ground to extend drives, and the pick aside — caused by Brett Heggie not holding his block as much as anything — it’s hard to second-guess any of his decisions.

Florida couldn’t survive anything but a flawless game from Trask because the defense was so poor. I was willing to say that the LSU pass offense is just brilliant and allowing too many long runs did the Gators in, but then I saw the passing success rate.

Some recent LSU quarterbacks couldn’t sustain a 75% success rate against air. Stewart’s one breakup aside, Todd Grantham couldn’t figure out any strategy to slow down LSU’s pass attack nearly as much and Vanderbilt did. Vandy! Switching up the secondary personnel did yield a second-half punt, but the Tigers were back to gashing the defense on the ensuing series.

Mullen going conservative by running too much on 2nd & long and the defense being next to useless in stopping the pass are the two big reasons why the Gators came up short. It’s not on Trask or Jones, or Perine, or even so much on the offensive line. Mullen made a great game plan but his longstanding conservative in-game management tendencies bit him, and I will have to watch the tape but I can’t imagine how I’d determine that the defensive staff wasn’t drastically outcoached by Joe Brady and Steve Ensminger.

Florida showed a lot, but it wasn’t enough. Most teams won’t have enough to beat LSU. It’s time to regroup for South Carolina and move on with every season-long goal still in play.