Florida Gators vs. Tennessee Volunteers advanced stats review

There is nothing fortunate about Feleipe Franks’s season-ending injury, but the timing certainly could’ve been worse. Florida got to break in Kyle Trask, Starting Quarterback in about the perfect situation.

Tennessee is an SEC opponent and one of the Gators’ biggest rivals of the last 30 years, so it was a game that the team would not take lightly. And yet, UT is a team with serious talent deficits in many places under questionable management. It was a chance for UF to give Trask a look in a serious but not pressure-packed situation.

Florida and Trask passed the test, but as the advanced stats show, they didn’t pass it in every respect. Let’s see where they did and didn’t succeed. This review is based on Bill Connelly’s Five Factors of winning, sacks are counted as pass plays, and I tossed out Tennessee’s final drive that only ran out the clock.

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.

It tells you something about how little UT ran the ball that they had almost the same explosive rushing rate with three fewer 10+ yard runs. Both came in the third quarter after Florida had already run up a comfy lead. Along those lines, I’ll have something to say about UF’s explosive run rate later in the Efficiency by Player section.

This table shows you the limitations of counting explosive plays in the way that I do. For the moment setting aside Emory Jones, whose pass attempts are reflected above, four of Trask’s 30 passing plays (28 passes plus two sacks) went for at least 20 yards. That’s a rate of 13.3%.

However, ten of the 30 (33%) went for between ten and 19 yards. Those can reasonably be considered “chunk plays” even if they’re not truly explosive, and they help keep an offense moving.

Those intermediate plays were not ones that Florida had been making at such a rate. Franks was at 21% against Miami and 27% against Kentucky, for instance. Trask seems to be more comfortable attempting throws in that range rather than keeping everything either short or long. Tennessee’s struggling defense helped him, as he was at 21% against Kentucky. Some of his incompletions against the Wildcats were attempts in that range, though.

Efficiency

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

Yeah, so the run game is still not there yet. Tennessee was actually a little better at staying on schedule with the rush than Florida was. UT could’ve been even better had it turned to its promising freshman RB Eric Gray before halftime. UF is definitively a passing team until further notice.

The Vols had some success to begin the game and right after halftime, but the Gators shut it down in the second and fourth quarters once they determined how to deal with it. The UF offense was good out of the gate but things turned south in the third quarter when the game got sloppy.

Efficiency by Player

Trask really was sharp, though he needs to work on pocket awareness. Dan Mullen said after the game that the picks were forgivable, and I guess I’ll defer to the guy who developed Alex Smith, Tim Tebow, and Dak Prescott.

The sacks were less forgivable, though after a while assuming that the Vol pass rush would never get to him did make a certain sense. Again, this is why Tennessee was a good first start for him. He got to learn some good lessons about pocket presence and picks against a team with good athletes that still was no threat to actually win the game.

I have no idea what happened to Guarantano. He really did get better from 2017 to 2018. He has regressed this year, and Maurer was no better once Florida got a handle on him past his first drive. UT would be in far less of a predicament if Guarantano had continued his trajectory; instead, everyone’s watching for a Maurer start to mark when Jeremy Pruitt has thrown in the towel on the season.

Jefferson was the top target man again, but Trask was far less reliant on him than expected after the Kentucky game. He only threw to him once before the half, and he targeted Swain the same number of times (Jones threw to Jefferson once). Hammond only having one target for the second straight week is a little odd, though.

Anyway, Florida’s top six receiving targets each getting at least three targets somehow felt categorically different than in the past when no more than five (and often four or fewer) guys got at least three targets.

Maybe it’s just Tennessee’s iffy defense made everything feel easier. I don’t know. But, there might be some kind of mental tipping point that makes it seem like Florida finally used its full depth of receiving talent simply by throwing it to that many guys at least three times each.

I’m not going to be able to comment authoritatively about the run game until I do a close rewatch, but from my seat looking down the near hash in the lower south end zone, I saw Perine and Pierce do a lot of running into scrums with no daylight for zero to three yards.

I will also add that Perine (runs of 11 and 13, two-for-two SR) and Pierce (runs of 12 and ten, two-for-three SR) padded their yards per carry and success rates some on the fourth quarter touchdown drive after Tennessee appeared to have mentally checked out. Perine drops to 3.2 yards per rush and 25% success and Pierce drops to 2.1 per rush and 12.5% success without those carries. Four of the five explosive runs came in that series too.

Another key was Jones being in the game, as Tennessee struggled in that spot when having to respect two possible rushers instead of one. With as great as Trask has been through the air, Jones will not get a ton of playing time though. And, it’s worth noting, Tennessee had zero problems dealing with Jones handoffs when it was merely a 10-0 game in the second quarter.

Maybe the close rewatch will change my mind, but I’m not ready yet to say the run game is fixed after that. And Malik Davis really needs to stop putting the ball on the ground.

Field Position

The turnovers show up big here with Florida enjoying a decent sized field position advantage in the game. Florida kicking off so many times for touchbacks after scores also tended to anchor UT’s starting field position to its own 25.

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.

Nine scoring opportunities in 11 drives while holding the opponent to three scoring opportunities in ten drives is a strong performance. Less so is frittering away three scoring opportunities with a fourth down stuff and two interceptions. Of course, UT threw two of its three away with a red zone pick and a fumble, so the Vols did what they could to keep the tension down.

Turnovers

The drive sequence of INT-INT-Punt-INT-Fumble in the second half is when this game went off the rails. And that doesn’t count the handful of turnovers reversed on review. This was a sloppy game.

Being +1 in turnovers is better than some alternatives, but having only three turnovers to the opponent’s four is not how you want to get there. Trask’s two picks were, as Mullen said, at least him being aggressive. Tennessee’s turnovers were mostly just bad plays. The Gators can’t get away with this many miscues against their better opponents.

Overall

But they weren’t playing one of their better opponents, were they? Again, this was a good chance to have the trappings of a big game while not having any of the drama of one.

Not only did Trask ease into his reign as starting quarterback, but John Hevesy got a chance to experiment with the offensive line too. He not only got to repeat his Week 3 experiment of putting Richard Gouraige at left tackle with Stone Forsythe sliding to right, he also tested Gouraige at left guard with Brett Heggie at right guard. Both are understandable considering Jean Delance and Chris Bleich are the ones who’ve struggled the most on the line this year. We’ll which lineups get a repeat in the future.

It’s not a small issue, because Florida couldn’t run the ball until late against a defensive front that got pushed around by Georgia State. The Vols’ linebacker leader Daniel Bituli being out hurt against GSU was a major factor there; he’s the guy who makes sure they line up correctly, and without him they too often didn’t. Georgia State had a 50% rushing success rate against the Bituli-less Vols, while a much better BYU team had a 38.5% rushing success rate against the UT defense with him.

That said, Florida should be much better than BYU and it had a 34.3% rushing success rate. And as I pointed out above, that rate was padded by the late touchdown drive. The silver lining is that the starting five was on the field for that drive, so they did have a good rushing series together, but it also required sacrificing the pass by putting Jones in for Trask.

When I think about what the Tennessee series once was, it is a little painful to think of it in terms that once were reserved for the likes of Kentucky, Vandy, and South Carolina at the time that series was at its height. That’s UT’s problem to worry about, though, and for now Florida used the game in the way it should have.

The Gators still haven’t answered all the questions about the team, but they at least were successful in getting to work on them a bit in a live game. They now have one more tune up before those answers are due.