If you’re reading this, you’re probably a Florida fan. If you’re a Florida fan, you probably didn’t watch much if any Virginia football this year.
That’s okay. If not for ill-conceived bowl tie-in contracts, the Cavaliers’ football team would still be irrelevant to the Gators.
With that in mind, here is a brief introduction to UVA football in 2019 to give you an idea of what’s in store for UF in Miami.
Ratings
The Massey Composite, which combines 106 different ranking systems, sees the game as a bigger mismatch than the College Football Playoff selection committee does. There UF is ninth but Virginia is down at 33rd.
I like to use the SP+ ratings, and there the gap is wider still. UF clocks in at seventh with the 15th-best offense and seventh-best defense. Virginia is down at No. 45 with the 57th-best offense and 44th-best defense.
Among the Gators’ FBS opponents, UVA rates as the eighth-best of them between No. 37 Kentucky and No. 49 South Carolina. Florida had to come back late on the Wildcats and needed a flurry of late points to put away the Gamecocks on the road, so an easy win is not necessarily assured.
Among offenses specifically, the Cavs’ 57th-rated attack slots in between No. 45 FSU and No. 65 Kentucky. UK’s rating is hard to gauge since the actual offense was wildly different before and after Lynn Bowden took over at quarterback, so for more perspective, Miami is No. 73 and Tennessee is No. 75.
On the other side of the ball, Virginia’s 44th-rated defense is closer to Kentucky’s 32nd-rated unit than FSU’s 68th-rated unit. Despite the focus on Joe Burrow and pre-injury Tua Tagovailoa, the SEC went back to being defense-heavy this year. Thus only UF’s other ACC opponent and lowly Vandy rate worse in defense than UVA does on the slate of FBS opponents.
Style
In this section, the stats don’t include garbage time.
Virginia has a similar run/pass mix as Florida does. On standard downs — 1st, 2nd and 6 or fewer, 3rd/4th & 4 or fewer — the Cavaliers run 45.8% of the time. UF runs 45.5% of the time in those situations. On passing downs, which are all downs that aren’t standard, UVA runs a mere 32% of the time. Florida runs 31.4% on passing downs.
The key difference is that Virginia is about as good at both by success rate. The ‘Hoos have a 43.1% success rate on the ground and 43.6% rate through the air. Both of those figures are around the national average. Meanwhile UF has a 49.8% rate with the pass and 38.3% rate on the ground.
But despite the efficiency edge the Cavaliers have with the run, they’re not significantly better at generating big plays. The Gators actually generate a higher percentage of runs for 10+ yards (13.5%) than UVA does (12.7%), and they average 4.61 non-sack yards per carry against 4.84 per carry for Virginia. That’s really not a huge difference.
The UVA defense’s best attribute is getting after the quarterback. It can actually boast a higher sack rate (11.0%) than Florida’s defense can (10.3%). The reason is because the Cavs sack their opponents more often on standard downs; on passing downs, the Gators take the edge back by about 0.6 percentage points.
They need to get those big negative plays because they give up a good amount of big positive plays. Virginia allows runs of 10+ on 15.2% of rushing plays defended (11.5% for UF) and completions of 20+ yards on 11.8% of passing plays defended (8.6% for UF). There will be opportunities for the Gator offense to break off some long gains.
On tape
Along with both coordinators, Bronco Mendenhall brought the general aesthetic he cultivated at BYU with him to Charlottesville. Virginia looks a lot like those Cougar teams, just with orange added as an accent color instead of just white.
They don’t do much fancy. It’s structurally sound but not innovative. There’s a reason why those coordinators are neither in danger of losing their jobs nor in high demand from elsewhere. There also aren’t a ton of exceptional athletes that make you sit up and take notice.
UVA only put one player on the All-ACC first team, wideout Joe Reed. He got the returner spot, which makes sense because he took two kickoffs to the house this year.
He also got the all-purpose spot, I guess because he had six carries to go with his team-leading 70 receptions. Reed ran for under five yards a carry on those six rushes, though, and he’s under nine yards a reception. He’s not alone. Only one Cavalier with at least ten receptions averaged above 11.3 yards per catch, and four of the six were under 11. Sophomore Wayne Taulapapa was the leading running back with 459 yards on 111 carries (4.14 YPC).
Virginia also put one player on the All-ACC second team, quarterback Bryce Perkins. The entire offense is basically built on him. He’s thrown 456 of the team’s 479 passes on the season, and his 175 non-sack carries are about 58% more than Taulapapa had.
Perkins will probably top the 1,000-yard mark for the season with sacks factored out, as he’s amassed 969 yards on the ground at about a 5.5 YPC clip. He’s elusive but doesn’t have speed that makes you say “wow”. He has a couple of 60+ yards rushes, but in eight of his 13 games, his longest run went for fewer than 20 yards.
His arm looks comparable to Kyle Trask’s in terms of strength and zip, but his ball placement is all over the place. He’s far more likely to skip a pass or miss a guy entirely. Perkins has completed 64% of his passes on the season as a whole, but that’s mainly because he throws an enormous number of short, safe passes. Remember how most of the receivers have rather modest yards per catch rates? Yeah, those go even lower when you convert it to yards per target.
Perkins will make some plays, and he’s dangerous on the QB draw on 3rd & long. The key is to keep him in the pocket. He’s not particularly comfortable there, and it negates his good mobility. If the Gators don’t let him break contain, the defense should be able to keep the fireworks to a minimum.
UVA did put a couple defenders on the All-ACC third team, LB Jordan Mack and safety Joey Blount, plus three more on the honorable mentions. They run a 3-4, sometimes with a linebacker up on the edge and sometimes not. I saw them do a few interesting things with showing pressure from one place and sending it from another in the game against Virginia Tech, but honestly it’s not anything groundbreaking that no one else ever does.
If Florida comes in prepared and plays its game, it should win. The Gators are a big favorite for good reasons. UVA being 59th in the Team Talent Composite, right behind Oregon State and Rutgers, is one of those reasons.
But UVA isn’t terrible by any stretch. They don’t shoot themselves in the foot too much. They commit just under five penalties a game, and while they’re at -3 in turnover margin, the backup QBs somehow managed to throw a combined three picks in 23 attempts. Toss those out and they’ve turned it over the same 17 times as Florida has.
The Gators will have to work to make it look easy, but in the end, they are the better team.