You can be forgiven if you zoned out for stretches of Florida’s win over Missouri. With a combined 18 punts in 26 drives, including a couple streaks of five or more punts in a row, the game didn’t set the world on fire. That’s why it’s good to go through the numbers to pull what we can out of a sleepy, chilly road win to cap a 6-2 conference campaign.
This review is based on Bill Connelly’s Five Factors of winning, and sacks are counted as pass plays.
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.
| Team | Runs 10+ | Pct. | Passes 20+ | Pct. | Explosive Pct. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | 4 | 19.0% | 5 | 12.5% | 14.8% |
| Missouri | 1 | 3.8% | 2 | 4.8% | 4.4% |
The upshot of Dan Mullen nearly abandoning the run in the second open week is that the explosive run rate has skyrocketed in the past two games. Vandy’s defense being bad helped two weeks ago, but on the season coming in Mizzou gave up a little over half of the rate the Gators got in this one.
The handoff-based run game is still a mess as we’ll see later, but three quarterback runs and a carry from Kadarius Toney hit ten or more yards. Shrink the denominator by only having nine running back carries in 61 plays, and that’ll move that explosive rate upward nicely.
Missouri’s explosive passing rate hasn’t been anything special this year — surprise, the Kelly Bryant who wasn’t a big play passer at Clemson still isn’t at Missouri — but the Tigers had been able to generate explosive runs on about 15% of carries. UF held them to a quarter of that rate by only giving up a single explosive run of all of 11 yards. That’s how you make a team punt on over three quarters of its drives.
Efficiency
The main measure here is success rate. Watch this short video if you need to brush up on it.
| Team | Run SR | Pass SR | Overall SR | Red Zone SR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | 33.3% | 40.0% | 37.7% | 14.3% |
| Missouri | 34.6% | 31.0% | 32.4% | 0.0% |
Florida punted on almost two thirds of its drives too, though. Mizzou has one of the SEC’s best passing defenses, and they held the Gators to just over 11 percentage points worse of a passing success rate than Georgia did. UF made up for the inefficiency with some chunk plays, but the Tigers still did well here especially on third down.
Ah yes, third down, the Gators’ new nemesis. Saturday’s contest was the fourth consecutive one in which UF couldn’t reach 36% third down conversions on offense. Their best in the stretch was four games ago with 5/14 (35.7%) against South Carolina, but since then they’ve gone 2/9 (22%) against Georgia, 3/9 (33%) against Vandy, and 3/14 (21.4%) against Missouri.
The loss in that span was the only time it truly bit the team, but this is officially An Issue. Kentucky and, oddly, No. 1 LSU are the only FBS teams that UF has been able to top 37% third down conversions against. They can’t run on any down, and not running much on third down because they don’t run much at all makes it easier to defend those critical plays.
| Team | 1Q SR | 2Q SR | 3Q SR | 4Q SR |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | 40.0% | 26.3% | 57.1% | 30.8% |
| Missouri | 33.3% | 27.3% | 30.0% | 36.8% |
The quarter with the two touchdowns was the only one in which either team had an above-average success rate. Sometimes the numbers tell you what you already know.
Efficiency by Player
| Player | Comp. Pct. | Pass Eff. | Yards/Att | Sacks | Pass SR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kyle Trask | 65.7% | 152.3 | 8.1 | 4 | 38.5% |
| Kelly Bryant | 64.1% | 102.9 | 5.2 | 3 | 31.0% |
Trask completed a healthy percentage of his passes and had his highest yards per attempt rate against SEC teams not from the state of Tennessee. He also took four sacks, a couple of them exacerbated by him holding onto the ball for a long time, and had some passes that should’ve been picked off. He could’ve used some more help from his targets, I will say that.
| Player | Targets | Catches | Yards | Yards/Target | SR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Van Jefferson | 8 | 6 | 82 | 10.3 | 50.0% |
| Kyle Pitts | 6 | 4 | 38 | 6.3 | 33.3% |
| Jacob Copeland | 6 | 3 | 23 | 3.8 | 33.3% |
| Lamical Perine | 5 | 4 | 24 | 4.8 | 40.0% |
| Trevon Grimes | 4 | 3 | 66 | 16.5 | 75.0% |
| Kadarius Toney | 2 | 1 | 48 | 24.0 | 50.0% |
| Josh Hammond | 2 | 2 | 45 | 22.5 | 100.0% |
| Freddie Swain | 2 | 1 | 4 | 2.0 | 0.0% |
There were some drops on Saturday, and that might be the one place where the cold weather made a difference. Neither team seemed too bothered by it in any other way, but Missouri had a few drops as well.
Grimes might be the most symbolic player for the game. He did well when given the opportunity, including a nice 41-yard catch. He also picked up one flag when he didn’t fully commit to acting like his illegal pick was a legal rub and another when he lost his cool. And, as a non-quarterback/non-Toney player, his rushing attempt was bottled up. Some highs, some lows.
| Player | Carries | YPC | Rushing SR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emory Jones | 6 | 6.5 | 50.0% |
| Lamical Perine | 4 | 4.0 | 25.0% |
| Kadarius Toney | 3 | 5.7 | 33.3% |
| Dameon Pierce | 3 | 1.3 | 0.0% |
| Kyle Trask | 2 | 6.0 | 50.0% |
| Malik Davis | 2 | 1.5 | 50.0% |
| Trevon Grimes | 1 | -4.0 | 0.0% |
Nothing says “we’ve abandoned the run” like giving the primary running back only four carries in a game. Nothing says “and it’s with good reason” like the three running backs combining for 2.6 yards per carry and a 22% success rate.
We’ve been waiting for the offensive line to improve in run blocking like it did last year. Every couple of games, I’ve seen one beat writer or another try to find improvements after lineup adjustments or a game where one back spontaneously has a good outing. It just hasn’t happened.
This line can’t run block, period. Florida had better hope that 2018 and 2019 signees can beat out some number of the three veteran returning starters next spring — or that a premium grad transfer or two wants to come to Gainesville — because I don’t see any signs of hope at all. It’s mid-November, and nothing has changed in this regard since August.
Field Position
| Team | Avg. Starting Position | Plays in Opp. Territory | Pct. Of Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | Own 26 | 15 | 24.6% |
| Missouri | Own 24 | 13 | 19.1% |
The telling part here is the 25% of plays in opponent territory for the Gators. That’s the smallest share for this team in this year. The previous low was 32.4% against Auburn and its terrific defense. It’s hard to sustain drives when you can’t convert third downs, and the two touchdown drives featuring plenty of long plays meant that the Gators didn’t camp out on the Mizzou side of the 50 once they got there.
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.
| Team | Drives | Trips Inside 40 | Points | Red Zone Trips | Points | Pts./Drive |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Florida | 13 | 5 | 23 | 3 | 13 | 1.77 |
| Missouri | 13 | 2 | 6 | 1 | 3 | 0.46 |
The good news here is that the Gators got points on all of their scoring opportunities. The two touchdowns to three field goals ratio isn’t the best, but they never came up empty when they had the chance to put something on the scoreboard. Largely keeping Missouri out of the scoring area was a major win for the defense too.
Turnovers
The only one in the game was Marco Wilson’s interception on the last real play of the game. It counts, but as it was a fourth down before a single kneel down to end the game, it functionally was no different than a deflection. Trask tried to throw some picks, but fortunately for him the cold weather turning hands to stone affected the Tiger defense too.
Overall
The win over Missouri was a workmanlike victory. As the team is climbing the mountain again, it’s the sort of outcome that you take without much complaint. If they were back at one of their peaks, there would be a lot of complaining about how it went down and why the offense fell silent for stretches.
For now, it’s 100% acceptable because the defense stifling the Tigers’ offense meant there wasn’t really any drama even when the score was close for a half and change. After about a quarter, I never believed that Mizzou would put together a string of scoring drives to really challenge for the win. Florida still needed to run up a two or three-score lead at some point because football is a game where any team is always one play away from putting seven points on the board. Once they did that in the third quarter, it was over.
The most important thing from this one is that it put a number 9 in the win column and kept a number 3 out of the loss column. No season sees every game end up memorable. This one certainly wasn’t. The records are memorable though, and holding serve here kept the record looking nice. Sometimes that’s all you need out of a game.