Today I bring you a puzzle about offseason expectations. I don’t have a definitive answer, but rather several possible answers for you to weigh and select from. They all surround Florida’s season opener against Miami (FL).
Expectations aren’t high for the Gators’ record this year. Their early win total from Vegas is 5.5 wins, which is the same as it was last year. The schedule is famously brutal, especially on the back end. The team has a deep portal haul this year but lacks any true headliners, unless Grayson Howard or Joey Slackman manage to find their way onto one of the All-SEC teams. There’s no O’Cyrus Torrence among the mix, anyway.
Meanwhile, Miami is in a much different place. The win total line I was able to find for the Hurricanes from back in February is 9.5 wins. That’s tied for the highest such line in the ACC with FSU and Clemson. They landed one of the better portal quarterback prospects in Cam Ward. They made the postseason a year ago, and then they scored with half a minute left to only lose the Pinstripe Bowl to Rutgers by one score instead of two. It’s all forward momentum in Coral Gables.
Just this week, the Athletic’s Miami beat writer Manny Navarro affirmed that he thinks Miami is a real ACC contender while guesting on in an episode of Stew Mandel and Bruce Feldman’s podcast, The Audible. And by extension, Navarro correctly contends, being a true ACC contender would make the team a playoff contender in the expanded 12-team field.
If you believe that UM is a playoff contender and UF will be merely happy to make a bowl, then obviously you’ve got to lean Hurricanes in the opener, right? I mean, right?
Yet late in the episode, the topic of UF’s schedule comes up during a discussion of the Gators. Mandel notes that Florida could conceivably start 5-0, which would include a victory over the Hurricanes. He soon after expresses uncertainty as to whether the Gators would be favored in the game, which implies that he thinks Florida could actually be favored to win. Neither Navarro nor Feldman jumps in to suggest it’s an outlandish notion.
It’s not just them. The Split Zone Duo guys have all but declared the Gators-Hurricanes game the first Anxiety Bowl of the season. It’s their term for, basically, whoever loses is going to feel like firing their coach the next day. Which, again, implies a real chance that Florida could win if we’re going to discuss Miami feeling terminal frustration with Mario Cristobal after a potential loss.
What is going on here?
Possibility 1: The Swamp Factor
Florida is hosting Miami this time around. Ben Hill Griffin Stadium still holds a mystique for a reason.
Billy Napier’s best wins have come at home, too: the Utah opener and South Carolina blowout in 2022, plus the Tennessee win in 2023. He’s certainly not bulletproof at home, as the USF stinker in ’22 and infamous ’23 loss to Arkansas also happened in Gainesville. However if Napier is going to pull off a critical win, it seems far more likely that it will happen at home than on the road.
Possibility 2: The Schedule Factor
Look. You’ve heard it a thousand times by now. You’ll hear it ten thousand more times by September: Florida’s schedule really is that bad.
At risk of repeating something else you’ve heard, perhaps from me already: a win total of 5.5 for ’24 is actually a vote of confidence. The team also had a total of 5.5 last offseason, and that squad was not staring down the barrel of as bad a slate. The team would necessarily have to improve to reach the same number of wins, provided the projections of this year’s 12 opponents are anywhere near accurate on the whole.
This isn’t making excuses, by the way. The team won’t be back up to the, ahem, Gator Standard unless analysts are breaking down how playing against Florida makes a schedule harder.
But Napier promised from the start that it wouldn’t be a fast rebuild, and that promise has been fulfilled. So in the actual reality we have in 2024, it’s accurate to say the Gators have a very hard schedule rather than that they are causing schedules to be harder. And that’s how a team with a win total of 5.5 could have a chance to be favored in Week 1 against a possible playoff contender.
Possibility 3: The ACC Stinks
FSU lost a ton off of last year’s team. It has replenished some from the portal, but there’s no way they run the regular season table again.
Dabo Swinney lost his fastball a few years back. He finally started hiring assistants from outside the Clemson family to bring fresh ideas after 2022, but the Tigers are not back yet to looking how they did when they and Alabama seemed inevitable every season.
The rest of the top half of the league is either dealing with key personnel losses of their own (UNC, NC State) or are working their way up (Louisville, Virginia Tech, and, uh, SMU?). It’s not exactly a murderer’s row this year.
There are many seasons where the idea of a middle-of-the-pack SEC school being equivalent to an ACC contender is vastly overstated bravado. This year, maybe it’s not? Or at least in one game it’s not, particularly when the SEC team is at home.
Possibility 4: No One Trusts These Coaches
When Miami hired Cristobal away from Oregon, the reaction from Ducks fans wasn’t entirely anger. Plenty were happy to have someone else pay to take the guy off their hands on account of his periodic baffling in-game decisions. In retrospect, it doesn’t sound like a coping mechanism when the Hurricanes lost to Georgia Tech last year because Cristobal wouldn’t take knees to run out the clock.
Most coaches see gains from their first seasons to their second on account of all the systems being in place and there being more familiarity among the players and coaches. Yet, I’ve probably never seen a team less prepared for Week 1 of Year 2 than Florida last year. Napier had problems with clock management and the middle 8 in 2022, and he’s had a terrible loss each year between Vandy in ’22 and Arkansas in ’23.
Anything could happen thanks to the wildly variable game day decision making from the two head coaches. Anything. Pick any far-fetched scenario you like and yep, I could see it happening. If the random number generator that seems to govern these two guys spits out a solid game from Napier and a Cristobal Special, then Florida winning is a logical conclusion.
The Bottom Line
Why is a Florida team that Vegas sees as a coin flip regarding bowl eligibility potentially going to be favored against a possible playoff contender? It’s likely a combination of all of these rather than any one of them.
Still, it’s a little jarring to hear someone like Navarro talk about the Hurricanes maybe making the playoff and then 20 minutes later not hear him immediately dismiss the idea of Florida being favored against or beating that same exact team. Vegas doesn’t ever explain itself, so we won’t get an answer about how it will weigh these and other factors when coming up with a point spread for the contest.
But could the Gators beat the eventual ACC runner up or champ in the opener? Yeah, it could theoretically happen. And then the rest of the slate really is tough enough that doing so wouldn’t guarantee Napier another year at the helm. It’s not going to be a boring fall, that’s for sure, especially since it starts with such a confounding opening game.