If you could improve one thing about Florida’s offense, what would it be?
After last year, I’m sure that run blocking would be up there on your list. It’s high on mine. It was hard to watch Gator running backs run into wall after wall of defenders and have to use every trick of elusiveness to gain two yards.
I do believe that last year’s struggles were something of an aberration, though. A team like UF with the developmental abilities of its head and offensive line coaches will not field lines like that often. Reversion to the mean alone would cause things to get better. That’s before counting things like the benefit of experience for younger guys like Richard Gouraige and Ethan White, or the shot in the arm of grad transfer Stewart Reese.
If I could only pick one thing, it’d be improving the explosiveness in the passing game.
The 2019 season already was something of an improvement in that regard. This, despite defenses having to pay less and less attention to the run game as the season went along.
In Dan Mullen’s first campaign, 9.7% of throws went for gains of at least 20 yards (I counted sacks as pass plays here). Pass plays that gain at least 20 is how I define an explosive play through the air; other people have different definitions. In 2019, the rate went up to 11.6%. That’s about a 20% improvement over the prior year.
Kyle Trask, for his part, was sixth in the SEC in overall pass attempts last year. Yet, he was third in both completions of 10+ yards and 20+ yards. He overperformed his attempts when it came to generating chunk plays.
Once we start looking at longer completions, he began to fall. It’s definitely better to rack up a bunch of 20+ yard completions than not to, but longer plays are ones that can break games open and make larger differences.
At a minimum gain of 30 yards, Trask falls down to fifth in the conference. That’s still one spot better than his ranking in attempts, but a pair of passers who were ahead of him in attempts (Jake Fromm and Bo Nix) have now leapfrogged him in the long pass standings.
Looking at completions of 40+ yards, Trask is down to a three-way tie at eighth with South Carolina’s Ryan Hilinksi and Vandy’s Riley Neal. Hilinksi was the last of the guys ahead of Trask in attempts, so that’s not so bad. However, Trask’s 354 attempts are about a hundred more than Neal’s 258. It’s about the same gap as with the 257 of Tennessee’s Jarrett Guarantano, who threw two more 40+ yard passes (eight) than Trask did (six). Joe Burrow was way out in front with 28 passes of at least 40+ yards; Tua Tagovailoa (11) and Fromm (ten) about tied for second.
I don’t think Trask needs to put up Burrow-level numbers for Florida to have a real chance to win whatever the SEC ends up being this year if the high end of number of games get played. In fact, I don’t even put a lot of the onus on Trask himself, as he was more willing to throw intermediate passes that tend to fill out the 20-30 yard range and are the meat and potatoes of a true explosive offense.
I went through and looked at points per game for Mullen’s teams (OC/HC at Florida and HC at Mississippi State) that scored at least 30 per contest. I then looked at overall yards per play, yards per rush, and yards per passing attempt. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to take sacks out of rushing plays because there aren’t good stats for that going back in the 2007-08 kind of range.
Mullen’s best offenses remain the 2007 and 2008 attacks, which gained 7.0 and 7.1 yards per play, respectively. The best he’s done since then was his 2014 team that sat at No. 1 in the polls for a month, which gained 6.7 yards per play. Tied for the next spot are his 2015 and 2019 offenses at 6.5 yards per play.
Now, that’s not a huge difference on a per play basis, but his 2007 team (42.5) and 2008 team (43.6) scored a lot more points per game than his 2014 (36.9), 2015 (34.4), and 2019 (33.2) teams did. I will note the ’19 team’s points per game was a bit on the low side due to a dearth of non-offensive scores, an issue I looked at two weeks ago.
Given Mullen’s pedigree as a spread-to-run guy, you might guess that the yards per rush was the important factor. You’d be wrong if you did. In fact, his 2015 team (4.4) and 2019 team (4.3) easily had the two lowest yards per rush rates despite being the tied for the second-best post-Tebow offenses Mullen’s had in yards per play.
Yards per pass is easily the more important factor. The 2007 team (9.4) and 2008 team (9.2) were clearly the top in yards per pass attempt. Not surprisingly, Mullen’s 2014 team was next (8.7). The only other of his teams to hit at least eight? You guessed it: 2015 (8.0) and 2019 (8.3).
I even ran quick regressions on points per game and these three rates. The stat R-squared in these tells you how much of the variance in points per game can be explained by yards per play, rush, or pass. The R-squared for plain yards per play was 0.70, meaning you could expect about 70% of the variance in points per game to be captured by yards per play. The R-squared for yards per pass was slightly better at 0.75, while the R-squared for yards per rush was a mere 0.13. If you were trying to model Mullen’s points per game based on these three specific rates, which would be a very limited model indeed, you’d actually do best by ignoring rushing altogether.
This result should make some sense. Football in general has been deemphasizing the run and going all-in on the pass in recent years. The winning strategy for a power team like Florida, as opposed to an idiosyncratic underdog like a service academy, is to throw.
I don’t see Mullen abandoning the run as he did towards the end of last year. After all, he leaned much more on it in the bowl than in the final month of the regular season. He adapts as time goes on but doesn’t lose his gut instincts.
But however the basic plan works, being more explosive in the pass attack is vital to getting UF where it wants to be. These first two seasons at Florida have seen Mullen command Mississippi State-level offenses. The best it ever gets for Mississippi State-level offenses, but about that potency. Gator fans expect more from their best offenses.
For all their reliability, the outgoing wide receivers were not the most explosive. They had good speed but nothing that made you sit up and say “wow” like what the 2007-08 teams had. Kyle Pitts, who is a remarkable mismatch but isn’t a burner, led the team with 11 receptions of 20+ yards; he had just two of 30+ yards.
If Kadarius Toney can go all year, or Jacob Copeland master the playbook, or true freshmen Xzavier Henderson and Jaquavion Fraziars impress enough in preseason camp to get major snaps, Florida might get that explosiveness. Trevon Grimes has shown flashes of elite speed at times but has yet to emerge as a consistent deep threat. Maybe he could get there.
Whoever it is, Florida has to find elite long-distance playmakers to catch what Trask is throwing to get the offense up to the heights that Gator fans demand. It’d be great to run the ball better, but increasing explosiveness in the pass game has to be the top priority.